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Research Paper Holocaust Overview

Carlie Allison

Mr. Neuburger English Composition 102-118 9 May 2013

Allison 2 Most find it disturbing to think that just seventy years ago a systematic killing of twelve million people occurs. Most people have an understanding by now of what the Nazis do in World War II to the European Jewish population. However, few understand the Nazis do not just kill six million Jews, but they also kill six million people of minority ethnic groups opposing the their regime. In order to understand how an entire political party and dictatorship can be formed out of such evil, one must look at the desperation for power and the strong anti-Semitism forming in the Nazi party in Germany after World War I. Even harder to understand is how quickly this destruction happens and the reasons the Nazis have for despising an entire population of people so much they attempt extinguishing so many of them. In order to comprehend how the Nazis pulled off such an atrocity, one needs to understand the series of events and methodology used to systematically murder so many people. It all begins with the rise of the Nazi party. Nazi Rise to Power Germanys weak government, known as the Weimar Republic, had very little support from its people after their embarrassing loss of World War I. Germany found a leader on the rise by the name of Adolf Hitler. His party, the National Socialist German Workers Party appealed to the lower middle class of Germany that were being effected by unemployment because of Germanys poor economic state after World War I. Hitlers Party would become known to the world as the Nazi Party. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) states that, In the 1932 elections, the Nazis won 33 percent of the votes, more than any other party (Hitler Comes to Power). That wasnt the amount of votes that the Nazi party needed
Nazi Propaganda Poster Source: http://bbc.in/dos42p

Allison 3 in order to control the majority of the Reichstag (Germanys Parliament). The USHMM also states, After months of negotiations, the president of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, will appoint Hitler chancellor of Germany in a government seemingly dominated by conservatives on January 30, 1933. (Hitler Comes to Power). Hitlers Nazi Party formed on the backbone of anti-Semitism. He blamed the Jews for the economic state of Germany and the reason Germany had lost World War I. Germans were looking for someone to blame for all of their misfortune and Hitlers speaking style and anti-Semitism made since to those looking for answers. Nuremberg Laws Fritz Lustig remembers the day that Hitler came into major power, On the 30th of January 1933, I was a 14-year-old schoolboy living in Berlin's Schneberg districtEarlier that day, the president of the German Reich, Paul von Hindenburg, had sworn in Adolf Hitler as chancellor and assigned him the task of assembling a rightwing coalition government consisting of the Nazis and the conservative DNVP (Lustig 1). Once Hitler received such power, he started implementing his anti-Semitic laws, known as the Nuremberg Laws. An article from the Yad Vashem entitled "Nuremberg Laws" states that the laws were passed through in the German Parliament in Nuremberg, Germany on September 15, 1935. These were strictly racial laws against Jews. As the Yad Vashems article also states, The first of the Nuremberg Laws was called the "Reich Citizenship Law," which declared that only Aryans could be citizens of the Reich(Nuremberg Laws). Jews were no longer citizens of Source: Lexfridman.com Germany under this law which would just become the first of many laws upheld by the Nazi Socialist Party to discriminate against Jews under Hitlers rule.
Nuremberg Laws Jew Ancestory

Allison 4 Kristallnacht The Holocaust History Project (THHP) tells us that on the night of November 8th 1938 a seventeen year old Jewish boy by the name of Herschel Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath, who was a German diplomat in Paris (What Was Kristallnacht?). This was a perfect reinforcement of the anti-Semitism beliefs that Hitler had been preaching to the German population. It came on the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch which Hitler had used fifteen years ago as a means to get noticed by his country. This caused uproar among Germans. The destruction of synagogues and Jewish businesses were taking place all over Germany. Anti-semitism grew
Synagoge Siegen during Kristallnacht Source: Wikimedia Commons

as fast as it ever had. The violence in Germany stopped on November 10th, but in Austria it raged on. In Vienna the pogrom raged fiercely: Jews were attacked (at least eight were beaten to death), 5,000 Jewish shops were wrecked, and all but one of the citys 21 synagogues were burnt down (What Was Kristallnacht?). Jews were motivated even more by the push to get them out of Germany and emigrated somewhere else. Many people committed suicide in Austria in the wake of this madness; the writing was on the wall for all Jews. This would be just the beginning of a very long war for the Jewish population. Rounding Up the Jews In an article on the Yad Vashem's website, "The Holocaust: The Ghettos"(THTG), it states that the rounding up of Jews into ghettos began on the 21st of September in 1939, shortly after Germany invaded Poland, when Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS, sent out what was called the Schnellbrief. This gave the guidelines for how the Jews would be moved into larger cities in Poland and eventually these cities would be sealed off to the public. You would not be

Allison 5 allowed in or out, and so the age of the Jewish ghetto began. The ghettos housed massive amounts of people into a very small area. People kept being rounded up from all over and sent to the ghetto. Food supplies were very scarce, but the Jews did their best to preserve some of their daily life before the Nuremberg Laws. Some made it a priority to educate their children, practice their religion, and maintain their cultural traditions in circumstances comparable to that of
Rounding Up Jews Source: http://bit.ly/13kumh7

a dog pound (THTG).

