Victims of the Holocaust

1. Victims of the Holocaust

2. Jews • Poles • Jehovah’s witnesses • Soviets • Gypsies (Roma) • Homosexuals • Disabled and Mentally ill • Political Prisoners • Prisoners of War

3. Jews • Unique ethnic group and religious group. • Antisemitism -prejudice against or hatred of Jews. • Practice the oldest monotheistic religion in the world: Judaism

4. Illustration from an antisemitic children's primer. The sign reads "Jews are not wanted here." Germany, 1936.

5. Judaism • Subdivisions: Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Secular, and Reconstructionists. • 14 million members of the Jewish faith Secular Jews Orthodox Jews

6. Judaism • Sacred texts include the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, Midrash, Mishnah, Halakah, Haggadah and Kabbalah. • Talmud – ceremonial law • Kabbalah -- the ancient Jewish tradition of mystical interpretation of the Bible, first transmitted orally • Hebrew Bible – similar to Christians old testament

7. Judaism Synagogue • Place where Jews go to worship.

8. Judaism • At 13, Boys have a Bar Mitzvah • He reads from the Torah for the first time. • At 12, Girls have a Bat Mitzvah

9. Judaism Language • Jews learn to read ancient Hebrew, language of the Torah. • Yiddish is also used. It is a mixture of German and ancient Hebrew.

10. Judaism Feast Days • Shabbat (Sabbath) is the Jewish holy day. • Pesach or Passover celebrates the Exodus of Jews from Egypt. • Yom Kippur is the holiest day. Fasting & prayer and asking for forgiveness for any wrongs. • Rosh Hashanah celebrates the Jewish New Year.

11. Poles • Predominantly Roman Catholic ethnic majority in Poland.

12. Hitler on the Poles “. . . With orders to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space that we need.”

13. Jehovah’s Witnesses • Founded in the U.S. in 1870s. • Sent missionaries to Germany in the 1890s. • By 1930, 20,000 of the 65 million German citizens were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

14. Jehovah’s Witnesses “rival center of loyalty” They were citizens of Jehovah’s Kingdom; they refused to swear allegiance to any worldly government. Would not bear arms.

15. Jehovah’s Witnesses • April 1, 1935 – the groups was banned in Germany. • Unlike Jews and Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), persecuted and killed by virtue of their birth, Jehovah’s Witnesses had the opportunity to escape persecution and personal harm by renouncing their religious beliefs.

16. Roma (gypsies) • Labeled by the Nazis as racially “undesirable” Marzahn, the first internment camp for Roma (Gypsies) in the Third Reich. Germany, date uncertain.

17. Roma (gypsies) • No records, Nazi’s used physical characteristics. • Dr. Robert Ritter, a child psychologist at the University of Tuebingen, became the central figure in the study of Roma. • Ritter declared that Roma, having originated in India, were once Aryan but had been corrupted by mingling with lesser peoples during their long migration. Ritter estimated that some 90 percent of all Roma in Germany were of mixed blood and were consequently carriers of "degenerate" blood and criminal characteristics.

18. Roma (gypsies) • Shortly before the opening of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, the police ordered the arrest and forcible relocation of all Roma in Greater Berlin to Marzahn, an open field located near a cemetery and sewage dump in eastern Berlin.

19. Afro-Germans Nazi propaganda photo depicts friendship between an "Aryan" and a black woman. The caption states: "The result! A loss of racial pride." Germany, prewar.

20. Afro-Germans • After WWI, Germany stripped of its African colonies. • Separation of whites and blacks was mandated by the Reichstag (German parliament), which enacted a law against mixed marriages in the African colonies.

21. People with Disabilities • Euthanasia – good death • The so-called "Euthanasia" program was National Socialist Germany's first program of mass murder, predating the genocide of European Jewry, which we call the Holocaust, by approximately two years.

22. People with Disabilities • 1939 - a decree compelling all physicians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability. • T4 – same policies to adults in institutions.

23. People with Disabilities • In view of widespread public knowledge of the measure and in the wake of private and public protests concerning the killings, especially from members of the German clergy, Hitler ordered a halt to the euthanasia program in late August 1941. According to T4's own internal calculations, the "euthanasia" effort claimed the lives of 70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons at the six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941.

24. Homosexuals • Believed to be too weak, effeminate men who could not fight for the German nation. A writer from Duesseldorf who was arrested for homosexuality. Duesseldorf, Germany, 1938.

25. Homosexuals • Lesbians were not regarded as a threat to Nazi racial policies and were generally not targeted for persecution. • Because some Nazis believed homosexuality was a sickness that could be cured, they designed policies to "cure" homosexuals of their "disease" through humiliation and hard work.

26. Soviets • The war against the Soviet Union was a war of annihilation between German fascism and Soviet communism; a racial war between German "Aryans" and subhuman Slavs and Jews. • Soviet POWs differed dramatically from German policy towards POWs from Britain and the United States, countries the Nazis regarded as racial equals to the Germans.

27. Soviets • German authorities viewed Soviet POWs as a particular threat, regarding them not only as Slavic subhumans but as part of the "Bolshevik menace" linked in their minds to a Jewish conspiracy.

28. What was the Holocaust? The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

29. Ghettos • First ghetto – 1516, Venice • Ghettos isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities from the non-Jewish population. • Three types of ghettos: closed ghettos, open ghettos, and destruction ghettos.

30. Warsaw Ghetto • 1.3 square miles • Over 400,000 people • Identification badges required.

31. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – April ‘43 • Hid out instead of complying with deportation to concentration and work camps. 1935 1943