Extermination of the Jews

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The Nazi Holocaust

• Extermination of the Jews

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• Standard WHII.12b The student will demonstrate
  knowledge of the worldwide impact of World War II
  by examining the Holocaust and other examples of
  genocide in the twentieth century.
• Essential Understandings
• There had been a climate of hatred against Jews
  in Europe and Russia for centuries
• Various instances of genocide occurred throughout
  the twentieth century
• Essential Questions Why did the Holocaust occur?
  What are other examples of genocide in the
  twentieth century?
• Elements Leading to the Holocaust
• Totalitarianism combined with nationalism
• History of anti-Semitism
• Defeat in WWI and economic depression blamed on
  German Jews
• Hitlers belief in the master race (Aryans)
• Final Solution extermination camps, gas chambers

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Terms to Know

• Genocide
• The organized purposeful destruction of a
  racial, political, religious, or cultural group
• Anti-Semitism
• Prejudice against or hostility toward Jews, often
  rooted in hatred of their ethnic background,
  culture, and/or religion. In its extreme form, it
  defames Jews as an inferior group and denies
  their being part of the nations in which they
  reside.
• Holocaust
• Systematic, government-sponsored, persecution and
  murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the
  Nazi regime and its collaborators. Means
  sacrifice by fire.

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Mein Kampf (1925) My Struggle

• Considered the Bible of Nazism
• The importance of the book is that it calls for
  German domination of Europe
• Presents Hitlers major ideas
• Anti-Semitism
• Anti-Communism
• Superiority of the Aryan race
• German nationalism

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Hitlers Focus on Racial Superiority

• Hitler described a racial hierarchy with
• Aryans (the culture-producing race) at the top
• Jews, Africans, Gypsies, the mentally and
  physically disabled, etc. (the culture-destroying
  races) at the bottom
• Hitler's goal remove the inferior types from
  Germany, making more lebensraum (living space)
  for the superior Aryans
• Jews were the special object of his hatred

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The War Against the Jews

• When the Nazis began to wage war against the
  Jews, they used speeches and propaganda

From an anti-Semitic children's book. The sign
reads "Jews are not wanted here."
The headlines say "Jews are our misfortune" and
"How the Jew cheats." Germany, 1936.
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1935 Nuremberg Race Laws
Sterilization Euthanasia Sterilization The
Nazis made laws allowing for forced sterilization
of those with genetic defects (i.e., blindness,
epilepsy) Euthanasia The Nazis also advocated
for the removal (killing) of those who would not
improve the German race and had no use in society
those who Hitler called the "useless eaters"
(i.e., mentally ill, terminally ill, physically
handicapped, mentally handicapped)
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The Nazis had several methods of terror that they
used to enforce their power

• Gestapo Nazi secret police
• Mission eliminate all opposition to Hitler and
  the Nazis
• Tactics terror, torture, murder
• SS Hitlers personal body guards
• Headed by Heinrich Himmler
• Mission exterminate all Jews
• Tactics propaganda (the spreading of false
  information to purposely mislead people), terror,
  murder

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1940

• First ghetto established in Poland
• Ghetto walled off parts of the city in which
  the people could be more easily controlled
• German Jews were deported to Poland to live in
  ghettos

Children climbing the walls to smuggle food into
the Warsaw Ghetto
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Concentration Camps vs. Extermination Camps

• Selection The process of separating people who
  arrived at the camps
• The strong healthy were sent to work in the
  concentration camps
• The young, the old the ill were sent to their
  deaths in the gas chambers of the extermination
  camps

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1942 The Final Solution

• Jews would be systematically evacuated from all
  over occupied Europe to
• camps in the east, where the entire Jewish
  population would be exterminated
• Three Phases
• Phase 1 Shooting Jews were rounded up and told
  they were to be relocated they were taken to
  the woods and were shot one by one their bodies
  were buried in mass graves
• Phase 2 Gas Vans Again, Jews were rounded up
  and told they were to be relocated in vans The
  vans were equipped so that the vans exhaust was
  piped back into the van
• Phase 3 Gas Chambers Nazi leaders decided to
  drastically speed up the Final Solution by
  sending Jews to camps the most effective method
  for mass extermination became gassing in
  specially constructed gas chambers (disguised as
  showers), from which the bodies were removed to
  adjacent crematoriums
• This plan of genocide was carried out with
  efficiency and the victims, whose will to resist
  had been sapped by prolonged starvation and
  disease, were often unaware until the last moment
  that they were going to be gassed

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The final destination for those who could not
work, the gas chamber
Ovens in crematorium
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Children victims of Nazi medical experiments
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Mass grave site at Bergen-Belsen. The British
found many dead when they liberated the camp.
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Auschwitz
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GENOCIDE
Genocide The systematic purposeful
destruction of a racial, political, religious, or
cultural group
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Other Examples of Genocide

• 1915-1923 Armenians by leaders of the Ottoman
  Empire
• 1937-1938 Chinese soldiers and citizens by the
  Imperial Japanese Army in Nanking, China
• 1975-1979 Artists, technicians, former
  government officials, monks, minorities, and
  other educated individuals by Pol Pot and the
  Khmer Rouge in Cambodia
• 1994 Tutsi minority by the Hutu majority and the
  Interhamwe militia in Rwanda
• 2003-2011 Non-Arab Muslims by the Arab
  government-sponsored Janjaweed in Darfur, Sudan