Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust “Never Again”

Vocabulary

• Jews

• Anti-Semitism

• Nazi

• Scapegoat

• Ghetto

• Deportation

• Forced Labour Camps

• Concentration camps

• Death camps

• Extermination

• Genocide

What is Genocide?

Genocide

• Term coined in 1944 as direct result of the Holocaust

• The United Nations definition (1948):

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

• Introduction to the Holocaust: Animated Map

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=10005143&MediaId=3372

• WWII and the Holocaust: Animated Map

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=10005143&MediaId=7827

Two Jewish girls: Two young cousins shortly before they were smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto. A Lithuanian family hid the children and both girls survived the war. Kovno, Lithuania, August 1943

Portrait of members of a Hungarian Jewish family. They were deported to and killed in Auschwitz soon after this photo was taken. Kapuvar, Hungary, June 8, 1944.

By the Numbers

Total deaths in Holocaust: 6 million Jews 5 million “others” • Jewish population before war: 9.5 million • Jewish population after war: 3.5 million • Total Jewish deaths estimated at 5.7 million

By the Numbers

• Total deaths in WWII: At least 60 million • 25.5 million Soviets • 7 million Germans • 7 million Poles • 388,000 Brits • 292,000 Americans • 42,000 Canadians

PART I: War and Anti-Semitism

• Anti-Semitism was not invented by Hitler!

-Only unique element: Concentration camps

• 4 major categories:

-Religious (basis for all others)

-Economic

-Political

-Racial

• Nazis regarded Jews as a “race”, not a religion

• “Justified” their actions by saying the Jews had a genetic flaw and needed to be eliminated

Jewish History

Two Wars:

1. 70 A.D.

2. 132-135 A.D.

1. Jewish war against Rome

2. Freedom fighter and Israeli hero Bar Kochba

-Over .5 million Jews fight Romans

-By 135 A.D., Romans kick Jews out of Jerusalem

=Jews in permanent exile

By 1,000 A.D. many Jews settle in Europe =

Economic

benefits for

Europe

• By 1,000 A.D. many Jews settle in Europe

-Economic benefits for Europe

-By 20thC, approximately 3 million Jews live in Poland

• Germany established as nation by 1871

Adolf Hitler • Active in WWI

Adolf Hitler

• 100,000 Jews fought in WWI for Germany; Hitler denies it

• Desperate to protect the “Volk” (Volksgemeinshaft): Blood and Soil

• Coins the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem / Question”

-Jews assimilating too well= “Jewish Problem”

• “CONSPIRACY”: Hitler’s favourite word

Rise of the Nazi Party: WWI

WWI:

-Austria declares war on Serbia

-Austria allied with Germany; Serbia with Russia

-1914: Germany declares war against France and Russia

-Hungary and Turkey join Germany; Brits join France / Russia and form the Allies

-1917: Russian Revolutions; Russia pulls out

-April 1917: U.S. enters war, dominates

Rise of the Nazi Party Aftermath of WWI

• Paris 1919: Germany receives 100% war guilt clause

-Reparations: 31 Billion

• Germany: Destroyed

-Empire collapses

-Weimar Republic (shaky democracy)

-1920s Germany: starvation, $ worthless

• Middle East: An Afterthought

• Allies promise both Arabs and Jews states

• So Hitler launches Nazism

-Undo humiliation of Versailles step by step

- “Stab in the Back”: Jews

Jews became the Nazi’s

Scapegoat

-Crush Bolshevism

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis

• 1921: Becomes leader of Nazi Party

The “Aryan” “Race”

Mein Kamph, published in 1925

Nazi Germany

• 1933: Nazis take power

Hitler “democratically” became Chancellor

• 1934: Hitler secretly tells officials to set up

for war

Hitler with President Hindenburg, 1933

BUT: Hitler is seen by public as a peacemaker

• Brits allowed Hitler to take back land until he invaded Poland

• 1936 Olympics held in Germany

• Hitler allied with England and Italy from

1933-39

• No western powers really cared about the Jews

1935 Nuremberg Laws • Jews stripped of citizenship • Intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles prohibited -Jews punished by death • 1930s (Pre-war) Nazi policy: -Encouraged exodus of Jews but nobody

wanted them = Elimination policies begin in 1939 • The Nuremberg Laws become basis of Apartheid in

