The Holocaust World War Looms #3

I. Persecution Begins ► A. Jews Targeted  1. Germans blamed Jews for their failures in WWI.  2. Hitler preached Anti-Semitism or hatred toward Jews.  3. The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship, jobs, and property.  4. Jews had to wear a star of David to identify them.

► B. Kristallnacht  1. “Night of Broken Glass.”  2. On November 9-10, 1938, Nazi storm troopers attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues across Germany.

► C. Plight of the St. Louis  1. Thousands of German Jews began to flee Germany to other European countries and the U.S.  2. However, due to official indifference of the Jewish situation in Germany the U.S. forced the ship St. Louis to return to Germany because not of the occupants had U.S. immigration papers.

II. Hitler’s Final Solution ► A. Definition  1. The “Final Solution” is a policy of genocide, which is the deliberate and systematic killing of an entire population.

► B. The Condemned  1. Gypsies, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, Jews and Slavs.  2. Germans who were unfit to be in the master race; homosexuals, the mentally deficient, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, and the incurably ill.

► C. Steps to Death  1. Jews were ordered into ghettos or segregated Jewish areas.  2. Jews were forced to work and many were shot, but the Jews held on.  3. Jews were then sent to concentration or labor camps. Many Jews were worked to death.

► 4. The final stage of the “Final Solution” were death camps were Jews were gassed, shot, worked to death, injected with poison, and medical experiments. ► 5. The Nazis then buried the bodies or burned them in huge ovens. ► 6. An estimated 6 million Jews died in death camps and in the Nazi massacres.