holocaust essay evidence Flashcards
Kristallnacht
testimony by retired German firefighter -
his friend was “beaten up already when I [he] wanted to put out the fire”
“one old Jew was dragged down and pushed to his knees [by a marshall].”
“the arsonists came in their brown uniforms to admire the results of their destruction.”
7500 businesses destroyed and looted
1000 synagogues
30,000 Jewish males arrested
antisemitic laws 1930s
The Civil Service Law 1933
All Non-Aryans dismissed from government jobs. Non-Aryans were Jews, or children of Jews.
3.Mass bonfires to burn Jewish and Anti-nazi books 1933-34
- Jewish people prohibited from producing Kosher meat 1934
- The Reich Citizenship Law - a citizen was a person who was “of German or related blood”
Jews were not full citizens, lost many rights + defined as a separate “race”
- The Law for the protection of German blood and German honour - against race mixing/”race defilement”
banned future intermarriages and sexual relations between Jews and people “of German or related blood.”
justified with the fact mixed races undermined the purity of the German race
ghetto conditions
Lodz ghetto -
more than 20% died as a result of horrific living condition
forced labour in German factories, with meagre food rations - one loaf of bread for multiple families
disease was rife - syphilis, typhus
“The whole ghetto was designed, actually, to starve the people out.”—Leo Schneiderman, holocaust survivor
“we did not want to leave… because you figure that the misery you knew would be better than the misery you didn’t know” - fear of deportation and remaining in ghettos formed complex dilemma
“there was no milk, there was no meat”
substantial resources poured into Holocaust
1143 ghettos constructed - mainly in territories in Eastern Europe
More than 52,000 SS guards - part of their job was to maintain control of such Jewish ghettos and guard them - later it was to run concentration camps
process of deportation
Cramming of 100 or more Jewish people into train compartments -
hot, humid , lack of ventilation
no food, water for 4 days
those who would refuse would be shot
Holocaust by bullets
Einsatzgruppen - Nazi killing squads
Babi Yar - largest site
33,000 people laid on top of one another and shot
-started forcing them to lay on top of the dead bodies, which were piled up in the mass graves
-then shot
at least 1.5 million holocaust victims died in holocaust <1942
gas chambers
They opened the door, threw the children in and closed the door. There was a terrible cry.
The bodies were loaded on a rough wagon and taken to a ditch.
The next batch were already undressing in the huts.
After that I didn’t look at my wife for four weeks.
- testimony of SS private Boeck
Zyklon B
Marcel Nadjari, a Greek Jew - Jews “packed in like sardines”.
2,200 members of the Sonderkommando - Jewish slaves of the SS who had to escort them to gas chambers
then they had to burn the bodies, collect gold fillings and women’s hair, and throw the ashes into a nearby river + cremated
Out of 1.3 million deported, 1.1 million murdered
final solution - hitler’s prophet speech
“Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
“…We must once and for all get rid of the opinion that the Jewish race was only created by God for the purpose of being in a certain percentage a parasite living on the body and the productive work of other nations.”
Operation Barbarossa
The Holocaust by bullets, from 1941-42
The death of 2 million men
Operation Reinhard was implemented, proposed in the Wansee Conference January 24 1942
“a suitable form of labor deployment in the East.”
“to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction.”
“final remnant.. They must be dealt with appropriately”
- Reinhard Heydrich, chief of SD
The German army would require a workforce that would help in paving roads, clearing minefields, producing ordinance and equipment
