1. *** Choose your own seat! First come, first serve!
1st Day of 4th Quarter
*** Choose your own seat! First come, first serve!
No saving seats for others!
(3 strikes & you’re out = 3 warnings and then I choose where you permanently sit!)

2. The Holocaust (in Hebrew, Shoah)
World War Two
The Holocaust (in Hebrew, Shoah)

3. We will be talking about some very difficult and emotional events in this unit.
Please treat your fellow students with respect, kindness and love.
BE NICE! There’s no reason not to be.

4. Guiding Questions What do we already know about the Holocaust?
Why do you think we talk about the Holocaust so much?

5. Why study the Holocaust?
The Holocaust provides a context for exploring the dangers of remaining silent, apathetic, and indifferent in the face of the oppression of others.
Silence and indifference to the suffering of others, or to the infringement of civil rights in any society can—however unintentionally—perpetuate the problems.
The Holocaust was not an accident in history—it occurred because individuals, organizations, and governments made choices that not only legalized discrimination but also allowed prejudice, hatred, and ultimately, mass murder, to occur.

6. Studying the Holocaust
This catastrophe, the Holocaust (in Hebrew, Shoah), which occurred in Europe from 1933 to 1945, resulted in the death of approximately:
six million Jews (two out of every three Jews then living in Europe)
hundreds of Sinti-Roma (Gypsies)
at least 250,000 people with mental or physical disabilities
more than three million Soviet prisoners
about two million Poles
and another one million Slavs who were targeted for slave labor
and thousands of homosexuals, Communists, Socialists, trade unionists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

7. Holocaust Definitions
According to The American Heritage Dictionary:
holocaust: great or total destruction, especially by fire.
Holocaust: the genocide of European Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II.
What differentiation can be made between the general meaning of the word “holocaust” and the use of “the Holocaust” to describe a series of events at a particular historic time?

8. Why does the Holocaust fit the definition of genocide?
In 1948, the United Nations defined genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, including:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Why does the Holocaust fit the definition of genocide?

9. Key Vocabulary
Antisemitism – prejudice or discrimination against Jews. Antisemitism can be based on hatred against Jews because of their religious beliefs or the group membership (ethnicity), but also on the incorrect belief that Jews are a race. Nazi antisemitism was racial in nature; Jews were viewed as racially inferior to Aryans and destructive of the world order.
Holocaust denial – an antisemitic movement that claims the Holocaust never happened or that minimizes or trivializes it.

10. Jewish life before the Holocaust
Before the Holocaust, life for European Jews was generally described as family centered, successful and relatively content. Many German Jews had fought and died in WWI and most German Jews considered themselves German first.
They were patriotic citizens.
They could not imagine their own country turning against them.

11. The Aryan Race
According to Hitler, the danger to the "Aryan race" came from its opposite, the "Jewish race." He believed that by mixing and polluting the blood of the "Aryans," Jews had "infiltrated" German culture, politics and thinking. The Jews, he said, had been the underlying cause of the German defeat in World War One.
It followed from his racial theories of life that in order to save the "Aryan race" and ultimately the world, "inferior races" like the Jews had to be first isolated and then eliminated. The beliefs of the Nazi Party became the policies of the Nazi state.

12. Nazi Genocide
Hitler’s policy was to kill all people he judged “racially inferior,” particularly Jews. Other targets included Slavs, Gypsies, and the mentally ill.
At first, the Nazis forced Jews in Poland and other countries to live in ghettos and concentration camps.
By 1941, German leaders had devised plans for the “final solution of the Jewish problem” – the genocide (deliberate murder) of all European Jews.

13. The Nazis shipped Jews from all over occupied Europe to special “death camps” built in Poland, at places like Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
By 1945, the Nazis had massacred almost 6 million Jews and almost as many other “undesirable” people were killed as well.
The scale and savagery of the Holocaust are unequaled in history.