The Holocaust

Presenter: William HillSubject: Persecution of the Jewish People During WWIIClass: 6th Period

The Holocaust

The Holocaust

The Holocaust is the name applied to describe the attempted genocide of Europe's Jewish population during World War II.

It was part of a program of ridding Europe of "undesirables" by the National Socialist regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.

Events Leading to Horrific Tragedy

Growth of Nazi Party Nazi is a short term

for the National Socialist German Workers Party, a right-wing political party formed in 1919.

It consisted of primarily unemployed German veterans of World War I.

The Nazi Party Ideology The Nazi party beliefs based

on nationalism and racism. They promoted Germany as

superior to all other nations. They promised to restore it

to greatness, while championing a scientific theory of racism.

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The Nazi Party Ideology• They even created a

league table of 'races' with the Aryans at the top and with Jews, Gypsies and black people at the bottom.

• These 'inferior' people were seen as a threat to the purity and strength of the German nation.

Nazi Movement lead by Adolf Hitler

In 1933, Hitler assumed power in Germany.

He ended German democracy and severely restricted basic rights, such as freedom of speech, press, and assembly.

Eventually decided that the Jewish people should be exterminated.

The Nuremberg Laws

The Nuremberg Laws were the beginning of Hitler's master plan for the perfect race.

They took away Jewish natural rights and citizenship.

The Nuremberg Laws formalized the unofficial and particular measures taken against Jews leading up to 1935.

The Wannsee Conference The Wannsee Conference was a

meeting of senior Nazi German officials held in Wannsee on January 20, 1942.

German successes of the opening weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union considered how to handle the four million Jews of the western Soviet Union coming under German control.

The conference proposed the "Final solution to the Jewish question" - the killing of all the 11 million Jews of Europe, a process now known as the Holocaust. Reinhard Heydrich the main

police authority in Hitler's Reich headed up what was called “the Jewish problem.”

The Nazi Camp System• In the early years of the

Third Reich, the Nazis imprisoned primarily Communists and Socialists.

• In about 1935, the regime also began to imprison those whom it designated as racially or biologically inferior, especially Jews.

The Camps Camps were an

essential part of the Nazis' systematic oppression and mass murder of Jews, political adversaries, and others considered socially and racially undesirable.

The Camps There were

concentration camps, forced labor camps, extermination or death camps, transit camps, and prisoner-of-war camps.

The living conditions of all camps were brutal.

The Camps Of the approximately 6

million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, more than half were systematically exterminated in the highly rationalized gas chamber/crematorium system of the Nazi Death Camps between 1942 and 1945.

The names of Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzek and Majdanek are indelibly stamped on history.

The Camps The guards carried out

beatings and acts of torture on a daily basis.

Some women worked in brothels for the guards and privileged prisoners. It has been argued that some were forced to do so.

Russian prisoners of war were used for experiments, such as being immersed in ice water or being put into pressure chambers.

Extent of the Holocaust

• The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime is still subject to further research. However, the following estimates are considered to be highly reliable.– 5.6–6.1 million Jews – 3.5–6 million Slavic civilians – 2.5–4 million POWs – 1–1.5 million political dissidents – 200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti – 200,000–300,000 handicapped – 10,000–250,000 homosexuals – 2,000 Jehovah's Witnesses

Ramifications

The Holocaust has had a number of political and social ramifications which reach to the present.

The need to find a homeland for many Jewish refugees led to a great many Jews emigrating to Palestine, most of which was soon to become the modern State of Israel.

This immigration had a direct effect on the Arabs of the region.

Historical Interpretations

• As with any historical event, scholars continue to argue over what, exactly, happened, and why. Among the major questions historians have sought to answer are:– how many people were killed in the Holocaust? – who was directly involved in the killing? – who authorized the killing? – who knew about the killing? – why did people directly participate in, authorize, or

tacitly accept the killing?

Camp Liberator Shares Memories at 60th Reunion

In 1944, Martin Weiss was 15 years old when he was shipped from his native Hungary and eventually imprisoned at Gunskirchen, a concentration camp in Austria.

Edgar Edelsack was 21 when he arrived at the Mauthausen camp as part of the 11th Armored Division in Gen. Patton's 3rd Army.

Camp liberator Edgar Edelsack, left, in a 1945 photo and Holocaust survivor Martin Weiss, in an undated photo

Edelsack, left, and Weiss at 60th Reunion in Washington, D.C.