1. The Holocaust

2. Definition
Systematic, bureaucratic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and their collaborators as a central act of state during World War II
1933: nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe later occupied by Germany
By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed.

3. Deaths
An estimated 5 to 6 million Jews, including 3 million Polish Jews
1.8 – 1.9 million Christian Poles and other (non-Jewish) Poles (estimate includes civilians killed as due to Nazi aggression and occupation but not military casualties of Nazi aggression or victims of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and of deportations to Central Asia and Siberia)
200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti (Gypsies)
200,000–300,000 people with disabilities
80, ,000 European Freemasons
100,000 communists
10,000–25,000 homosexual men
2,500–5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses
Roma people in concentration camp

4. Phase I:
1933: Nazis began to put into practice their racial ideology
Nazis believed that the Germans were “racially superior”
Struggle for survival between them and “inferior races.”
Nazis considered themselves the pure German (“Aryan”) Race
Jews numbered around 500,000 in Germany
Nazis blamed Jews for Germany’s economic depression and the WW1 defeat
Dachau concentration camp, outside Munich

5. Phase I:
1933: new German laws forced Jews to quit civil service jobs, university and law court positions, and other areas of public life.
1933: Concentration camps started to remove undesired people from society
1935: “Nuremberg Laws” stripped German Jews of their citizenship
1937 and 1939: Jews banned from public schools, theaters, cinemas, resorts, and some cities.
Seized Jewish businesses and properties or forced Jews to sell them at low prices.
1938 Kristallnact: destroyed synagogues and Jewish stores; arrests, destroyed homes, murders
The Warsaw Ghetto

6. Phase II: 1939-1945 About half the German Jewish population had fled
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began.
Holocaust shifted to the “Final Solution” of exterminating European Jewry
Between 1942 and 1944, Nazis eliminated the ghettos in occupied Poland
Concentration camps became “Extermination camps” mostly in Poland.
Victims arrived in railroad freight cars to gas chambers, disguised as showers
May 1945, Nazi Germany collapsed
Auschwitz

8. Extermination Camps Most victims came from central Europe: 5m
Victims came from what today are 35 countries
After 1942, gas became most efficient killer in camps
Nazi doctors conducted experiments on prisoners (Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz and Birkenau)

9. Opposition to Holocaust
Some German and occupied peoples worked against the Holocaust
Raul Wallenberg: Swedish diplomat in Budapest
Provided safe passage to tens of thousands of Jews from Hungary by providing diplomatic passes
Arrested by Soviet forces the day before liberation of Pest, perhaps suspecting him as American spy; later died in Soviet prison