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Discover the events that led to the Final Solution and the systematic murder of millions during the Holocaust, including Jews, communists, gypsies, and more.
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Essential Question: What was the sequence of events that led to the Final Solution? The Holocaust Other victims: communists, enemies of the state, gypsies, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally ill and physically disabled During the Holocaust, the Nazis systematically murdered 6 million Jews and 5 million other “non-Aryans”
The Jewish in Germany • Jews had lived in Germany for 1600 years • Medieval Anti-Semitic laws • Germans looked for a scapegoat • Nazis defined anyone with a Jewish grandparent a Jew • 1933 after Hitler takes control he ordered “non-Aryans” fired from government jobs • Nuremburg Laws deprived Jews of citizenship
Kristallnacht: “Night of Broken Glass”November 9-10, 1938 • Jewish teenager assassinated a German official in Paris • Rioters attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues all over Germany and Vienna • Streets were littered with glass • Many Jews fled Germany in the months following the attacks Herschel Grynszpan Ernst vom Rath
Forced Relocation • Jews ordered into Ghettos (a confined neighborhood in cities) • Surrounded by barbed wire and stone walls • Meant to starve people and deny medical help • Jews formed resistance movements, published and distributed newspapers, created secret schools and cultural activities
Einsatzgruppen: Mobile Death Squads • Used in Eastern Europe • Executed people by rounding them up and shooting them • Nazi leaders unsatisfied with the method
“Final Solution” • Alternative plan adopted: “Final Solution” • Build six new extermination camps • Most of the new arrivals would be gassed • Others went through the “destruction through work” process
Concentration Camps • Conditions humiliating and crude • Crowded and not enough food • Inmates worked dawn to dusk, everyday until they collapsed • People died from infectious disease, starvation, injury, overwork, being shot, despair, and more
Last Stage of the Final Solution - Mass Murders • Each camp had huge gas chambers where as many as 12,000 people a day were killed • Those too ill to work were taken to a gas chamber where they were told they would take a shower • Prisoners given soap (as part of deception) • Poisoned with Zyklon B gas
Last Stages continued • Dead bodies put into enormous pits • Crematoriums created to burn bodies • Some prisoners subjected to horrible medical experiments: injected with germs, sterilized, etc. (Dr. Mengele)
The Survivors • Camps began to be liberated in 1945, after the war was over • By 1945: The 6 million European Jews killed in the Holocaust represented about 1 out of every 3 Jews worldwide. About 2 out of every 3 European Jews. • “Survival is both an exalted privilege and a painful burden.” Gerda Weissmann Klein