brendon smith holocaust research project

7/30/2019 Brendon Smith Holocaust Research Project

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Research Paper

Holocaust Overview

Brendon Smith

Mr. Neuburger

English Comp. 102-127

1 November 2012


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leader, Adolf Hitler, was born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Austria. His father was a

strict and abusive man. Adolf was more emotionally attached to his mother, however both

parents died before Hitler reached the age of twenty. Hitler quit high school at the age of fifteen

in hopes of becoming an artist. After being turned down by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts,

Hitler lived off the money he made selling painted postcards at street corners. In Vienna, Hitler

established his anti-Semitic personality. He wrote an autobiography,Mein Kampf, which

revealed the anti-Semitic ideas and plans.

Nazis Views on Jews

Years before Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he was preoccupied with ideas about

race. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hitler spread his beliefs in

racial purity and in the superiority of the Germanic race, which is what he called an Aryan

master race" (Nazi Racism). He stated that his race must remain pure in order to one day take

over the world. Adolf Hitler wroteMein Kampfwhile

in prison for treason, then failed to seize power in

1923. In this autobiography, Hitler views history as

the fight between races for living space. He

anticipated a war of conquest with the Slavic peoples

confined to the German interests. He wanted to

remove all Jews from Germany. Adolf smoothly

entered the National Socialist Party, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, with his naturally gifted

and talented public speaking skills. He was easily able to build a sense of German pride and

success. The Nazi party created over 3,000 members and Hitler was appointed their leader,

which is also known as the Fhrer.

The Nazis used public displays to spread their

ideas of race.

Source: http://bit.ly/PBMbVA


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As Hitler and the Nazis came to power, the beliefs of the government were spread

publicly on posters, on the radio, in movies, classrooms, and newspapers. The Nazis began to put

their ideology into practice with the support of German scientists who believed that the human

race could be improved by limiting the reproduction of people that are considered poorer. Hitler

and other Nazi leaders didnt view the Jews as a religious group, but instead as a lethal race,

which lived off of the other races and weakened them. The United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum states, Once Hitler took power, Nazi teachers in school classrooms started applying

the principles of racial beliefs. They did everything from measuring skull size and nose length to

recording the color of their pupils, hair, and eyes to decide whether students fit in with the true

Aryan race. Several Jewish students at this time were consistently humiliated (Nazi Racism)

Nuremberg Laws

According to The History Place, the Nazis issued a complex instructional chart to help

officials distinguish the various degrees of Jewishness (The Nuremberg Laws). Usually, the Jews

that are full-blooded carried a greater level of

discrimination against them. In addition, much of the

confusion still remained. Nearly 50,000 people converted

to Christianity from Judaism. Others were either half-Jew

or even considered quarter-Jews. Strangely enough,

several German Jews reacted to the Nuremberg Laws

with a sense of relief, thinking the worst was now over.

The History Place concludes, At least now they finally understood where they stand and could

get on with their lives even if they had diminished rights. And to some degree they were correct

(The Nuremberg Laws). The Nazis moved rather slowly in regard to the Jews. This was a quiet

Instructional chart issued to help bureaucrats

distinguish Jews from Mischlinge (mixed racepersons) and Aryans.

Source:http://bit.ly/Q8yaA1


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Aftermath of Kristallnacht

Source: http://bit.ly/SGpbly

time for Jews in the Third Reich, as Hitler started to focus his attention entirely on diplomatic

affairs and military re-armament.

Kristallnacht

PBS claims that on the night of November 9, 1938, the sounds of breaking glass shattered the

air in cities throughout Germany while fires were started across the country devouring

synagogues and Jewish institutions (Kristallnacht). Many gangs of Nazi storm troopers

demolished several Jewish businesses, set fire to over 900 synagogues, killed 91 Jews and

deported nearly thirty thousand Jewish men to

concentration camps. "Kristallnacht" provided the

Nazi government with an opportunity at last to totally

remove Jews from German public life. It was the

concluding event in a sequence of anti-Semitic

policies set in place since Hitler took power in 1933.

The Nazis dispersed a letter stating that Jewish businesses cannot be reopened unless they are

managed by non-Jews. On November 15th

1938, Jewish children were banned from attending

school. One does not deserve to be banned from school due to their religion. Not long after, the

Nazis provided the "Decree on Eliminating the Jews from German Economic Life," which

prohibited Jews from selling goods or services anywhere, from engaging in crafts work, from

serving as the leaders of any firms, and from being members of cooperatives. Somehow, the

Nazis decided that the Jews should be liable for the damages caused during Kristallnacht.

