The Holocaust systematically targeted and killed approximately 6 million Jewish people across Europe between 1941-1945. The Nazis rose to power in Germany during the 1930s and enacted increasingly severe laws discriminating against and isolating Jewish communities. They eventually implemented the "Final Solution" to exterminate all Jews, establishing death camps across German-occupied Poland and employing gas chambers and industrial methods to murder victims. Millions of other groups such as Roma, Slavs, homosexuals and disabled people were also persecuted and killed in the genocide.

1. The Holocaust

2. Learning Goal:
• NJCCCS: 6.1.12.A.11.e
• Assess the responses of the United States
and other nations to the violation of
human rights that occurred during the
Holocaust and other genocides.

3. The Holocaust
The Beginning Stages

4. Vocabulary
• Anti-Semitism - Prejudices toward Jews
or discrimination against them.
• Genocide - Deliberate, systematic
destruction of a racial, cultural, or political
group.
• Scapegoat - Person or group of persons
unfairly blamed for wrongs done by others.

5. Pre-War
• Approximately 11
million Jews in Europe
• Poland and the Soviet
Union had the largest
Jewish populations
• Jews very assimilated:
farmers, factory
workers, business Jewish community of Sighet,
people, doctors, Romania in front of a wooden
synagogue.
teachers, and
craftsmen

6. Germany blames Jews for Post
WW1 problems
• Post WWI Blues
– Many Germans upset over the loss (Hurt Pride)
– Upset about Reparations
– German Army is limited in size
– Germany falls to extreme depression.
• Extremists blamed Jews for Germany’s defeat in
WWI
– Blamed the German Foreign Minister (a Jew) for his
role in reaching a settlement with the Allies.

7. Anti-Semitism
• For 2,000 yrs Jews have suffered discrimination
and used as scapegoats.
– people blamed Jews for the “Black Death” during
Middle Ages
• Hitler idolized Austrian mayor (Karl Lueger) who
used anti-Semitism in his political campaign.
• Political leaders who used anti-Semitism as a tool
- portray Jews as a race instead of a religion.

8. Totalitarian State
• Totalitarianism is the total control of a country in
the government’s hands:
– It subjugates the individual’s rights.
– It demonstrates a policy of aggression.
– In a totalitarian state, paranoia and fear dominate.
– The government maintains total control over the
culture.
– The government is capable of indiscriminate killing.

9. Why do you think Germany is
a prime country for doing
something like the Holocaust?
Think of what you know about
Germany and characteristics of a
Totalitarian State

10. Persecution
• April 1933
– eliminated from civil service
– social security eliminated
– quotas in schools
• September 15, 1935 - Nazis passed Nuremberg
Laws:
– Stripped Jews of their German citizenship.
– Prohibited from marrying or having sexual relations with
persons of “German or related blood.”
– were required to carry ID cards

11. Persecution
• The “Jewish Question”
evolved in three steps:
1. Expulsion: Get
them out of Europe
2. Containment:
Confine in one place —
Ghettos
3. “Final Solution”:
annihilation
• Other Groups Targeted:
– Gypsies (Sinti and Roma)
– Homosexuals Helene Gotthold, a Jehovah's
– Jehovah’s Witness Witness, was beheaded for her
– Handicapped Germans religious beliefs on December 8,
– Poles 1944, in Berlin. She is pictured with
– Political Dissidents her children in 1936.

12. Kristallnacht
• “Night of the Broken
Glass” November 9-
10,1938
• Anti-Jewish rampage in
Germany: Burnings,
arrests and beatings
• Nazis attacked
synagogues, homes and
businesses

13. Shattered Jewish Storefronts in Berlin. This photo was taken after the
Shattered Jewish Storefronts in Berlin. This photo was taken after the
attacks of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938.
attacks of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938.

15. Anti-Semitism Propaganda
• Nazi teachers began to apply the “principles” of
racial science by measuring skull size and nose
length and recording students’ eye color and
hair to determine whether students belonged to
the “Aryan race.”
• The Nazis used propaganda to promote their
anti-Semitic ideas.
– One such book was the children’s book, The
Poisonous Mushroom.

17. The Holocaust:
The Final Solution
Nazis would attempt to exterminate the
entire Jewish population of Europe, an
estimated 11 million persons.

18. Prelude to the Final Solution
• In 1939, Germany
invaded Poland
which had a much
larger population of
3 million Jews.
• In 1941, Germany
invaded Russia
which had a
population of 5
million Jews.

