Teacher: Student:

Indira Brajčić Caterina Rende Dominis MYP3

Date:

27/03/2010

The Holocaust 1 was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and

murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

"Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to

power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans was "racially superior" and that

the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial

community.

Germany was defeated by the allied powers, and afterwards humiliated by the Versailles

Treaty. Its pre-war territory was reduced immensely, as well as the armed forces. The

recognition of the guilt for the war was demanded, and it was stipulated to pay for all the

reparations to the allies. The Empire was destroyed and a new parliamentary government

called the Weimar republic was formed. Because of all these new strict rules and demands

the country suffered from economic instability and inflation, which grew worse in 1929. It

was followed by a very high rate of unemployment which intensified class and political

differences and began to weaken the government.

The Holocaust started on the 30th January 1933 when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of

Germany. He formed a new party called the Nazi party. His main ideas were to rid the

world of Communism and Social Democracy, and to rule over the world without “sub

races”. His aims were to get out of the economic crisis without big consequences, and to

firstly exterminate Jews.

His first aggressions started on the 27th February 1933, when one of Hitler’s men made the

Reichstag fire, and even though many people suspected the Nazis were involved, Hitler

managed to blame the Communists, and convinced a big number of German people to

vote for him.

The fire indicated the end of German democracy. On the next day Nazis, under the will of

controlling the Communists, decided to abolish democratic individual rights and

protections: for example freedom of the press, meetings and demonstrations were

cancelled out and abolished, as well as the right to privacy. When the elections were held

on the 5th March, the Nazis received nearly 44 percent of the vote, and with 8 percent

offered by the Conservatives, won a majority in the government.

The real attach which made World War II actually start was the attach on Poland the 1st

September 1939. In August of the same year Germany made a non – aggression pact with

the USSR (The Nazi – Soviet Pact), in which they secretly agreed to invade Poland and

share it. But soon after they invaded Poland, Germany concluded that Russia is

ineffective.

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A major tool of the Nazis' propaganda assault was the weekly Nazi newspaper Der

Stürmer (The Attacker). At the bottom of the front page of each issue, in bold letters, the

paper proclaimed, "The Jews are our misfortune!" Der Stürmer also regularly featured

cartoons of Jews in which they were caricatured as hooked-nosed and ape like. The

influence of the newspaper was far-reaching: by 1938 about a half million copies were

distributed weekly.

To make people even more convinced of the Jews’ bad characteristics, they introduced

Anti – Jewish education in schools. The first text book they used was called Trau keinem

Fuchs auf grüner Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid (Don't Trust A Fox in A Green

Meadow Or the Oath of A Jew). Some faithful Hitler’s followers also wrote books for

children against Jewish people. They always start with a very innocent and childish

introduction, which is followed by the main part which characterises Jewish people as the

Devil’s children and infamous liars who try to destroy humanity and must be extinct.

Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom) appeared in Germany in 1938 and leaves little

question regarding the intended Nazi solution to the "Jewish problem." The book begins

innocently enough by describing a favourite German pastime, picking wild mushrooms in

the woods. A young boy, Franz, accompanies his mother on a walk in a beautiful, wooded

area and helps her gather mushrooms. After carefully describing and showing Franz

several varieties of both edible and poisonous mushrooms, his mother compares the good

mushrooms to good people and the harmful mushrooms to bad people. The most

dangerous people are, of course, the Jews.

Franz proudly announces that he has learned in school that the Jews are bad people. His

mother continues her comparison of Jews to mushrooms by emphasizing that, just as

poisonous mushrooms are difficult to distinguish from edible ones, it is difficult to

differentiate Jews from Non-Jews because Jews can assume many forms. Franz's mother

repeatedly alludes to the terrible destructive force of the Jews. One Jew can destroy an

entire people because the Jew is the Devil in human form. The Jew poses a deadly threat

not only to the survival of the German people but to the survival of the world! It is

Germany's obligation to warn the rest of the world about this terrible toadstool and thereby

save humanity from destruction. Thus begins one of the most insidious storybooks ever

composed for children.

