1. The Final Solution

2. Genocide as a State Policy
Holocaust is unique in history
It was intentional and premeditated
No political or territorial purposes
Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Irish
Total and all encompassing – ALL the Jews in Europe including Great Britain & Ireland

3. The policy involved every level of German society and Nazi bureaucracy
Parish churches & Interior Ministry provided birth records that defined and isolated Jews
Post Office delivered notifications
Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish wealth
German industrial & commercial firms fired Jewish workers
Universities refused to admit Jewish students, dismissed Jewish faculty
Government transports handled billing and arrangements with the railroads for transport

4. German corporations profited
Pharmaceutical firms tested drugs without any regard of side effects, toxicity, etc.
Companies bid for contracts to build ovens and supply the gas used for extermination
Even as the Nazis were fighting a world war on two fronts, the mass killing of Jews continued and profited
It continued even though there was a labor and transportation shortage

5. Deportations Railroads were essential to the killing process Forms:
From towns & cities to transit camps or ghettos
From smaller ghettos to larger ones
1942 on: to one of the major killing centers
Auschwitz-Berkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor

6. Map – deportations to death camps 1942-1944 page Artifacts page
Personal histories page
Jews from Subcarpathian Rus await selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Jews from Subcarpathian Rus undergo a selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau

7. Concentration Camps Three purposes: More than 15,000 camps
Detention centers
Labor source
Liquidation
More than 15,000 camps
Transit camps, POW camps, private industrial camps, foreign-labor camps, camps for orphans (300 for women only)

8. Implementation Stage 1: mobile killing squad, 1941
Stage 2: mobile gas vans, December 1941
Stage 3: gas chambers, March 1942

9. Killing Centers Link Located near major railroad lines Zyklon B
Cheap and effective
2,000 in less than 30 minutes

10. Selection

11. Mauthausen rock quarry
Forced labor for no purpose

12. Rescue
“Whoever (shall) save a single life, saves an entire world” The Talmud
Danish Rescue (p. 159) Link

13. Death Marches Winter 1944-45 Nazis knew the war was lost
Soviets closing in from the east, British & Americans from the west
Nazis wanted no eyewitnesses, worked to conceal evidence
Auschwitz (66,000) one in four died

14. Liberation Soviets were the first to enter camps
July 23, 1944 Majdanek (80,000 pairs of shoes)
Found the living dead