1. The Holocaust Chapter 18 Sec. 3

2. Anti-Semitism In the mid-1800s, a new form of anti-Jewish prejudice arose based on racial theories. Some thinkers claimed that Germanic peoples whom they called “Aryans” were superior to Middle Eastern people called Semites. By the 1880s, the term anti-Semitism was used to describe discrimination or hostility, often violent, directed at Jews. The suffering caused by World War I and the Great Depression led many to look for someone to blame for their problems. The Jews gave the Germans somebody to blame for their problems and helped them revive their national pride.

3. Persecution in Germany In Mein Kampf, Hitler revived the idea of Aryan superiority and expressed an especially hateful view of Jews. When he came to power Hitler in 1933, Hitler made anti-Semitism the official state policy. In all 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, about two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Some 5 to 6 million other people would also die in the Nazi captivity.

4. Nazi Policies On April 1, 1933, the Nazis ordered a one-day boycott of businesses owned by Jews. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship and outlawed marriage between Jews and non-Jews. Nazi propaganda attacked Jews as enemies of Germany. In 1938, Jews were forced to surrender their own businesses to Aryans for a fraction of their value. A Jew was defined as any person who had three or four Jewish grandparents, as well as any person who had two Jewish grandparents and practiced Judaism. At the request of Switzerland, the Nazis marked Jews’ identity cards with a “J.” Eventually Jews were forced to sew yellow stars marked Jew on their clothing.

5. Hitler’s Police The Gestapo (secret police) were formed to identify and pursue enemies of the Nazi regime. Jews fell into this category. Hitler formed the SS, or Schutzstaffel, an elite guard of the Nazi Party. By 1939, the Gestapo became part of the SS. The duties of the SS included guarding the concentration camps for political prisoners. In addition to the Communists, the Nazi camps soon held other classes of people who they considered “undesirable”—mainly Jews, but also homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, and the homeless.

6. Kristallnacht Many Jews still believed they could endure persecution until Hitler lost power. Their illusions were destroyed on the night of November 9, 1938, when Nazi thugs throughout Germany and Austria looted and destroyed Jewish stores, houses and synagogues. During Kristallnacht, or “Night of the Broken Glass,” nearly every synagogue was destroyed. That night thousands of Jews were shipped off to concentration camps. After that night, Germany’s Jews sought any means possible to leave the country.

7. Refugees Seek an Escape From 1933 through 1937, 130,000 Jews (1 in 4), fled Germany. At first most of these moved to Germany’s neighboring nations. As the numbers grew Jews sought refuge in other nations but few welcomed them. Roosevelt called for the Evian Conference to deal with the Jewish refuge problem in 1938 in France. The conference failed to deal with the problem. Most countries including the U.S. refused to accept more Jewish immigrants.

8. From Murder to Genocide The more territory the Germans conquered the more Jews came under their control, some who had already fled Germany. The Nazis started to develop ghettos, self-contained areas, usually surrounded by a fence or wall, where Jews were forced to live. The Warsaw ghetto held 400,000 Jews, 30 percent of the city’s population in 3% of its space. Each month thousands of Jews died in the ghettos, due to disease, caused by a overcrowding and a lack of sanitation.

9. The Einsatzgruppen and The Final Solution During the invasion of the Soviet Union Hitler ordered the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing squads, to shoot Communist political leaders and all Jews in German- occupied territory. Although Hitler considered mass murder by firing squads acceptable in a war zone, he found the method unsuitable for conquered nations in Western Europe. In January 1942, Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin to agree on a new approach to the Jewish problem. At the Wannsee conference they reached the “final solution” to the Jewish question, the plan would lead to the construction of special camps in Poland where genocide, was to be carried out against Europe’s Jewish population.

10. The Death Camps In January 1942, the Nazis opened a specially designed gas chamber disguised as a shower room at Auschwitz in Poland. The Nazis outfitted six death camps in Poland. Unlike concentration camps, which functioned as prisons and centers of forced labor, these camps existed primarily for mass murder. Jews from other parts of Europe were crowded into cattle cars transported to the extermination centers. At Auschwitz and Majdanek, prisoners were organized into lines and those who looked to weak to work were sorted out to go directly to the gas chambers. Prisoners carried the dead bodies to the crematoria where the bodies were burned. At periodic “selections” the weak prisoners were sent to the gas chambers. At Auschwitz, 12,000 victims could be gassed and cremated in a single day. 1.5 million were killed at Auschwitz, 90% Jews.

11. Fighting Back Jews did resist the attempted genocide of their people. Many joined underground resistance groups. In August 1943, rioting Jews damaged the Treblinka death camp so badly that it had to be closed. Escape was the most common form of resistance. Though most attempted escapes failed. Those who did escape revealed the atrocity to the outside world. Jews who had escaped from Treblinka, got word to the Warsaw Ghetto about what was happening to the Jews from Warsaw being sent to Treblinka. As a result, in 1943, nearly 50,000 Jews still in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the final deportation to Treblinka. For 27 days, Jews held out against the Germans. The Germans defeated the rebellion but the deportation was stopped for a time.

12. Rescue & Liberation The U.S. government knew about the mass murder as early as November 1942. The press showed little interest in reporting the story and Congress did not raise immigration quotas. Finally in January 1944, over the objection of the State department, FDR created the War Refugee Board (WRB) to try to help people threatened by the Nazis. The WRB’s programs helped save some 200,000 lives. With funding from the WRB Raoul Wallenberg rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews by issuing them special Swedish passports.

13. Rescue & Liberation continued The War Refugee Board did not have much success bringing Jews to the U.S. As the Allied armies advanced in late 1944, the Nazis abandoned their camps outside Germany and started to move the prisoners to camps in Germany. On the eve of liberation, thousands of Jews died on forced marches from camp to camp as their guards moved them ahead of the advancing armies. In 1945 American soldiers witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust for the first time. At the Nuremberg Trials Nazi leaders were tried by an international tribunal, for crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Of the 24 defendants, 12 received the death penalty. The trials established the principle that individuals must be responsible for their own actions. The tribunal firmly rejected the Nazis’ argument that they were only “following orders.”