The Atrocities of WWII: The Holocaust, Japanese Internment,

& the Atomic Bombs

The Holocaust

• Mass, planned extermination of 11 million people the disabled, homosexuals, Roma, Communists, union members

• 6 million were Jews• Driven by Hitler and Nazi’s

obsession with creating a racially-superior Third Reich

Auschwitz

Progression of Extermination• 1933 = Jews banned

from government jobs & universities

• 1935 = Nuremberg Laws removed German citizenship, forbade marriage with non-Jews, segregated from hospitals, theatres, athletic fields

Auschwitz

Kristallnacht, November 7, 1938

• Arson, looting, murders of Jews across Germany

• 119 synagogues destroyed, 7,500 shops, 35 Jews killed

• 20,000 – 30,000 Jews sent to Concentration Camps

• Rest forced to wear Yellow Star of David

• Turning point in world’s awareness of plight of Jews

Jewish Migration?• By 1939 = 300,000 Jews

fled Germany, 200,000 fled Austria

• US did not allow Jewish refugees in

• June 1939 = 900 Jewish refugees arrived on St. Louis ship in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida & sent back to Germany

• 700 of the 900 died in concentration camps

Japanese Internment• Issei: First generation

Japanese Immigrants (37,000 interned)

• Nisei: U.S.-born Japanese Americans (75,000)

• FDR’s Executive Order 9006 = February 1942, all Japanese on West Coast forcibly removed from homes

Internment Camps

• $2 billion in property & belongings lost

• Supreme Court upheld constitutionality of internment policy, Korematsu v. US (1942)

• 1982 = US government admitted internment “not based on military necessity”

• 1988 = $20,000 given to 62,000 survivors

The Atomic Bombs• 1939 = Einstein warned

US about German development of A-bomb

• Manhattan Project began in 1941 between only US and Britain

• 2 bombs completed in Los Alamos, NM

• July 16 1945 = Alamogordo, NM test bomb exploded

• US threatened to drop bomb if Japan did not surrender by August 3, 1945

• August 6, 1945 = Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” over Hiroshima

• August 8, 1945 = Bock’s Car dropped “Hiroshima” over Nagasaki

• September 6, 1945 = Japan surrendered

• Hiroshima = 60,000 died immediately, 75,000 later from radiation and burns

• Nagasaki = 30,000 died immediately