19. Final Solution
• Himmler established specially trained SS units
called “Einsatzgruppen” to shoot Jews.
• Attempted to kill Jews by having them dig their
own graves and then stand in front of grave and
be shot.
• Inefficient
– Too Long, Needed Bullets for war
• Wannsee Conference to determine a more
effective way

20. Einsatzgruppen

21. Wannsee Conference
• On January, 20, 1942, headed by
Himmler, head Nazis met in Berlin
to coordinate the “FINAL
SOLUTION”
• Used “secret” language in
discussing plan
• "...eliminated by natural causes,"
refers to death by a combination of
hard labor and starvation.
• "treated accordingly“, "special
treatment" and "special actions"
refers to execution by SS firing
squads or death by gassing

22. Final Solution
• Jews to be rounded up, go through
process of selection
• Healthy Jews  Labor camps
– Death through over work and starvation
• Too Young, Too Old, Mothers of young, or
unhealthy  Death Camps

23. Where were the Death Camps built?
The work of the
Einsatzgruppen
Why do you think that they located them here?

24. Children Dying of Starvation in
the Warsaw Ghetto

25. jews arrested
warsaw_HU007442.jpg

26. Sleeping in the Ghetto

27. Jewish Corpses

28. Holocaust Denial

29. Children in the Holocaust

30. Victims Clothes & Shoes

31. SS Tactics: Dehumanisation
• The SS guards who murdered the Jews were
brainwashed with Anti-Semitic propaganda.
• The Jews were transported in cattle cars in terrible
conditions.
• Naked, dirty and half starved people look like
animals, which helped to reinforce the Nazi
propaganda.
• The SS used to train their new guards by
encouraging them to set fire to a pit full of live
victims – usually children.

32. Entrance to Auschwitz
Notice how it has been built to resemble a railway station

33. Auschwitz Orchestra

34. Auschwitz from the air
Notice how the Death
camp is set out like a
factory complex
The Nazis used
industrial methods to
murder the Jews and
process their dead
bodies

35. The Gas Chambers
• The Nazis would force
large groups of
prisoners into small
cement rooms and drop
canisters of Zyklon B, or
prussic acid, in its
crystal form through
small holes in the roof.
• These gas chambers
were sometimes
disguised as showers or
bathing houses.
The SS would try and pack up to 2000 people into this gas chamber

36. The outside of the Gas
Chamber
Notice the Ovens easily located near the Gas Chambers

37. Processing the bodies
• Specially selected Jews
known as the
sonderkommando
were used to to remove
the gold fillings and hair
of people who had been
gassed.
• The Sonderkommando
Jews were also forced
to feed the dead bodies
into the crematorium.

38. auschwitz
bodies_HU030094.jpg

39. Who did this?
Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg
• Ordinary Germans obeying orders
• July 1942-Nov. 1943: killed more than 38,000 Jews
• deported 45,000 others.

40. Who knew?
• Extermination involved the knowledge and
cooperation of many not directly involved
in killing
• Most who suspected the worst were
terrified and powerless
• Many Europeans believed “the Jews” were
a problem that needed “solving”
• Nazis tried to conceal the death camps
• What of other governments?
• Vichy France required Jews to wear special
identification
• Italians participated less actively
• Hungarian government dragged its feet

41. Resistance?
• Little resistance seemed to be possible
• Rebellions at Auschwitz and Treblinka
• Warsaw ghetto uprising (1943)
• 80 percent of the residents had been deported
• Small Jewish underground movement
• 56,000 Jews were killed

42. Overall human costs
• 5.1-6.0 million Jews
– 800,000 in Ghettos
– 1,400,000 in open-air shootings
– 2,900,000 in camps
• 1.8 -1.9 million Poles
• 200,000-800,000 Roma & Sinti
• 200,000-300,000 people with disabilities
• 10,000-25,000 gay men
• 2,000 Jehovah's Witnesses

43. The Ovens at Dachau

44. Dead bodies waiting to be
processed

45. Shoes waiting to be processed
by the sonderkommando
Taken inside a huge glass case in the Auschwitz Museum. This represents
one day's collection at the peak of the gassings, about twenty five thousand
pairs.

46. Destruction Through Work
This photo was taken by the Nazis to show just how you
could quite literally work the fat of the Jews by feeding
them 200 calories a day

47. Destruction Through Work
Same group of Jews 6 weeks later

48. Was the Final Solution
successful?
• The Nazis aimed to kill 11 million Jews
• Today there are only 2000 Jews living in Poland.
• The Nazis managed to kill at least 6 million Jews.

49. The Holocaust
To What Extent did the World
Know?

50. Evil is when a few good men
decide to do nothing.

51. U.S. and World Response
• Evian Conference - summer of 1938 in Evian, France.
– 32 countries met to discuss what to do about the Jewish refugees who
were trying to leave Germany and Austria.
– Despite voicing feelings of sympathy, most countries made excuses for
not accepting more refugees.
• Some US congressmen proposed the Wagner-Rogers Bill
– let 20,000 endangered Jewish refugee children into the country
– bill was not supported in the Senate.
• Anti-Semitic attitudes played a role in the failure to help refugees.
• The SS St. Louis, carrying refugees with Cuban visas, were denied
admittance both in Cuba and in Florida. After being turned back to
Europe, most of the passengers perished in the Holocaust.

52. The Horror of the Holocaust. Although the outside world had some knowledge of the
Nazi death camps before the war’s end, the full revelation of Hitler’s atrocities as the
Allies overran Germany in the spring of 1945 stunned and sickened the invading troops.
At General Eisenhower’s orders, German civilians were compelled to view the evidence
of the Nazi regime’s genocidal crimes- though these witnesses at Buchenwald tried to
look the other way, as many had done during the war itself.