“INTENTIONALISTS” FOCUS ON THESE UTTERANCES BY HITLER:

1. GI’s were shocked when they liberated the concentration camps, and could not understand what they were seeing(here: Eisenhower, Bradley, & Patton at Ohrdruf, 12 April 1945

2. TERMS TO DESCRIBE THE UNSPEAKABLE(most Germans today speak awkwardly of“the mass murder of the Jewish people”) • “Holocaust” is derived from the ancient Greek for “wholly burnt,” i.e., an offering to the gods consumed by fire on the altar. English-speakers since Milton have used it to describe any great destruction by fire or disastrous loss of life, and historians since 1960, to describe the Nazis’ mass murder of the Jews. • “Shoah” =Hebrew for “calamity”, the term preferred by Israeli scholars since 1945. • “Genocide” =the crime of attempting to murder an entire people, coined by the Polish-born expert on international law Raphael Lemkin in 1943 and enshrined in the United Nations “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” in 1948.

3. “INTENTIONALISTS” FOCUS ON THESE UTTERANCES BY HITLER: • Hitler apparently told a Munich journalist in 1922: “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows all over Munich, as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink.” • MEIN KAMPF: “If 12 or 15,000 of these Jewish traitors had been held under poison gas at the beginning of the war, the fate suffered by hundreds of thousands of the very best German workers... on the field of battle, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.“ • REICHSTAG SPEECH OF JANUARY 1939: "If the Jews do succeed in plunging Europe into war for a second time, the result will be, not the destruction of Europe, but the destruction of Jewry."

4. BUT THE ACTUAL GOAL OF NAZI POLICY UNTIL 1941 WAS TO EXPEL ALL JEWS • After the war broke out, the Gestapo’s chief “expert on Judaism,” Adolf Eichmann, was sent to leaders of the Zionist Jewish Agency to negotiate for the emigration of Jews to Palestine. The plan failed due to British objections. • In the spring and summer of 1940, Heinrich Himmler condemned the “Bolshevik method of physically destroying a people” as both “ungermanic and impossible.” The SS and Foreign Office pursued instead a scheme to deport four million European Jews to the French colony of Madagascar.

5. Das Großdeutsche Reich (1940-44): Germany proper was reserved for Aryans; racial undesirables were dumped elsewhere

6. Throughout German-occupied Europe, Jews were segregated in 1940

7. The Lodz ghetto, established on April 30, 1940, housed 160,000 Jews beside the “German” city of Litzmannstadt

8. One of the three ghetto foot bridges across the trolley car line

9. German policemen and a soldier abuse and ridiculea resident of the Łódz Ghetto: About 6,000 ghetto residents died in 1940, 11,000 in 1941, & 18,000 in 1942.

10. Wall being built to prepare for the proclamation of the huge Warsaw Ghetto in October 1940

11. Entrance to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, where 500,000 Jews were crammed into a district built for 50,000 inhabitants

12. The best hope for survival lay in proving the value of Jewish labor for the German war economy(a forced labor detail in 1941)

13. Crowded street in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1941/42

14. Pedestrians ignore a corpse, Warsaw Ghetto, 1941/42

15. Nazi “Productionists” vs. “Attritionists” in Poland Odilo Globocnik (1904-45), SS Police Commander in the Generalgouvernment Hans Frank (1900-46), Governor-General of Poland

16. PREPARATIONS FOR “OPERATION BARBAROSSA” (Dec. 1940-June 1941) suggest that Nazi leaders had lost all their inhibitions…. • In Poland the army refused to “liquidate the Polish intelligentsia,” so Hitler ordered the SS to take charge of occupation policy in the USSR, with greatly expanded Waffen-SS combat units, SS military police units, and roving SS execution squads (Einsatzgruppen). • All German soldiers received orders to ignore the Geneva Convention, and a promise that crimes against civilians would not be punished. • The “Commissar Order” of May 1941 required the execution of all Communist functionaries; oral instructions explained that this applied to all Jews. • German troops received orders to live off the land and to plunder food supplies for shipment home, even if “tens of millions” of Russians starved to death.

17. “The Jew:Warmonger, War-Prolonger”(1941/42).Hermann Göring issued written orders in Hitler’s name to Reinhard Heydrich on July 31, 1942, to develop a comprehensive plan for the “final solution of the Jewish Question in Europe”

18. RUDOLF HÖSS, AUSCHWITZ COMMANDANT, LATER RECALLED RECEIVING THE FOLLOWING ORDERSFROM HEINRICH HIMMLER IN SUMMER 1941 “The Führer has ordered the Final Solution of the Jewish question. We the SS have to carry out this order. The existing extermination sites in the East are not in a position to carry out these intended operations on a large scale. I have, therefore, chosen Auschwitz for this purpose.…. It is a hard and difficult job which requires your complete commitment, regardless of the difficulties which may arise…. You are sworn to the strictest silence. “The Jews are the eternal enemies of the German people and must be exterminated. All the Jews within our reach must be annihilated during this war. If we do not succeed in destroying the biological foundation of Jewry now, then one day the Jews will destroy the German people.”

19. Reinhard Heydrich and SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann invited the top civil servants from seven government agencies to discuss the “final solution of the Jewish Question”at this villa in Berlin-Wannsee on January 20, 1942

20. Map of operations associated with the Holocaust, 1942/43

21. WHAT ALL GERMANS KNEW:The Jews of Würzburg are “evacuated” in March/April 1942

22. Jewish deportees travelling through Germany, 1942/43

23. Deportation of Jews from the Lublin Ghetto, 1942

24. Mass deportation of children from the Łódz Ghetto,September 1942

25. Rail Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1942:Many Germans knew that factories were being built here

26. The entrance of Auschwitz today:“Arbeit macht frei”—”Work sets you free”

27. Auschwitz-Birkenau, February 1945

28. Hungarian Jews newly arrived at Auschwitz, spring 1944

29. A new shipment of Hungarian Jews undergoes selection on the Auschwitz train ramp

30. THE MOST CAREFULLY GUARDED SECRET OF THE THIRD REICH:Hand-carved model of the main gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau(U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

31. Details

32. Flow chart for the process of assembly- line murder developed in 1942 at the death camps:Chelmno, 150,000Treblinka, 800,000Sobibor, 250,000Belzec, 575,000Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1,100,000

33. DECODED ULTRA INTERCEPT: SS report from January 1943 on the killing of 1,274,166 people in the four camps of “Operation Reinhard” in the year 1942

34. U.S. planes bomb the Buna synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 13 September 1944

35. Jewish victims of the Third Reich

36. STAGES IN THE PROCESS OF GENOCIDE(as defined by Raul Hilberg) • DEFINITION • DISCRIMINATION • PHYSICAL SEPARATION • ANNIHILATION

37. The Zlotnik family gathers in Eishishok, Poland, in 1927 (Dora & the 2 boys escaped to Palestine)