South Africa

ALL FURTHER PERSECUTION / MURDER UNDER THESE LAWS WAS NOW LEGAL

• 1937-38: Hitler shed peacemaker image

• March 1938: Unite Germany with Austria, then Czechoslovakia

- “Rescue” German minority

• Sept. 29, 1938: Munich Agreement: A story of Appeasement

-British PM Chamberlain: avoid war at all costs = hands Czechoslovakia over

-Germany sees Hitler as hero: “frees” Germans in Czechoslovakia but avoids war

Campaign of Terror November 9-10, 1938: the Night of Broken Glass

(Kristallnacht)

• All of Germany’s 275 synagogues destroyed

• Thousands of Jews arrested, women beaten, 25,000 men sent to concentration camps

• 91 Jews murdered

• Result: Large scale emigration (100,000 Jews)…250,000 remain in Germany

Why didn’t more Jews leave?

Kristallnacht Local residents watch the burning of the ceremonial hall at the Jewish cemetery in Graz during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). Graz, Austria, November 9-10, 1938.

KENNKARTE

This is a photograph of a German internal identity card. German Jews were forced to carry these cards as of January 1, 1939. This card was issued to Ellen Wertheimer in June 1939 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She was deported from Germany to a ghetto called Terezin, in Czechoslovakia, on November 15, 1942. She kept the card with her throughout the war and preserved it.

Identification card issued to Moritz Israel Hamburger Date:

Saturday, February 04, 1939

Locale:

Pforzheim, [Baden] Germany

Date: Saturday, February 04, 1939

Identification card issued to Moritz Israel Hamburger Germany, 1939

He perished the following year in the Gurs concentration camp.

Hitler-Stalin Pact

August 23, 1939

• 10 year non-aggression pact

• Secret agreement to divide Poland

-Stalin to get control of Baltic States

• 1941: Hitler attacks Russia

= Two front war

• February 2, 1942: Battle of Stalingrad

-Secure Allied victory

The Inaction of the West

• 1939-41: Concern is the war

-Knew about machine gunning, etc.

• 1942: West knew about death camps

• Pope: feared Hitler would target Catholics

The West did nothing

D-Day: June 6, 1944 • Americans, British, Commonwealth, and free French

troops from Normandy; others from the Mediterranean

• Germany bombed relentlessly

• Hitler goes insane; retreats to bunker

• April 30, 1945: Hitler shoots himself to avoid falling into Russian hands

Hitler’s Hierarchy

1. Heinrich Himmler

2. Reinhard Heydrich

3. Hermann Goering

4. Joseph Goebbels

5. Adolf Eichmann

Heinrich Himmler

• Head of Gestapo and S.S.

• Minister of the Interior from

1943 to 1945

• The “architect” of the

Holocaust: supervised

day-to-day killings

Reinhard Heydrich

• Commander of the Einstatzgruppen

• Was appointed Reich Protector of

Bohemia-Moravia

-power to crush resistance in

Czechoslovakia and send Jews

to camps

Hermann Goering

• President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, the second man in the Third Reich

• Later blamed by Hitler for Germany’s military defeats

Joseph GOEBBELS

•Propaganda minister

•Kristallnacht organizer

Adolf EICHMANN

• S.S. Lieutenant-Colonel

• Chief of Jewish office of Gestapo

• Implemented Final Solution

The Path to Nazi Genocide

(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

http://www.ushmm.org/learn/introduction-to-the-holocaust/path-to-nazi-genocide

PART II: The Shoah

Human remains found in the Dachau concentration camp crematorium after liberation. Germany, April 1945

Autonomy of a Genocide

1939: Euthanasia Program:

250,000 Germans killed

-6 places for killing (Germany / Austria)

-Victims transported in buses with blacked out windows

-gassed and burned

Canadian Link: sterilization in Alta. and B.C.

-Criminals, low IQs, handicapped, Aboriginal youth

Ghettos

• Established to isolate “disease-spreading” Jews

• Initially for deportation to Madagascar

• NOT a conscious step to Final Solution

• Run by Jewish councils

• Starvation, disease = .5 million deaths

Lodz Ghetto • The Germans isolated the ghetto from the rest of

Lodz with barbed-wire fencing.

