Description
A Holocaust is defined as a mass slaughtering of civilians, commonly referred to as the genocide of Jewish people. Antisemitism was encouraged by the Nazi propaganda campaign that brought out the Germans’ hatred for Jewish people. The Germans blamed Jewish people for their defeat in World War 1 and their economic problems following the war. However, neither of those accusations are true because Germany’s economic problems were mainly a result of a worldwide Great Depression. Starting in 1933, the Nazis created the government policy to persecute Jews and forbid them from taking public office. Following in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were created and deprived Jews of the right to German citizenship, jobs, and owning property. Furthermore, Jews were forced to wear a bright yellow star attached to their clothes as a way to identify them. On November 9, 1939 the “Night of Broken Glass,” Nazi Storm Troopers launched an attack on the German community such as Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues all across Germany. They murdered approximately 100 Jews as a result of a 17-year- old Jewish boy who shot an employee of the German Embassy in Paris to avenge his father’s deportation out of Germany. By 1939, many Jewish people had fled from Germany for safety and for those who stayed were forced to emigrate. Hitler’s initial plan to get rid of the Jewish people who were non-Aryan was to allow them to emigrate. However, once other countries were unwilling to accept Jewish refugees into their countries, Hitler had another plan. All Jewish people were to be moved to specific cities in Poland where they were segregated into Jewish communities and overcrowded ghettos. In these ghettos, the Nazis sealed off the areas with barbed wire and stone walls with the goal that the Jewish people will perish from starvation or diseases. However, as the Jewish people hung on to their lives Hitler became impatient that they were not dying off quick enough so he came up with the plan the “Final Solution” which was actually a genocide program aimed to kill off the entire Jewish population systematically to create a pure German and Aryan living space in Germany. However, the Jews were not the only minorities that was executed, any races or nationalities that was considered inferior to the German race and displayed as “subhumans” had to be eliminated from Germany. The Jewish people were hunted down by Hitler’s elite security force and taken to isolated places where they would be shot in pits. Unfortunately, for those that were not taken away by the killing squads; had to be sent to concentration camps or slave-labor prisons where they were subjected to horrible conditions and most likely to die from those conditions. Adolf Hitler believed that the system of labor-prisons and concentration camps would speed up the process of eliminating these “subhumans.” Inside the prisons, prisoners worked as slaves for seven days a week and on top of that were severely beaten or killed and limited to petty meals; hunger was intense. In early 1942 the Final Solution reached its last phase. The existence of death camps and gas chambers were created by the Nazis to conduct mass murders. Gas chambers had the capability to kill off 6,000 people per a day by cyanide gas poisonings. By the end of the Holocaust, six million Jewish people had died from the Nazi massacre and genocide and fewer than four million European Jews were able to survive the horrors of the Holocaust.
Ten Best Articles
- Introduction to the Holocaust An overview of the time period prior and time period post of the Holocaust, when the mass genocide had destroyed millions of Jewish lives. "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."
- Victims of the Nazi Era: Nazi Racial Ideology The analysis of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis’ beliefs, that driven them to carry out the Holocaust and target specific minority groups and nationalities to eliminate from German society. "The interwar German state further weakened the German "Aryan" race by tolerating procreation among people whom the Nazis considered genetically degenerate and a harmful influence on the hygiene of the race as a whole: people with physical and mental disabilities, habitual or career criminals, and persons who compulsively engaged in socially “deviant behavior” as the Nazis perceived it, including homeless people, allegedly promiscuous women, people unable to hold a job, or alcoholics, among others."
- The Holocaust An in-depth explanation of the Holocaust and the major events that occurred during the years 1933-1953, which was caused by Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism. "During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds)."
- The Nuremberg Race Laws An article about the Nuremberg Laws which limited Jewish people from taking part in German society. "At the annual party rally held in Nuremberg in 1935, the Nazis announced new laws which institutionalized many of the racial theories prevalent in Nazi ideology."
- The Final Solution An about the Final Solution and the important events of the Nazis' plan to conduct a mass genocide of Jewish people, the plan was the Nazis' final step to eliminate Jews. "What is clear is that the genocide of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of Nazi policy, under the rule of Adolf Hitler."
- The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking An article about numbers that researchers found at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on concentration camps and ghettos in Europe fourteen years ago. "You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps."
- The First Killings of the Holocaust An article that explains that the killings of Jews in concentration camps started before the Holocaust. "The extermination of European Jews may have been formally outlined seven decades ago this month, but it began nearly nine years earlier, during Easter Week 1933, a few minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, April 12, when four Jews — Arthur Kahn, Ernst Goldmann, Rudolf Benario and Erwin Kahn — were executed in precisely that order at a Nazi camp in the obscure Bavarian hamlet of Prittlbach."
- Jews Killed Away From the Death Camps An article that conveys that the killings of Jewish people by the Nazis had occurred more in killing sites than at concentration camps. "Yet a third or more of the almost six million Jews killed in the Holocaust perished not in the industrial-scale murder of the camps, but in executions at what historians call killing sites: thousands of villages, quarries, forests, wells, streets and homes that dot the map of Eastern Europe."
- Kristallnacht An explanation of what is the Kristallnacht and what had caused it as well as the result of the event. "The violence of Kristallnacht served notice to German Jews that Nazi anti-Semitism was not a temporary predicament and would only intensify."
- Nazi Camp System An overview of how the system of Nazi concentration camps begun and how it developed into the Holocaust. "During World War II, the organization and scale of the Nazi camp system expanded rapidly and the purpose of the camps evolved beyond imprisonment toward forced labor and outright murder."
Audio/Videos
Primary Source Documents
- Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression A translated document of how Adolf Hitler wanted to organize Jewish ghettos in Warsaw. "The necessity of erecting a Ghetto in the City of Warsaw as well became more and more urgent in the summer of 1940, since more and more troops were being assembled in the district of Warsaw after termination of the French campaign."
- Nuremberg Code This was a document of the evidence the German doctors used in their defense for their medical experimentation of Jews during the trials of war criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. "Of the ten principles which have been enumerated our judicial concern, of course, is with those requirements which are purely legal in nature — or which at least are so clearly related to matters legal that they assist us in determining criminal culpability and punishment."
- The Concentration Camps of Oswieczin and Birkenau A report from an Auschwitz escapee about the conditions of German concentration camps in Oswieczin and Birkenau. "On principle only Jews are put to death by gas, this is only done to Aryans in exceptional cases."
Maps
Concentration camps and Extermination Camps in Eastern Europe
The Holocaust routes of deportation of Jews and location of death camps in Eastern Europe
Locations of sub-concentration camps and main concentration camps of the Storm Troopers
Locations of Jewish Ghettos in Eastern European between the year 1941-1942
Numbers of estimated deaths in each country as a result of the Holocaust