Wannsee Conference According to Holocuast-History.com (HH) the Wannsee Conference was held on January 20th, 1942 in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee (The Wannsee Conference). The purpose of the Wannsee Conference was to discuss the extermination of the European Jewish population, better known as the Final Solution. General Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and Security Service was put in charge of this luncheon and head of the Final Solution team by Reichsmarschall Hermann Gring (The Wannsee Conference). Fourteen of the most important officials of the Nazi government were in attendance to discuss
General Reinhard Heydrich Source: www.historyplace.com

the duties of they would be receiving in order to carry out the

Allison 6 Final Solution and the luncheon is said to have only lasted around an hour to an hour and a half (The Wannsee Conference). HH also states that he informed his colleagues of how they would remove the Jewish population from certain areas of Germany, and then how they would go about removing them altogether. As the ghettos population density gets larger and larger, the Nazis determine to use the able body ones as workers for the time being. Selection The Yad Vashem's article on "The Implementation of The Final Solution" tells us that Jewish selection from the ghettos begins almost immediately following the Wannsee Conference. The weakest people in the ghettos would be the first to leave on the trains out of the ghettos towards the death camps. People would have to stay in these old overcrowded cattle cars for days on end without water or food and very weak ventilation until they arrived at the final destination. Many of them died while riding to their emanate death. Those still alive after the horrific
Jewish Selection at Auschwitz Source: http://bit.ly/1137r8h

ride to the death camp were rushed out of the cattle cars,

and separated. Jews were quickly determined as to whether or not you were still capable of working. All families were separated at this point and most were sent off to the crematoriums. It is hard to tell which is worse, being forced to labor away for people out to destroy your race, or being sent to a crematorium. The Death Camps When one thinks of the Holocaust, the first thing that might come to mind is the crematorium, or black and white photos they've seen of naked starving bodies stacked up outside of buildings at the camps. Possibly the most disturbing and frightening of all the things that

Allison 7 happened during the Holocaust, is what happened at the death camps. In the Yad Vashems article "The Implementation of the Final Solution: Death Camps" (IFSDC) it states that, "Chelmo was the first extermination camp that the Germans established on Polish soil. Murder operations began there on December
Entrance to Auschwitz Death Camp Source: http://bit.ly/17IHXCe

8, 1941, and continued intermittently until January 1945. The Jews of the Lodz ghetto and the vicinity were the primary victims deported to Chelmno, where they were murdered by means of gas vans." (IFSDC). Gas vans were just another interesting form to kill Jews faster that the Nazi's made up. Jews were ordered to strip themselves of their belongings and clothes and get into the back of these vans. The exhaust pipe on these vans was placed through the interior wall of the back of the van. The Nazi's would drive the Jews around for a while until they were gassed to death and they would proceed to unload them (IFSDC). Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor were the first three death camps with the crematoriums. Crematoriums could kill people quicker and fit more in at a time. The Yad Vashem says, "Approximately 1,700,000 Jews, mostly from Poland, were murdered in these three extermination camps" (IFSDC). Liberation As the war is coming to a close and the Allies are making their way into Germany and Nazi occupied Poland, they begin to find the camps and ghettos. In the Yad Vashem's article, "The Final Stages of the War and the Aftermath: Last Jews in the Last Months of the German Reich." (LJLM) it states that," The first camps to be evacuated were in

Liberation From the camps Source: http ://bit.ly/17qAO6

Allison 8 the Baltic States and in eastern and central Poland" (LJLM). The Nazi's made the Jews evacuate the Polish camps and go on death marches back into Germany with them. They tried their very best to cover up some of the evidence that they had been killing massive amounts of people, but it's hard to cover up a thing like that. Death marches were happening in every camp by 1945, and thousands upon thousands of Jews were getting shot during this hustle. They were not allowed to drink any water on the death marches or eat, this would waste time, and the Nazi's taking them were even more concerned about their own life and how they were going to escape the allies with a bunch of malnourished humans in tow. The statistics of people that died during these marches are staggering, " from the summer of 1944 until the end of the war, between 200,000-250,000 Nazi concentration camp inmates perished on these marches" (LJLM). The marches continued until the very last moment of the war. Massive burial plots were dug to accommodate for the thousands of people killed on these marches. (LJLM) The war was over. The Jews that had survived the horror of the Third Reich had nothing left to go back to after they were no longer imprisoned. Most had lost all family members. There was no job to go back to, or home. Everything started from scratch. It is imperative that everyone know and understand why a systematic killing of over 12 million people occurred. It is the duty of the human race to insure that this act of pure evil shall never come forth on this earth again. While everyone is familiar with the hennas acts that took place in the Holocaust, it is more important that the generations now and the generations to come, learn from what took place leading up to the World War II in Germany and be able to recognize the coming signs of a corrupt government when you see one. One voice can have a lot of impact, just look at Adolf Hitler. The world must make sure that that powerful voice is a force for good and not evil. People can be so easily persuaded when they are desperate for

Allison 9 answers, and they sway so easily from their morals when they become desperate. In this case, Germans wanted answers for their troubles, and they found one with a man who knew how to get an audience fired up. We mustn't let this happen again. The face of the human race depends on it.

Allison 10 Works Cited "The Final Stages of the War and the Aftermath: Last Jews in the Last Months of the German Reich." Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2013. "Hitler Comes To Power." United States Holocaust Memorial Musuem. United States Holocaust Memorial Musuem, n.d. Web. 11 Apr. 2013. "The Holocaust: The Ghettos." Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem, n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2013. "The Implementation of the Final Solution: Death Camps." Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2013. "The Implementation of the Final Solution: Deportation to the Death Camps." Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2013. Lutig, Fritz. "Hitler Came to Power 80 Years Ago. I Remember It like Yesterday." The Guardian. The Guardian, 30 Jan. 2013. Web. 16 Apr. 2013. "Nuremberg Laws." Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2013. "The Wannsee Conference." Holocaust-History.org. Holocaust History, 4 Feb. 2004. Web. 15 Apr. 2013. "What Happened to the Jews After the Holocaust?" Holocaust-History.org. Holocaust History, 7 Sept. 1998. Web. 15 May 2013. "What Was Kristallnacht?" The Holocaust History Project. The Holocaust History Project, 28 Nov. 2003. Web. 11 Apr. 2013.

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