1. Section Three The Holocaust
Chapter 16 World War II
Section Three
The Holocaust

2. The Holocaust Begins The Nazis proposed a new racial order for Europe.
Germanic peoples, whom they called Aryans, were the “master race”.
All non-Aryan people, particularly Jews, were inferior.
This eventually led to the Holocaust.
The Holocaust- the systematic mass slaughter of Jews and other groups judged inferior by the Nazis.
Hitler tapped into a hatred for Jews that had deep roots in European history.
The Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which deprived Jews of their rights to citizenship and forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews.

3. “Night of Broken Glass”
On November 9th, 1938, Nazi storm troopers attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues across the Germany and murdered close to 100 Jews.
This night came to be known as “Kristallnacht”, or “Night of Broken Glass”.
This event marked a major step up in the Nazi policy of Jewish persecution.

4. A Flood of Refugees
After Kristallnacht, many Jews left Germany and fled to other countries.
Hitler took over more territories where Jews lived and the number of those fleeing increased.
Emigration seemed to be the solution to “the Jewish problem” as the Nazis called it.
After a while the number of Jewish refugees was so large, that many nations, including Britain, France, and the U.S. would not take any more.

5. Isolating the Jews Hitler ordered all Jews into ghettos.
Ghetto- city neighborhoods where European Jews were forced to live.
The ghettos were sealed off with barbed wire and stone walls. The Nazis hoped they would starve or die of disease.
The Jewish people hung on to their traditions, formed resistance movements, and taught their children in these ghettos.

6. “The Final Solution”
Hitler grew impatient waiting for the Jews to die in the ghettos.
He implemented “The Final Solution”.
This was a program of genocide, or the systematic killing of an entire people.
Hitler wanted to guarantee the purity of the Aryan race.
He ordered the elimination of all other groups he deemed inferior and subhuman.
Gypsies, Poles, Russians, homosexuals, the insane, the disabled, the incurably ill, and especially Jews.

7. The Killings Begin
As Nazi troops swept across Europe, the killings began
Units from Hitler’s SS, elite security force, moved from town to town to hunt down Jews.
Jews were taken to isolated spots, shot, and buried in massive pits.
Other Jews were rounded up and taken to concentration camps or slave labor prisons. These camps were mainly located in Germany and Poland.
Prisoners worked seven days a week and were given little food. Conditions were deplorable.

8. The Final Stage
In 1942, the Nazis built extermination camps equipped with huge gas chambers that could kill 6,000 human beings a day.
Prisoners were separated into two categories, weak or strong.
The weak, many women, young children, the elderly, and the sick, were killed that day.
They were taken to chambers that looked like shower rooms. The doors were closed, the room filled with cyanide gas, and later the bodies were cremated in ovens..
The strong were forced to do hard labor.
The largest of these extermination camps was Auschwitz, located in southern Poland.

9. The Survivors
Some six million European Jews died in these death camps.
Fewer than four million survived.
Some survived with the help of non-Jewish people. Many, at great risk to their own lives, hid Jews in their homes or helped them escape to neutral countries.
Those who survived the camps were changed forever.

10. Other Genocides
Armenians
Rwanda
Darfur
Former Yugoslavia