According to PBS, "The Decree on the Penalty Paymentby Jews Who Are German Subjects

also imposed a one-billion mark fine on the Jewish community, supposedly an indemnity for the

death of vom Rath (Kristallnacht).


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Even though the outrages carried on throughout the Night of Broken Glass did arouse

violence in Western Europe and the United States, little action was taken to help the Jews of

Germany. PBS states, At a press conference on November 15th of 1933, President Roosevelt

said, the news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the

United States... I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century

civilization" (Kristallnacht). Also, the president ordered that the 12,000-15,000 refugees already

in the U.S. on temporary visitor visas could remain in the country forever.

Rounding Up Jews

In 1942, Hitler decided to clear up the ghettos and, within 18 months, he deported over

two million Jewish survivors to death camps. The Jewish Virtual Library states, Germans

ordered the Jewish police in the Warsaw ghetto to round up people for deportation.

Approximately 300,000 men, women, and children were packed in cattle cars and transported to

the Treblinka death camp where they were murdered. This left a Jewish population of between

55,000 and 60,000 in the ghetto (Warsaw Ghetto Uprising).

In January 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw ghettoused a small supply of weapons that had

been smuggled into the ghetto and fired their guns at German troops as they tried to round up

another group of ghetto residents for deportation. Not long afterwards, the troops retreated. This

small victory motivated the ghetto fighters to prepare for future resistance. The Jews in the

Warsaw ghetto truly fought for their lives and probably ended up saving thousands of Jews from

being deported and murdered. If there were more people that fought for the Jews throughout this

time period, the Jews may have avoided losing the lives of their loved ones.


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According to The Jewish Virtual Library, The Jews in the ghetto believed that what had

happened in January was proof that by offering resistance it was possible to force the Germans to

desist from their plans. Many thought that the Germans would continue in unrestrained mass

deportations only so long as the Jews were passive, but that in

the face of resistance and armed confrontation they would think

twice before boarding upon yet another action. The Germans

would also have to take into account the possibility that the

outbreak of fighting in the ghetto might lead to the rebellion

spreading to the Polish population and might create a state of

insecurity in all of occupied Poland. These considerations led the

civilian population of the ghetto, in the final phase of its

existence, to approve of resistance and give its support to the preparations for the uprising. The

population also used the interval to prepare and equip a network of subterranean refuges and

hiding places, where they could hold out for an extended period even if they were cut off from

one another. Every Jew in the ghetto had his own spot in one of the shelters set up in the central

part of the ghetto. The civilians and the fighters now shared a common interest based on the hope

that fighting the Germans might be a way of rescue for them (Warsaw Ghetto Uprising).

After the January battle, the Jews spent the following weeks to train, acquire weapons,

and make plans to defend the ghetto. Unfortunately, the Germans also prepared for the

possibility of a fight by replacing the chief of the SS and police in the Warsaw district with an

officer who had experience fighting partisans. The ghetto fighters were warned of the timing of

the final deportation and the total Jewish population went into hiding. On April 19, 1943, the

Warsaw ghetto uprising began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport the

Heavily armed guards watch housing

blocks burn during the Warsaw Ghetto

uprising

Source:http://bit.ly/PPGTpw


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Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS

(Security Service) and Nazi governor ofBohemia and Moravia.

Source: http://bit.ly/SHIniw

rest of the Jews that survived. Nearly seven hundred and fifty fighters armed with a handful of

pistols, rifles, and Molotov cocktails faced more than two thousand heavily armed and well-

trained German troops supported by tanks and flamethrowers. This cannot be referred to a fair

fight, but this does show that the Jews literally gave all they had in saving their own people as

well as their selves. The Jewish Virtual Library claims, On May 16, Stroop announced the

fighting was over. He said his forces had captured 56,065 Jews and announced that he was going

to blow up the Great Synagogue as a symbol of victory and of the fact that the Jewish quarter of

Warsaw no longer exists (Warsaw Ghetto Uprising).

The Wannsee Conference

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Final Solution was

the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. Hitler

authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder.