• Special police units guarded the ghetto perimeter.

• Internal order in the ghetto was the responsibility of Jewish ghetto police.

• The ghetto area was divided into three parts.

• Streetcars for the non-Jewish population of Lodz went through the ghetto but were not allowed to stop within it.

Lodz Ghetto

May 1, 1940: Lodz ghetto sealed

-160,000 people inside less than 10 square blocks

Lodz Ghetto

• Historical footage from Lodz

DEPORTATIONS TO THE LODZ GHETTO

In 1941 and 1942, almost 40,000 Jews were

deported to the Lodz ghetto:

• 20,000 from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Luxembourg,

• 20,000 from the smaller towns.

• About 5,000 Roma (Gypsies) from Austria

• In the spring of 1944, the Nazis destroyed the Lodz ghetto.

• By then, Lodz was the last remaining ghetto in Poland, with a population of approximately 75,000 Jews in May 1944.

• In June and July 1944 the Nazis deported 3,000 Jews to Chelmno.

• Jews were told that they were being transferred to work camps in Germany.

• The Germans deported the surviving ghetto residents to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in August 1944.

• “Give me your children” Museum | Online Exhibitions | Voices from the Lodz Ghetto

• Holocaust Survivor Milton Belfer Individual Record

http://tc.usc.edu/vhiechoes/video.aspx?testimonyid=22514

The Final Solution

• Hitler coins the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem / Question”

-Jews assimilating too well=

“Jewish Problem”

• Summer 1941: Plan for mass murder of Jews -Hitler gives verbal order -September: Zyclone B tested at Auschwitz (gas

chambers under construction) -October: mass deportation of German Jews to

Poland -Thousands shot on arrival

1941: Einsatzgruppen -December 8: mobile killing units begin operating

in Poland -3,000 men in 4 killing squads follow army into

Russia -1.5 million Jews are shot face-to-face

• January 20, 1942: Wannsee Conference

-Plan Final Solution (Endloesung)

• An Invitation to Mass Murder:

July 13, 1942: 1,500 Jews shot in one day

• May 12, 1943: After one month resistance, Warsaw ghetto liquidated • All ghettos in Poland liquidated; Jews sent to death camps

On display at the United Nations, New York

1944:

Hungarian Jews the last group to be taken to Auschwitz

• "Final Solution“

Interviews describing gas chambers at Auschwitz

• November 28, 1944: Last gassings at Auschwitz

-Himmler orders the chambers be destroyed

January 1945: Death Marches

-From the East to Germany

-Prisoners forced-marched; shot if out of line

-Most fell apart; S.S. fled

-Why do it?

• January 28, 1945: Soviets liberate Auschwitz

Yalta Conference, Feb. 1945

• April 1945: England and America liberates German camps

• May 8, 1945: Germany surrenders

Aftermath of Hitler’s War

German soldiers in the Soviet Union during a December 1943 Soviet offensive on the eastern front. German troops invaded Soviet territory in June 1941 but faced counteroffensives following the battle of Stalingrad. December 16, 1943.

Cold War

• Begins immediately after WWII

-Threat of Communism

-Stalin now dominates Eastern and Balkan Europe

• East / West Berlin

Nuremberg Trials 1945-1946

• Allies had two jobs: 1. Punish Nazi criminals 2. Undo Nazi ideology / pave way for democracy

Nuremberg Trials 1945-1946

• Trial of 22 Nazi leaders -Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels committed

suicide -Hermann Goering war highest-ranking Nazi to

face justice: sentenced to death but escaped by committing suicide

Nuremberg Trials 1945-1946

• Many Nazis swore loyalty to Stalin = escape punishment

• Who exactly was a Nazi? Proof?

State of Israel

• Direct result of Holocaust

• Re-established in 1948

-U.N. and Soviet Union vote to give land to Jews

= Jewish / Arab war

-Arab denial of Holocaust

Survivors

Never Again?

Sources Information:

Dr. Catherine Chatterley, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust course notes; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Pictures:

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jewish Virtual Library, German Propaganda Archive.