The Holocaust

Origins of Nazi Persecution

In 1933, the people of Germany faced great economic hardship; nearly 6 million people were unemployed. The Nazi Party, promising to fix the economy, rose to power.
With Chancellor Adolf Hitler as leader, the Nazis significantly reduced unemployment and restored a sense of national pride in the country.
Racism, particularly anti-Semitism (hostility or hatred towards Jews), was at the heart of Hitler’s philosophy.
He believed that Germans were the “master race,” entitled to rule the world. He also believed that Jews were poisoning the blood and culture of the German people and preventing the Germans from attaining their political and cultural potential.
Hitler labeled Europe’s 9.5 million Jewish people as “vermin that must be expunged” and an obstacle to German domination in Europe.
On April 1, 1933, Hitler called for a boycott of Jewish businesses. The boycott was meant to officially mark Jews as different and inferior, as well as to cause them economic distress and strip them of any political or social power.

Kristallnacht "The Night of the Broken Glass"

On the night of November 9, 1938, violent anti-Jewish demonstrations broke out across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Nazi officials depicted the riots as justified reactions to the assassination of a German official, who had been shot two days earlier by a 17-year-old Polish Jew distraught over the deportation of his family from Germany.

Over the next 48 hours, violent mobs of Nazi soldiers, Hitler youth, and civilians, inspired by the antisemitic ideas from Nazi officials, destroyed about 270 synagogues, burning or desecrating Jewish religious artifacts along the way. Acting on orders from the government, police officers and firefighters did nothing to prevent the destruction. All told, approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools were destroyed, and 91 Jews were murdered.

An additional 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Nazi officials immediately claimed that the Jews themselves were to blame for the riots, and a fine of one billion reichsmarks (about $400 million at 1938 rates) was imposed on the German Jewish community.

The Nazis came to call the event Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass”, referring to the thousands of shattered windows that littered the streets afterward. Kristallnacht was a turning point in history, marking the shift from people having antisemitic ideas to actual violence and aggressive anti-Jewish measures that would become the Holocaust.

Hitler's Plan" Ghettos

Before invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis drew up plans to annihilate the entire European Jewish population which consisted of millions of people and all others considered “undesirables”. These plans were known as “The Final Solution.”

By 1941, the Nazis forced all Jews over the age of six to wear the yellow Star of David on their outer clothing to identify them. The Germans aimed to control the Jewish population by forcing them to reside in marked-off sections of towns and cities the Nazis called "ghettos" or "Jewish residential quarters."

Many ghettos were set up in cities and towns where Jews were already concentrated. Jews as well as some Roma (Gypsies) were also brought to ghettos from surrounding regions.

The Germans usually marked off the oldest, most run-down sections of cities for the ghettos. Many of the ghettos were enclosed by barbed-wire fences or walls, with entrances guarded by local and German police and SS members. During curfew hours at night, the residents were forced to stay inside their apartments.

Ghettos isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities from the rest of the population. The Germans soon started building factories in the ghettos and they used Jewish residents as forced labor. Tens of thousands died from illness and starvation.

Hitler's Plan: Concentration Camp 1

Nazi leaders instilled both fear and loyalty into the army and the German people. They did not question their actions against the Jewish community.

Eventually, Nazis began to deport Jews from the ghettos to concentration camps or killing centers that were built throughout Germany.

After deportation trains arrived at the killing centers, guards ordered the deportees to get out and form a line. The victims then went through a selection process. Men were separated from women and children. The Nazis glanced at each person to decide if he or she was healthy and strong enough for forced labor. Babies and young children, pregnant women, the elderly, people with disabilities, and the sick had little chance of surviving this first selection.

Those who had been selected to die were forced into gas vans or gas chambers. To prevent panic, camp guards told the victims that they would take showers to rid themselves of lice. The guards instructed them to turn over all their valuables and to undress. Then they were driven naked into the "showers." A guard closed and locked the doors, and carbon monoxide was piped into the chamber. Usually, within minutes after entering the gas chambers, everyone inside was dead from lack of oxygen.

Under guard, prisoners were forced to haul the corpses to a nearby room, where they removed hair, gold teeth, and fillings. The bodies were burned in ovens in the crematoriums or buried in mass graves.

Hitler's Plan: Concentration Camp 2

The Nazi German regime created five killing centers specifically to murder Jewish people using poison gas. These killing centers were called Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.

Those regarded as fit for work by the SS were used as slave laborers. Prisoners worked many hours daily, building roads, digging tunnels, breaking rocks, and producing goods for the German military.

Conditions inside the camps were also deadly. The prisoners were worked to death. Many died from illness and starvation. Many more were executed or died during horrific medical experiments.

One camp, Auschwitz, went as far as branding the Jewish prisoners as a way to keep track of them. This registration consisted of a tattoo placed on the prisoner's left breast; later, the tattoo location was moved to the inner forearm.

Last Days of the War

In an attempt to prevent the Allies from liberating large numbers of prisoners, the Nazis instituted massive evacuations of the concentration camps. These became known as “death marches,” in which the prisoners were forced to walk many miles in harsh conditions. The Nazis did not provide food, water, or rest and shot hundreds of prisoners who could not keep up. They wanted all the prisoners to die during these marches for many reasons, including:

1. German authorities did not want prisoners to fall into enemy hands alive to tell their stories

2. Some SS leaders, believed that they could use Jewish prisoners as hostages to bargain for peace that would guarantee the survival of the Nazi regime.

The evacuations continued until the very end of the war, contributing significantly to the death toll.

The Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered six million Jewish people between 1933 and 1945 in the genocide now known as the Holocaust. They also murdered millions of non-Jewish people who were also classified as inferior.

Liberation

As Allied and Soviet troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Nazi Germany, they encountered concentration camps, mass graves, and numerous other sites of Nazi crimes.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, where they discovered about seven thousand prisoners, including young children, who the SS had not evacuated.

As the soldiers marched into the interior of Germany, they liberated more major concentration camps.

Though the liberation of Nazi camps was not a primary objective of the Allied military campaign, US, British, Canadian, and Soviet troops freed prisoners from their SS guards, provided them with food and badly needed medical support, and collected evidence for war crimes trials.

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