1. The Holocaust began in 1936 in Germany and lasted until 1945. Adolf Hitler rose to power as the leader of Germany's Nazi party in 1933 and instituted racist laws targeting Jews. 2. The Nazi regime created ghettos and concentration camps, where they imprisoned and starved Jewish people. They also conducted medical experiments on prisoners. 3. Over six million Jewish people were murdered in the Holocaust through mass executions, starvation, and gas chambers at concentration camps like Auschwitz. Allied forces liberated camps in 1945 and discovered the horrific atrocities.

1. The Holocaust 1936-1945 *This Presentation Contains Many Graphic Images By Deborah Alcorn 2006-2007

2. "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana

3. The Attitude of the Jews Before the War “ From biblical times to the present day, Jews have wandered the uncertain terrain between power and powerlessness, never quite achieving the power necessary to guarantee long-term security, but equally avoiding, with a number of disastrous exceptions, the abyss of absolute impotence. They developed the consummate skill of living with uncertainty and insecurity.” The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, by Michael Berenbaum

4. Jewish Refugees in the 1800s

6. Adolf Hitler

8. How Did Hitler Attain Such Power? Hitler’s National Socialist Party was a minority party with 107 seats in the Weimar Republic in 1930. As economic conditions worsened, Hitler attracted a wider following. He was a spellbinding orator and skilled organizer. Thousands of jobless young men put on the brown-shirted uniform of the Nazi storm troopers. Their job was to mount frightening demonstrations and terrorize political opponents.

9. Hitler’s Rise to Power In January 1933 Hitler was named chancellor of Germany. Hitler suspended civil liberties after a government building was set on fire. The Reichstag reconvened and passed an Enabling Act that gave dictatorial powers to Hitler. For the next twelve years, Germany was ruled by the Führer (Hitler.)

10. Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and Hesse

11. Nazi Ideology Racism was the central theme of Nazi ideology. It motivated German policy in occupied countries and resulted in the Holocaust. Hitler was obsessed with racial purity, his beliefs in German supremacy, and his idea of the master Aryan race. He outlined his plan for world domination in his book Mein Kampf ( My Struggle ), published in 1925.

12. Persecution of the Jews Persecution officially began on April 1, 1933. Nazis boycotted Jewish businesses, put up propaganda posters and painted Stars of David on Jewish store fronts. A series of laws was put into effect, singling out Jews. These laws defined, isolated, excluded, segregated, and impoverished German Jews.

13. The Nuremberg Race Laws, 1935 Jews were forbidden to hold government jobs. They were stripped of their citizenship. Jews were forbidden to marry Aryans. They had to wear the Star of David at all times. They had to give up valuables and property.

14. The Nazis Burned Books by “un-German” Authors

15. “ Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.” Written one hundred years before the Holocaust by German poet Heinrich Heine

16. Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass Berlin, Germany April 16, 1941

17. Broken Windows in a Jewish Business

18. A Destroyed Synagogue

20. Destroyed Synagogue

21. The Ghettos

22. Guards in Front of the Warsaw Ghetto

23. The Warsaw Ghetto

24. Ghetto Life This man is eating a meal of watery soup from a cooking pot. Jews were starving from lack of food. Many people were crammed into a small area and fenced in. The food ration for one day was only 300 calories.

25. Homeless Children in the Ghetto

27. Dying Child on the Street of a Ghetto

28. The Mass Killing Begins

29. Awaiting Execution

30. Waiting for Death

32. Restraining a Man Who Did Not Die Right Away

33. 25,000 Executed at One Time

34. Transport

35. Children Lined Up to Be Deported

36. Being Loaded into Boxcars

39. Arrival at the Camp

41. The Concentration Camps and Death Camps

44. Babies It did not matter that they were babies. They were future adult Jews. Babies were frequently killed by bashing their heads against a wall, by tossing them in the air for target practice, or, if a mother would not give her child up, they would shoot the baby and mother with one bullet.

47. Barracks

48. Prisoners Marching Inside the Camp

49. Prisoner Identification Prisoners had to wear these triangles on their uniform. Yellow meant Jewish. Pink meant homosexual. The uniform shows where the patches were placed.

50. Loading an Ill Prisoner into a Truck

51. The Women Are Pulling a Rail Car Loaded with Rocks

53. Burning Bodies

54. Bodies stacked like firewood

55. Dead Children

56. Work Makes You Free

57. The Gas Chambers

58. Shower Head in the Gas Chamber There were shower heads in the gas chamber so it looked like a real shower. When the hermetically sealed door slammed shut, the prisoners were trapped. There are still fingernails embedded in the walls of the chambers where the dying prisoners tried to climb to the last fresh air.

59. This Gas Chamber Was Designed to Look Like a Shower Room in a Gymnasium. .

60. Auschwitz Prisoner Uniforms A Gas Chamber at Auschwitz

61. Auschwitz Smokestack of the Crematoria The Crematoria or Oven Used to Burn Prisoners’ Bodies

62. Crematoria

64. The Angel of Death Dr. Josef Mengele, Camp Physician of Auschwitz He decided who lived and who died. He personally conducted terrible medical experiments at Auschwitz. He was especially interested in twins.

65. Medical Experiments The Nazis experimented to see what range of temperatures the human body could withstand. They also tested flight suits, parachutes, and tested to see what changes in air pressure a human being could tolerate.

66. Gypsy Children Used in Medical Experiments

67. Liberation

69. On April 12, 1945, Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton visited Ohrdruf concentration camp. Eisenhower wrote to Chief of Staff General George Marshall, to report, “….the things I saw beggar description.” The evidence of starvation and bestiality was “so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.” Eisenhower visited “every nook and cranny.” It was his duty, he said, “to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief… ‘that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’” Eisenhower issued an order for every American unit in the area to visit the camp.

71. Allies Discover Prisoners’ Bodies in a Boxcar

72. The locals are forced to view dead prisoners.

73. Eisenhower also issued a call to the press back home. Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., the dean of American journalists, viewed the camps. He initially had a “suspicious frame of mind,” and expected that many of the terrible reports were exaggerations and largely propaganda. However, he said the initial reports were understatements. Within days, congressional delegations visited the camps, along with journalists and photographers.

74. Polish Children

76. Edward R. Murrow of CBS gave a stunning, matter-of-fact description of the piles of emaciated bodies at Buchenwald concentration camp during his radio broadcast on April 15, 1945. He said, “I pray to you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it; for most of it I have no words.” He added, “If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry.”

77. Mass Grave at Bergen-Belsen

78. Walking Among Dead Bodies

79. Arrow points to Elie Wiesel

80. “ First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade-unionists and I did not speak out-- because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.” Pastor Martin Niemoller

81. More than six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

82. Timeline of the Holocaust http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/timeline.html

83. Resources http://www.flholocaustmuseum.org/ http://holocaust.hklaw.com/trg/Login.asp?Source=/trg/unit1/lesson5/Unit1Less5.asp http://www.yadvashem.org.il/ http://images.google.com http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/ http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=fwLYKnN8LzH&b=242023 The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Michael Berenbaum