Reinhard Heydrich arranged the Wannsee Conference to inform

and secure support from government ministries and other

interested agencies relevant to the implementation of the Final

Solution, and to disclose to the participants that Hitler himself

had tasked Heydrich with coordinating the operation. The men at

the table did not deliberate whether such a plan should be

undertaken, but instead discussed the implementation of a policy

decision that had already been made at the highest level of the Nazi regime (Wannsee

Conference and the "Final Solution"). During the Wannsee Conference, most participants already

knew that the National Socialist regime had engaged in mass murder of Jews. The police and

military units were already slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews in the German-occupied


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Soviet Union. Others were aware that units of the German Army and the SS and police were

killing Jews in Serbia. Not even one of the officials present at the meeting objected to the Final

Solution policy that Heydrich declared. Heydrich specified that roughly eleven million Jews in

Europe would fall under the provisions of the Final Solution. He included not only Jews living in

Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom, and the neutral nations such as

Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey. The United States

Holocaust Memorial Museum states, Heydrich announced that during the course of the Final

Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor

deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be

brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through

natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most

capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of

natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival (Wannsee

Conference and the Final Solution). The point of the Wannsee Conference was to advance the

organization of a policy aimed at the physical annihilation of the European Jews.

Death Camps

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established around twenty thousand camps to

imprison its many millions of victims. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum, These camps were used for a range of purposes including forced-labor camps, transit

camps which served as temporary way stations, and extermination camps built primarily or

exclusively for mass murder (Nazi Camps). From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi

government built a series of confinement facilities to imprison and eliminate so-called "enemies

of the state." The prisoners in the early concentration camps were mostly German Communists,


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Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and people

accused of socially abnormal behavior. These facilities were called concentration camps because

those imprisoned there were physically concentrated in one location. After Germany's invasion

of Austria in March 1938, the Nazis arrested German and Austrian Jews and imprisoned them in

the Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen concentration

camps, which are all located in Germany. After the violent

Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") in November of 1938,

the Nazis directed mass arrests of adult male Jews and

incarcerated them in camps for brief periods. Following the

German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis

established forced-labor camps where thousands of prisoners died

from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure. SS units guarded the

forced-labor camps. The Nazi camp system expanded quickly during World War II. Nazi doctors

even performed medical experiments on prisoners in some of the camps. A couple years later,

following the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis improved the number of

prisoner-of-war (POW) camps. Some new camps, such as Auschwitz, were built at existing

concentration camp complexes in Poland. The camp at Lublin, later known as Majdanek, was

established in the autumn of 1941 as a POW camp and became a concentration camp in 1943.

Unfortunately, thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were either shot or gassed there.

Extermination Camps

Chelmno was the first extermination camp to be established with the one cruel purpose

of killing all Jews in an organized fashion. In Chelmno, roughly one-hundred and fifty-two Jews

were gassed to death using exhaust gas from trucks. Not long after Chelmno was established,

Auschwitz death camp

Source: http://bit.ly/TvS7hj


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three more extermination camps were created. Belzec,

Treblinka and Sobibor are the names of these three

sadistic camps. The extermination camp Belzec was

established in May 1942 and continued to function until

August 1943. Six-hundred thousand Jews died due to the

cruel efficiency of the gas chambers at Belzec. Similarly,

Sobibor activated its terrible business of mass murder in

May 1942. The killings continued through October 1943, when an uprising between the

prisoners put an end to the activities of the camp. The Jews fought with the low amount of

weapons they had to avoid being murdered. Two-hundred and fifty thousand Jews lost their lives

in Sobibors gas chambers. Also, the extermination camp Treblinka ran from July 1942 to

November 1943. In August 1943, an uprising demolished many of the facilities. 900,000 Jews

died in the terribly efficient extermination camp at Treblinka. According to the Danish Center,

It is estimated that 1 million Jews and several thousand gypsies were killed during Operation

Reinhard (Extermination Camps). Only few survived or escaped the killings, majority were

killed upon arrival. Auschwitz-Birkenau, which also ran as a concentration camp and a work

camp, became the largest killing center as far as the number of fatalities is concerned. Between 1

and 2 million Jews were killed in the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau during its day.

The first gassing experiments began in September 1941. The extermination camp was started up

in March 1942 and ended its work in November 1944. Majority of the victims in the

extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau were Jews. The other victims were mainly Poles,

gypsies, and Soviet POWs. Majdanek is another extermination camp that initiated its gassings in

October 1942. The camp worked in the same way as Auschwitz-Birkenau, and also included a

Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp

Source: http://bit.ly/ZgWAbJ


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concentration and work camp. In 1943, the camp was closed after claiming between 60,000 and

80,000 Jewish losses. Overall, mass extermination was usually performed in the form of shooting

and gassing of Jews and Soviet POWs.

Survivors Words

As for the survivors, they now live the rest of their lives knowing the complete

destruction of their Jewish family and the horrific events they had to face due to Nazi troops.