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Germans were now totally convinced by Hitler and the majority of German people hated

Jews. So they were also totally ignored and thrown out of the society, and got thrown in

very poor quarters, full of diseases, where Jews didn’t have food and thick blankets, so

they lived in hunger and coldness. They had to sleep very uncomfortably and often more

people had to sleep in one bed.

These quarters were called ghettos. Ghettos were also used before WWII, but for different

purposes, and usually were formed naturally without interference of outside people and

completely agreed about it and weren’t forced to live in these places. They were

sometimes very fine and rich quarters, as well as poor and left behind.

Jewish ghettos during WWII were places that a towns Jewish population was forced to live

in. They did not have access to food, the Germans gave small portions to them, there was

no clean water. Nazis used ghettos as a place to stake out sick and elderly Jews. They

usually took an entire population to concentration camps though it.

Concentration camps were originally a place in which non-combatants were

accommodated, as instituted by Lord KITCHENER during the Second Boer War (1899–

1902). The Boers, mainly women and children, were placed there officially for their own

protection from Kitchener's ‘scorched earth policy’ in the Transvaal and Cape Colony, but

actually to prevent them from aiding the guerrillas. Some 20,000 detainees died, largely as

a result of disease arising from unhygienic conditions.

During the NAZI regime in Germany (1933–45) concentration camps became places in

which to intern unwanted persons, specifically JEWISH PEOPLE, but also Protestant and

Catholic dissidents, communists, gypsies, trade unionists, homosexuals, and people with

disabilities. Described by GOEBBELS in August 1934 as ‘camps to turn anti-social

members of society into useful members by the most humane means possible’, they in fact

came to witness depraved acts of torture, slave labour, horror, and mass murder on a

scale unprecedented in any country in any century.

Some 200,000 had been through the camps before World began, when they were

increased in size and number. The camps (Konzetrazionslager, or KZ), administered by

the SS, were categorized into Arbeitslager, where prisoners were organized into labour

battalions, and Vernichtungslager, set up for the extermination and incineration of men,

women, and children. In eastern Europe prisoners were used initially in labour battalions or

in the tasks of genocide, until they too were exterminated. In such camps as Auschwitz,

gas chambers could kill and incinerate 12,000 people daily.

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In the west, Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald (a forced labour camp where doctors

conducted medical research on prisoners) were notorious. An estimated six

million Jews died in the camps, as well as some half million gypsies; in addition, millions of

Poles, Soviet prisoners-of-war, and other civilians perished. After the war many camp

officials were tried and punished, but others escaped. Maidanek was the first camp to be

liberated (by the Red Army, in July 1944). After 1953 West Germany paid $37 billion in

reparations to the surviving Jewish victims of Nazism.

The Final Solution was the genocide (mass murder) of the Jews by the Nazis in 1941-

1945.

As mentioned before, the Nazis thought of the Jews as a sub-race which makes the Arian

race dirty. They wanted to kill them all to make the world perfect, and this process was

called Final Solution. Before instituting it, the Nazi government had abolished the Jews'

rights, destroyed and confiscated their property, and sent them to concentration camps.

Many historians view the Kristallnacht (Night of broken glass) as the genesis of The Final

Solution as this event was triggered by the assassination of Ernst vom Rath by a 17-year-

old Jewish youth.

Mass killings of about one million Jews occurred before the plans of the Final Solution

were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to eradicate the entire

Jewish population that the extermination camps were built and industrialized mass

slaughter of Jews began in earnest. This decision to systematically kill the Jews of Europe

was made either by the time of or at the Wannsee conference, which took place in Berlin,

in the Wannsee Villa on January 20, 1942. The conference was chaired by Reinhard

Heydrich. He was acting under the authority given to him by Reichsmarshall Göring in a

letter dated July 31, 1941. Göring instructed Heydrich to devise "...the solution of the

Jewish problem..." During the conference, there was a discussion held by the group of

German Nazi officials how best to handle the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". A

surviving copy of the minutes of this meeting was found by the Allies in 1947, too late to

serve as evidence during the first Nuremberg Trials.

