Lydia and ErinBy

In this PowerPoint we are going to look at how the holocaust happened and what the final solution was. Also at why it was the Jewish people plus Gypsies, Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mentally Handicapped people and millions of Russians that were prisoners of war. These were all victims of the dreadful Holocaust.

Christian Europe had regarded the Jews as ‘Christ – Killers’ for hundreds of years. Jews had been driven out from almost every European country at one time or another. The way that they were treated in England in the 13 century is a typical example. In 1275 all Jews were made to wear a yellow badge also 269 of them were hanged in the Tower of London in However the Jews were the main people targeted because many Germans were poor and unemployed and wanted someone to blame. They turned on the Jews, as many of them were rich and successful in business.

During the 1920’s a new organised group of people in Germany began preaching hatred towards the Jews. This was Hitler’s Nazi party. Hitler was obsessed with the Jews, but not in a good way. All of his writings and speech’s showed a mixture of racist hate and fear. Hitler saw the Jews as threat to the supposedly called ‘Aryan’ race which consisted of having blonde hair and blue eyes and mainly German. Hitler said there were many inferior races such as Slavs and Negroes, but the lowest of them all were the Jews. Once Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, persecution of the Jews became official policy. Placards reading ‘ Jews not wanted’ appeared outside shops and café’s and beside roads leading to towns and villages. Stormtroopers beat Jews up in the streets. By mid 1930’s over thirty five thousand Jews had fled from Germany.

Firstly what were the Ghettos? Well, the ghettos were what the Germans built to keep the Jews separate from the German people. They were houses in a small area surrounded by a high wall. The houses were unheated, dirty, smelly and extremely cramped as there were seven people per room. They were only given 300cal of food a day. This is the same amount as 1.8kg (only two and a half loaves of bread!) and this was per person per month. Anyone who left the ghetto was executed. The largest ghetto was in Warsaw. There was over half a million Jews in this particular ghetto. Once Germany had invaded Poland even more Jews were trapped under German rule. The Germans moved Jews into a number of ghettos, and slowly the Nazis achieved what they wanted. The Jews, forced to live in sub-human conditions became very weak and under- nourished, because of this they began to look like the sub-humans that the Nazi propaganda made them out to be.

Between 1941 and 1943, underground resistance movements developed in about 100 Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe. Their main goals were to break out of the ghettos, and join partisan units in the fight against the Germans. The Jews knew that uprisings would not stop the Germans and that only a handful of fighters would succeed in escaping to join with partisans. Still, Jews made the decision to resist. Further, under the most adverse conditions, Jewish prisoners succeeded in initiating resistance and uprisings in some Nazi concentration camps, and even in the killing centers of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. Other camp uprisings took place in camps such as Kruszyna (1942), Minsk Mazowiecki (1943), and Janowska (1943). In several dozen camps prisoners organized escapes to join partisan units.

Major Ghettos in Warsaw Auschwitz death camp

On the 20 th January 1942, the leading Nazi’s met to plan what they called a ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem. All this meant was the complete extermination of all Jews under German control. A destruction of a particular race is called genocide. Death camps were built in remote areas of eastern Europe. Everything down to railway trucks were prepared and time tables were drawn up and arrangements made for all Jews to be rounded up. Jews were rounded up in Germany, Eastern Europe, France and every other part of Nazi controlled Europe. They were all sent to death camps. Auschwitz was the worst of these extermination camps and was located in Poland. At least four million people were sent to Auschwitz however only about 60,000 survived.

Even children were victims of the terrible Holocaust.