Holocaust

1. Holocaust By Timothy Hele, Alex Hayward and Michael Every

2. What It Means The word holocaust, in Greek means complete destruction by fire. However, it usually applies to the period during the late 1930s and early 1940s during which 6,000,000 of Hitler’s enemies were brutally exterminated. They were prominently Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, communists, journalists, Jehovah’s witnesses, handicapped people or anyone else who Hitler disliked or who didn’t appease his Aryan ideals.

3. Hitler’s Rise to Power After the Great War, Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, depriving it of land, population and resources. The German economy crashed and its people fell into poverty and ruin. The Government tried to make more money by printing more banknotes but this lead to hyperinflation and hence money became worthless. A lady burning money as it was worth more as fuel because of hyperinfla-tion 500,000 deutschmark note

4. Out of these ashes rose a leader who claimed he could solve all of Germany’s problems by blaming the past problems on non-Aryan people but mainly the Jews. Germany would have to cleanse itself from these ‘enemies’ and then it would become the great country it once was. In early 1933 Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany, answerable only to President Hindenburg. He started reclaiming all that Germany had lost through the Treaty of Versailles and won much support. Adolf Hitler wearing Nazi uniform

5. Nazi Regime Few dared criticise Hitler, so when President Hindenburg died in 1934, he declared himself as absolute leader. He set up secret police, the Gestapo, one of Hitler’s ministers, Goebbels, used propaganda to persuade the population that Jews were enemies of the state. Hitler gave people jobs and Germany appeared to recover. Anti-Semitism was ingrained into school children, producing a new generation of Nazi supporters. Nazi flag with Swastika in the centre

6. Kristallnacht In 1935, new Nuremberg laws were passed, depriving Jews of many of their rights. On 9th November 1938 anti-Jewish riots were initiated over Germany and what followed was called ‘Night of the broken glass’ or ‘Kristallnacht’. 20,000 Jews were taken to concentration camps, Synagogues were burned and many Jews emigrated. Jewish shop the morning after ‘Kristallnacht’

7. World War II Hitler had begun extending Germany since 1935 but in 1939 Britain and France declared war on Germany. Hitler’s armies swept through the Low Countries: Poland, Yugoslavia, Norway and France, bringing with it prisoners of war and plenty of people for the newly built concentration camps in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Map of the progressions of World War II

8. Holocaust Begins After the war had started the mass killings began in earnest. Many Jews in Poland and Russia were transported hundreds of miles in squalid conditions to Concentrations camps over Europe. Jews were now humiliated by people in the street and forced to wear yellow armbands. They had to carry identity cards and were not allowed professional jobs or work with Aryans. Jews wearing yellow armbands and being tormented.

9. Ghettos Jews were not only segregated but also isolated. They had to live in Ghettos, in the poorest, most dilapidated parts of cities. Overcrowding and disease were rife, with little sanitation, food or education. However, some Jews tried to continue as normal, running schools, printing newspapers and holding concerts. A Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw

10. Concentration & Extermination Camps The first Concentration camps were in Germany, like Dachau which I have already mentioned. Nevertheless, when Eastern Europe was invaded, many camps were built there, away from the masses and where genocide could begin undisturbed. On arrival, prisoners were stripped of their possessions, identity and clothes, given uniforms and a number was tattooed on their arm. Entrance to Dachau.

11. Prisoners would be shot or tortured for the slightest misdemeanour or brutally used as animals in repugnant medical experiments. Sometimes they were told the only right they had was to die. In extermination camps, those considered unfit to work as slave labour (women, children, sick and elderly) were gassed with Zyklon-B, a crystalline form of Hydrochloric acid. Barbed wire, electric fence guarded by the gunmen in watch tower. Shows where the pistol range used to be as Dachau is now a memorial. The two original furnaces where bodies were taken after being gassed.

12. Einsatzgruppen In Eastern Europe, not only were there Concentration and Extermination camps but also a groups of Nazis who would round up all the Jews and separate them into those who could work and those who were to die immediately. Those who could work were transported in cattle trucks for days on end and used as slave labour. Those who couldn’t work were taken by death squads, called ‘Einsatzgruppen’ (part of the SS) into the woods and shot. Sometimes they would line Jews up along a riverbank and use them as target practice. SS promotion poster – it says you can join at the age of 17.

13. Resistance & Helpers The Nazis final solution (the extermination of all Jews) did not always go smoothly. In Sobibor death camp, the Jews revolted, killing guards and freeing 600 of their own. There were uprisings in the Ghettoes, such as Bialystock in Poland, where 40,000 Jews died but most famously in Warsaw, April 1943, where the Jews held the Nazis back for some weeks as the guards tried to round up all the inhabitants and send them to the concentration camps. Oscar Schindler’s factory today.

14. There were Jewish partisan fighters and many others who tried to halt the deaths. Oskar Schindler built a factory for Jewish workers so they wouldn’t be killed and King Christian X of Denmark did everything he could to stop Danish Jews being executed, including sending deputations to death camps and smuggling them into neutral Sweden during the night. Yet, there are many unsung heroes. Oskar Schindler (right) A recent movie made about Schindler’s help during the Holocaust “Schindler’s List” (left)

15. The Liberation As the allies advanced, the German army realised they would be unable to complete the Final Solution. Instead there were death marches, marching the few survivors from one camp to another. Even when the Allies liberated the camps, those who were left were often too weak and malnourished to pull through, many died. The survivors were displaced and were frequently refused back into their own homes. Dachau liberation.

16. The Trials In 1945, 22 Nazi leaders were put on trial in Nuremberg for war crimes. This was the first time someone’s guilt was gauged on their individual responsibility, 19 were found guilty and hanged, from evidence they had compiled themselves. However, it didn’t stop there and those who had fled, like Eichmann, were eventually captured and tried for their crimes. The Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hess, was hanged on gallows erected just outside the concentration camp in which he killed over a million.

17. Location of concentration and death camps all over Europe.

18. Lessons The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created in 1948, entitling all human beings to minimum rights, such as freedom from death, slavery and torture. However, Genocide didn’t stop there. Since the Declaration of Human Rights genocide has been committed in Cambodia and Pol Pot or Rwanda where a million Hutus and Tutsis were murdered and Bosnia A memorial for the holocaust.

19. A memorial at Auschwitz One of many memorials at Dachau Spires of Harrisburg Holocaust Memorial