Holocaust survivors, such as Herman Cohn and Ursula Levy,

revealed their survival story and the devastating events that also

took place along the way. Herman Cohn was born in Essen,

Germany in 1921. He was raised by his army veteran father and

his stepmother. This family owned a business selling furniture

and linen. As Anti-Semitism grew, Herman got informed at work

that he had better leave because several Jews are being picked up

and taken to concentration camps. Herman turned around and

then left immediately. Later that day, he arrives at his fathers home realizing that his father was

missing. Herman later finds out that his father was taken that same morning he was informed to

leave work. After his father was taken, Herman decides to attempt to get a visa to travel to the

U.S. Herman shows up at the social security office to get an item stamped in order to obtain a

visa. He notices a classmate of his working at this office and they talk for a while and Herman

states, Did they really burn theSynagogue down? Is it true? Hermans classmate confirms that

it is true. A few moments later, Herman is asked to be seen by a German boss. The boss and a

man with boots worn by S.S. troops are standing in this room and ask, What rumors are you

telling your friend that works here and Herman explains that there is no rumor because it did

Herman Cohn; Holocaust Survivor

Source: http://bit.ly/TwlMqy


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happen and every Jew knows it. The man in the boots orders Herman to walk to the Gestapos

headquarters and he said he would be following Herman five meters behind. Herman was

warned that if he walks even six meters away or runs away from the Gestapo man in boots that

he will be shot. Once Herman arrives at the headquarters, he sees a dozen Gestapo men all in

uniform. Herman is placed in a corner for around an hour and kicked. Each Gestapo troop

kicked me and shouted, Where is your father hiding his money? Herman carefully avoided

every situation of being killed and instead just took a beating.

On May of 1935, Ursula Levy is born. She comes from Osnabruck, Germany. Levy was

three years old when her father and uncle were taken and sent to concentration camps. Levy

stated, They were exposed to extremely cool temperatures

causing injuries to the legs of both my father and my uncle.

They both died in 1939 due to a developed gangrene infection.

After her fathers death, her mother decides to write to her

sisters husband, which lives in the U.S., asking for any chance

of help getting her children out of Germany. Her mothers

sisters husband, Uncle Joseph, responds to the letter telling

Ursulas mother that there is a place in Holland to contact.

Ursulas mother then sends Ursula and her brother to Holland where there are hundreds of

Catholic children. Jewish children are sent here to secretly hide from the German army that

wants to get rid of all Jews. The Nazis then invaded Holland and sent all of the Jewish children

to concentration camps. A man named Mr. Vanmaklenburg spoke with the guards about Ursula

and her brother stating that they are not Jewish and they then were sent to another camp called

Westerberg. At Westerberg, Orthodox Jewish men ran an orphanage and the children in this

Ursula Levy, Holocaust Survivor

Source: http://bit.ly/T41WV2


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orphanage went to school every day. They not only got school, but they were well fed and they

got to play out in the woods of an evening. Not long after, Ursula and her brother were forced

onto a train with several other Jews. The train had frequent stops for the Jews to walk around and

move their legs. The Nazis unloaded the deceased from the train on these stops. Ursula

mentioned, No bread was ever taken from me, no one ever molested me, and no one ever beat

me. Many Jews were starving terribly and didnt take bread from this little girl. After about

two weeks, Ursula and her brother are let off the train and sent to a nearby town for food and

rest. Ursula is later informed that her mother has passed and it took her a little bit of time and

therapy to deal with these devastating events. Ursula and her brother were extremely lucky to

have survived this time period being Jewish.


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Works Cited

"The Nazi Rise to Power." ThinkQuest.org. Oracle, Web. 27 Oct. 2012.

"Nazi Racism." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum, Web. 28 Oct. 2012.

"The Nuremberg Laws." The History Place - Triumph of Hitler. The History Place, Web. 04

Nov. 2012.

"Kristallnacht." The American Experience - America and the Holocaust. PBS, Web. 06 Nov.

2012.

Bard, Mitchell. "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising." Jewish Virtual Library. Jewish Virtual Library, Web.

07 Nov. 2012.

"Wannsee Conference and the "Final Solution"" United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Web. 07 Nov. 2012.

"Nazi Camps." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum, Web. 10 Nov. 2012.

"Auschwitz." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum, Web. 10 Nov. 2012.

"Extermination Camps." The Danish Center - Holocaust Education. The Danish Center, Web. 12

Nov. 2012.

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