The Holocaust began as Nazis sought to establish a racial order, deeming Aryans the master race while targeting Jews and other groups as inferior. The systematic persecution escalated with the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws and violent events like Kristallnacht, leading to the establishment of ghettos and eventually extermination camps for mass killings under the 'final solution.' Approximately six million European Jews were murdered, with survivors escaping through the assistance of non-Jewish individuals.

1. The Holocaust
Chapter 16
Section 3

2. How The Holocaust Began?
• Nazis proposed a new racial order.
• Claimed that Germanic people or “Aryans” were
the master race.
• Nazis believed that non-Aryans were inferior,
which led to the Holocaust.

3. The Aryan Race
• In order to protect the racial purity, Hitler had to
eliminate other races, nationalities and other
“subhuman” groups.
• Inferior groups – Gypsies, Poles, Russians,
homosexuals, insane, disabled, incurably ill and
of course, the Jews.

4. The Holocaust Begins
• Germans had targeted Jews as the cause for their
failures, and blamed them for their country’s defeat
in World War I and its economic problems after the
war.
• in 1935 the Germans passed the Nuremberg Laws,
which disadvantaged Jews of their rights to German
citizenship and forbade marriages between Jews and
non-Jews.
• Also, Laws limited the kinds of work that Jews
could do.

5. Night of the Broken Glass
• In Paris, a 17 years old Jewish boy, shot a German
diplomat after hearing that his father had been
dismissed from Germany to Poland.
• When Nazi leaders heard the news, Germans started
a violent attack on the Jewish community.
• November 9 – Nazi storm troopers kill around 100
Jews, 30,000 Jews sent to concentration camps, by
the hundreds smashed Jewish shop windows, main
streets were covered in shattered glass.
– Kristallnacht – “Night of Broken Glass”

6. *Emigration Solution
• At first Hitler favored the idea of emigration
as a way to rid Germany of the Jews.
• After admitting tens of thousand of Jewish
refugees, countries closed their doors.
– France, Great Britain, and the United States
• Germany took this as meaning that the other
countries agreed that Jews were lesser
beings.

7. Isolating the Jews
• Hitler ordered that Jews, to be
moved to designated cities.
• Nazis herded Jews into
overcrowded ghettos. Sealed
them off with barbed wire
and stone walls.
• Hitler’s hope Jews would
starve and die from disease.

8. Jewish Resistance
• Some formed resistance organizations within the
ghettos.
• Struggled to keep their traditions.
• Teachers taught lessons in secret schools.
• Scholars kept records so that people would one day
find out the truth.

9. The “Final Solution”
• Hitler grew impatient waiting for Jews to die.
• He developed a plan for direct action called
the “Final Solution”.
• The Final Solution was a program of
genocide (the systematic killing of an entire
people).

10. The Killings Begin
• Hitler’s security force the Schutzstaffel SS moves
from town to town across Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union to eliminate Jews.
• Once Jews were rounded up, they placed them in pits
and shot them, creating mass graves.
• Some Jews were taken to concentration camps
(slave-labor prisons) at Germany and Poland
• Hitler once again hoped that the horrible conditions
would speed up the total elimination of Jews.

11. Conditions
• Prisoners worked seven days a
week as slaves.
• Severely beaten or killed if
they did not work fast enough.
• Meals – thin soup, scrap bread
and potato peelings.
• Most prisoners lost 50 pounds
in first few months.

12. The Final Stage
• in 1942 the Final Solution reached
its last stage.
• Nazis now had extermination
camps with gas chambers.
– Kill up to 6,000 people in one
day.
• At Auschwitz, prisoners were
divided to weak or strong. Mainly
women, children, elderly and the
sick.
• If they were weak, they were
executed that day.

13. The Executions
• The weak were led to a
chamber with fake
showerheads.
• Cyanide gas poured from the
shower heads and killed the
people within a matter of
minutes.
• Soon, Nazis installed
crematoriums.

14. The Survivors
• Some six million
European Jews died in the
death camps and
massacres.
• Less than four million
survived.
• Some escaped with the
help of non-Jewish
people.