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Station #1: The Holocaust and the German Strategy and Final Solution plan. The Holocaust. The State sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims – 6 million were murdered.
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Station #1: The Holocaustand the German Strategy and Final Solution plan
The Holocaust • The State sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. • Jews were the primary victims – 6 million were murdered. • From the Greek word meaning “a sacrifice by burning.” • In Hebrew the term “shoah” is used, meaning “catastrophe.”
The Holocaust was Unique: • Never before had a government, one that had prided itself on its own citizens’ high level of education and culture, sought to define a religious group as a race that must be eliminated throughout an entire continent, not just within a single country. • Never before had a government harnessed the immense power of technology for such destructive ends, culminating in the horror of Auschwitz – a death camp that, at its peak, “processed” 10,000 Jews a day. • Never before had a government summoned their best and brightest people to mobilize destruction and used mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) to systematically kill approximately 1.5 million individuals in 2 years. • Never before had a government sought to dehumanize a group through such a devastatingly thorough and systematic use of propaganda that included the use of film, education, public rallies, indoctrination of the youth, radio, newspapers, art and literature.
List of countries presented at the Wannsee Conference, with the number of Jews who were to be deported to their deaths. Almost half of these countries never came under German rule or control.