Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust

Question 1

Anti-Semitism

Answer 1

1. Jews killed Jesus
2. Cultural differences
3. Pogroms in Russia
4. Jews prominent in Professions and Business – led to envy and criticism
5. Jews associated with liberalism, radicalism and communism.
6. Eliminate Jews – eliminate capitalism and socialism.

Question 2

The Nazis and race theory

Answer 2

1. Superiority of the Aryans
2. Assimilation of Jews would taint Aryan stock
3. Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s troubles
4. Jews invented Marxism
5. Jews caused Germany’s defeat in WWI
6. Jews caused humiliation of treaty of Versailles.

Question 3

Did Hitler plan the Holocaust

Answer 3

1. Major Historical debate
2. Intentionalists - the Nazis’ had a constant and unwavering intention to destroy European Jews
3. Functionalists - the Holocaust was reached by a ‘twisted road’ - many forces inside and outside Germany helped to bring it about

Question 4

The Persecution of the Jews

Answer 4

1. April 1933 – Hitler organises a one-day boycott of Jewish shops and businesses
2. Jews banned from civil service
3. Nuremberg Laws 1935
4. Marriages between Germans and Jews were forbidden
5. Relations between Jews and Germans outside marriage were forbidden
6. Jews were not to employ Germans under the age of 45
7. Jews were deprived of citizenship.
8. 1936 – Jews could not vote
9. Wear Star of David.
10. 1938 – Jews barred from Law, Medicine and Business

Question 5

Kristallnacht 1938

Answer 5

1. Reprisal for an attack on a German embassy official in Paris.
2. More than 8,000 Jewish homes and shops were attacked.
3. 100 Jews killed and 20,000 arrested.
4. Goering blamed the Jews for the violence.
5. Jews fined one billion Reichmarks.
6. Many Jews, including Albert Einstein, emigrated at this time.
7. 400,000 Jews who could afford it leave Germany and Austria

Question 6

Polish Jews

Answer 6

1. 10% of the population was Jewish
2. Nazi occupation of Poland leads to persecution of Jews
3. Jews forced into ghettos
4. Jews live in squalid conditions, wracked by disease.
5. 500,000 crammed into 1.3 square miles of Warsaw
6. By 1942 over 100,000 Jews died because of conditions
7. Nazis order ‘non-productive’ Jews to be resettled.
8. Sept 1942 – remaining 70,000 Jews die during and after the Warsaw Uprising

Question 7

Concentration Camps

Answer 7

1. The ‘Final Solution’ – extermination of the Jews
2. Towns and villages emptied of Jews who would be executed and buried in mass graves
3. Extermination camps established in Poland
4. German companies set up slave-labour factories in camps
5. Two million Jews killed in Auschwitz using cyanide gas and the bodies cremated.
6. Bodies stripped of anything of value, clothes, hair gold fillings making the camps self-financing
7. 90% of Jews killed on arrival. Remainder used for slave labour.
8. Life expectancy of Jewish slave was three months
9. Six millions Jews die in Holocaust
10. Pro-Nazi historians deny the Holocaust took place.