By the summer of 1942, Operation Reinhard began the systematic extermination of the

Jews, although hundreds of thousands already had been killed by death squads and in

mass pogroms. In Heinrich Himmler's speech at the Posen Conference of October 6,

1943, Himmler, for the first time, clearly elucidated to all assembled leaders of the Reich to

what the "Final Solution" referred.

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The racial policy of Nazi Germany were a set of policies and laws implemented by Nazi

Germany, asserting the superiority of the "Aryan race," and based on a specific racist

doctrine which claimed scientific legitimacy. It was combined with a eugenics

programme that aimed to achieve "racial purity" of the "Aryan race" by using compulsory

sterilizations and extermination of the Untermensch (or "sub-humans"), which eventually

culminated in the Holocaust. These policies targeted, first of all, Jews, who

were considered as the most "inferior race" of all on a hierarchy that included Jews at the

bottom and the Herrenvolk (or "master race") of the Volksgemeinschaft (or "national

community") at the top.

 Genocide refers to the mass murder of a tribe or an entire people (genos=tribe, people;

cide=killing). According to Yehuda Bauer, one of the most prominent historians of the Nazi

Genocide of the Jews, the term was first coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin , who defined

it as "a synchronized attack" on the moral, political, cultural, religious, economic and social

aspects of a people's life, involving a "policy of depopulation, introducing a starvation

rationing system" and carrying out systematic "mass killings". After World War II, the

United Nations convened hearings and formulated a legal definition of Genocide as an

international crime in times of war and peace. This was called the Convention on

Genocide of 1948, which was influenced and informed by the Nazi Genocide of the Jews.

The Holocaust has been a horrifying event that should never been forgotten for if we did

something like that could happen again!

As I mentioned before, it has killed many people, and many people lost their families and

friends in it, so it affected the people who survived too.

After the holocaust many people killed themselves because they couldn’t bare the huge

loss that they experienced!

I personally think that the holocaust was one of greatest mistakes mankind did, because of

all the people who have been murdered without any important and reasonable reason, but

also because of how negatively it affected the world’s economy. There were less people,

which means less working force, less taxes were paid to the states, etc...

The general idea of the Holocaust was useless, and horrid. People without any guilt were

killed just because they belonged to a different race, culture, nation, or tradition. According

to my opinion that honestly didn’t make any sense at all. The fact that you look different,

talk differently, behave differently, or dress differently, does not have anything to do with

our minds, rights, and personality. There is no such thing that can allow you to kill

someone, and even less to kill entire nations!

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Everyone is different and has a different character and personality, but that’s a fact that

counts for every single individual. If you belong to the same nation, culture or race, it does

not mean that you have to have the same ideas as someone that belongs too, as well as

when you don’t it doesn’t mean that you have to have a different opinion then someone

which doesn’t.

Everyone has its own rights and opinions, and its everyone’s job to respect them and

tolerate them.

I will certainly not support racism, and I’ll try to convince my classmates and friends to

support my opinion and not to make differences between people for their appearance,

tradition nation or culture.

Resources:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/holocaust/

http://www.holocaustsurvivors.org/

http://www.holocaust-history.org/

http://pakistanthinktankyouth.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/holocaust_kwhuq_3868.jpg

http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/camp_children1.jpg

http://www.woodburysch.com/staff/userfiles/efirth/image/anne%20frank.jpg

http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/2158911/2159086/2159087/070221_CL_HitlerEX.jpg

1 1. Great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of life, especially by fire. 2. a. Holocaust The genocide of European Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II b. A massive slaughter 3. A sacrificial offering that is consumed entirely by flames.

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