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The Holocaust . SWBAT: identify the causes of the Holocaust. Homework: None. Do Now: With a partner sitting near you, add words surrounding the word “Holocaust” with things you already know about it. Consider: who, what, where, when, and why . Note: the more you can add, the better. .
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The Holocaust SWBAT: identify the causes of the Holocaust. Homework: None. Do Now: With a partner sitting near you, add words surrounding the word “Holocaust” with things you already know about it. Consider: who, what, where, when, and why. Note: the more you can add, the better. The Holocaust
What is the Holocaust? • Systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, throughout the German Reich and German-occupied territories • Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed. • A network of over 40,000 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territory were used to concentrate, hold, and kill Jews and other victims
Who was Targeted? • Those deemed to have "racial inferiority": • This mostly meant Jews. • Included gypsies, the physically and mentally disabled, homosexuals, Communists, Socialists, and Jehovah's Witnesses.
The Beginnings • As early as 1933, laws were implemented that outlawed kosher butchering and made it difficult for Jewish children to attend school with non-Jewish children. • In 1935, Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Lawsstripping German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all civil rights. • At the same time the Nazis used propaganda to spread the concept of Rassenschande (race defilement) to justify the need for a restrictive law. The Nazi propaganda film poster for the “The Eternal Jew”
Kristallnacht • On November 7, 1938, a Jewish teenager named Herschel Grünspan assassinated Nazi German diplomat Ernst vomRath in Paris. • This incident was used by the Nazis as a reason to begin physical violence against German Jews. • What the Nazis claimed to be spontaneous "public outrage" was in fact a planned program throughout Nazi Germany, • These programs became known as Kristallnacht("the Night of Broken Glass", literally "Crystal Night"). • Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized, • Over 7,000 Jewish shops and more than 1,200 synagogues (roughly two-thirds of the synagogues in areas under German control) were damaged or destroyed.
Early Measures • Germany's invasion of Poland in September, 1939 increased the urgency of the "Jewish Question". • Poland was home to approximately three million Jews. • A Nazi party member recommended putting Polish Jews in ghettos in major cities, located on railway junctions in order to furnish, "a better possibility of control and later deportation.“ • Here many thousands died from maltreatment, disease, starvation, and exhaustion, but there was still no program of systematic killing.
Movement towards the “Final Solution” • Hitler said that if the "Jewish problem" cannot be solved by these laws and ghettos, it "must then be handed over by law to the National-Socialist Party for a final solution". • The "final solution“ became the standard Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews. • The Wannsee Conference brought together some 15 Nazi leaders to a suburb of Berlin. • Purpose? To discuss plans for a comprehensive solution to the "Jewish question in Europe.“ • The decision? European Jews would be rounded up from west to east and sent to extermination camps where they would be killed.
The Camps Extermination Camps Labor Camps Concentration Camps • Located in all German-occupied locations. • Created to exploit the labor of prisoners of various kinds, including prisoners of war. • Included Camps like: • Buchenwald • Mauthausen-Gusen • Ravensbrück • Located mostly in Poland. • Created for the sole purpose of exterminating the Jews. • Included camps like: • Auschwitz • Belzec • Sobibor • Treblinka • Located mostly in Germany. • intended as places of incarceration and forced labor for a variety of enemies of the Nazi regime • Included camps like: • Dachau • Bergen-Belsen
Steps to Death • Deportation and transportation to camps often took days. • Individuals, families and whole communities together with their personal belongings were packed into cattle train cars. • They had no information. They did not know where they were going, the length of the journey or what would happen to them when they eventually arrived at their destination. • It was not uncommon for the very young, the old and the sick to die because of the inhumane conditions during the journey
Arrival • Having arrived at a concentration camp and been unloaded from the cattle trucks, men and women were separated, children staying with their mothers. • After registration, prisoners had to undress and have their hair shaved before showering. • They usually had their own clothing taken away, which would be replaced by a striped uniform.
Life at a Camp • After an early wake-up, daily concentration camp routines would begin with the Appell, the daily roll call. • During the Appell prisoners had to stand in rows, completely still, for hours at a time, and in all weather conditions. • After waking and before roll call, up to 2,000 prisoners at a time would have to share toilet facilities. The toilet would be a concrete or wooden board with often 100 holes for seats.
Conditions • No privacy and no real sanitation was provided. Prisoners would have to wash in dirty water, without soap and with no change of clothes for weeks or months on end. • Unsanitary conditions often spread disease. • After eating a meagre ration of watery soup, a piece of bread and some imitation coffee, a prisoner’s day would follow with work details. • Led to malnutrition and starvation. • If the conditions didn’t kill you, the work might. • Exhaustion was a common cause of death. • And if this didn’t kill you, the gas chambers would.
