The Holocaust

1. The Holocaust Hitler’s Final Solution

2. Hitler and the Nazis comes to power • promised Germans a better life • appealed to young, unemployed and small businessmen • Chancellor (1933) a one-party dictatorship. • All individual freedoms and rights removed • rely on terror and violence to maintain and increase their power..

3. Heinrich Himmler • Head of the SS

4. Nazi Propaganda and Censorship • To gain support of the German people • Headed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, • control of all forms of media and communication (newspapers, magazines, books, public meetings, rallies, art, music, movies and radio). • burned books (unfit) (Einstein and Freud) • Anti-Semitism

6. The Master Race • “master race” = Aryans (blond, blue-eyed and tall). • Improved humanity by limiting the reproduction of people considered to be “inferior”. • Forced sterilization on Gypsies, handicapped, mentally ill, deaf, blind, African-German children and the Jews. • Teachers began to apply “the principles of racial sciences”.

7. The Handicapped • Physically and mentally ill targeted. • Viewed as “useless” members of society • Threat to Aryan genetic purity • The T-4 program (euthanasia program) • German doctors aided the Nazis (medical files) • Killed in specially constructed gas chambers. • Children – injections or starvation. • Bodies burned

8. Hadamar

9. Jews and anti-Semitism in Europe • 600 000 Jews in Germany. • The largest concentration in Eastern Europe • Contrary to German propaganda and prejudice, not all Jews were extremely wealthy. • Anti-Semitism was prevalent in Europe prior to the Holocaust. • The Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages taught that the Jews were responsible for Christ’s death even though the Romans had crucified Jesus. • blamed for Black Death

10. Nazi persecution of the Jews • Star of David & identification cards • The Nuremburg Race Laws (1935) • Defined a Jew: Not in religious terms, but in terms of lineage. • Complete segregation (adults and children) • Pogroms • November 9, 1938: Kristallnacht or “the Night of the Broken Glass”. • Joseph Goebbels carefully organized the pogroms. • 1 000 synagogues burned, 7 000 Jewish businesses attacked and dozens of Jews were killed. • Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools and homes looted

12. Kristallnacht

13. The Ghettos • Forced to live in marked-off sections of cities (ghettos) • Fenced in barbed-wire or walls /guarded entrances • Life unbearable. • Overcrowded/diseased/filthy/no heat • Nazis deliberately tried to starve the residents of the ghettos. There was no sources of heat. • Thousands died/many suicides.

14. Concentration Camps • Prison camps or concentration were built by the Nazis to imprison Jews, Gypsies, political and religious opponents, resisters, homosexuals and other “enemies of the state”. • more than 100 across German-occupied Europe by the end of WWII.

15. The Final Solution • Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish people. • The goal = genocide (the deliberate, systematic destruction of a racial, ethnic, cultural or political group). • First revealed to non-Nazi leaders at Wannsee Conference (Jan. 1942) • Many forms of murder: gassing, shootings, random acts of violence, disease and starvation.

16. Einsatzgruppen • Mobile group of SS • Followed German armies into the Soviet Union in June 1941 • Ordered to kill all Jews, communist leaders and Gypsies. • Killed one million Jews. • Shot or used gas vans • psychologically devastating to the killers (ordinary men) • Those who struggled with the murders often used liquor to numb themselves

17. The Last Jew in Vinnitsa (1942) An Einsatzgruppen D member about to shoot a Jew kneeling at a mass grave in Vinnitsa.

18. Extermination Camps • The Nazis systematically deported Jews to six extermination camps • In Poland • To decrease psychological burden on the killers. • The most famous death camp was Auschwitz. These camps were • killing centres to achieve Hitler’s goals of genocide

19. Auschwitz-Birkenau

21. Death Camps • Arrive by train (packed like cattle) • sorted by the guards: • men from the women and children • the sick from the healthy (overseen by SS doctor) • Infants, young children, pregnant women, the elderly, the handicapped and the sick usually did not survive this initial selection. • Once selected to die: • led to the gas chambers. (Told it was a shower to prevent panic) • Prisoners forced to carry the bodies to a room where all valuables removed • Bodies were burned or buried in mass graves. • Also extermination through work.

25. Liberation of the Camps • Soviet soldiers first • British, Canadian, American and French troops too • Nazis had tried to empty the camps of surviving prisoners/ evidence of their crimes • Allied soldiers still found thousands of dead • Those alive practically skeletons • Many too weak to digest food (1/2 found alive in Auschwitz died in a few days) • Mixed reactions of survivors • Excitement and guilt

27. Returning home? • Impossible to return home to a life like it had been before the Holocaust • Jewish communities no longer existed in much of Europe. • Found that, in many cases, their homes had been looted or taken over by others. • Many ended up in displaced persons’ (DP) camps • Waited to be admitted to places like the United States or South Africa. • On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, announced the formation of the State of Israel.

28. Nuremburg Trials • After the war, some of those responsible for crimes committed during the Holocaust were brought to trial in Nuremburg, Germany in 1945 and 1946. • Allied judges presided over the hearings of twenty-two major Nazi criminals. Twelve prominent Nazis were sentenced to death. • Hitler did not appear at the Nuremburg Trials because he had committed suicide at the end of the war.