Part 2 Key Questions

1. How is the decision made and implemented to commit a European-wide genocide?

2. What were the major effects of WWII on American society including minorities and women?

A. Early Jewish Persecution• 1935 Nuremburg laws in Germany

stripped German Jews of citizenship and rights

• 1938 Kristellnacht Nazis unleashed wave of violence against Jews attacking them in their homes, synagogues and businesses

• Tens of thousands of European Jews fled for countries that would admit them

III. The Jewish Genocide

• Among them distinguished musicians, architects, writers, scholars who enriched the cultural life of their adopted nation

• Refugee physicists like Enrique Ferme contributed to developing the atomic bomb for the U.S.

• Discriminatory Immigration laws in place at time

• Congress refused to change the quotas for Jews• FDR would not exert pressure on lawmakers to

do so• Majority of Americans opposed letting in more

Jews (isolationist, anti-immigrant, anti-semitic sentiments)

B. America and the Jewish refugees

Jewish refugees on board MS St Louis in 1939

while docked in Havana, Cuba

Stopped by US Authorities and

forced to return to Europe

Video: Jewish Refugees – The

Roosevelts

C. The Jewish Genocide• Onset of the war accelerates the

process of elimination– Deportation of “undesirables” into

concentration camps– In Eastern Europe (esp. Poland) , forced

relocation of Jews into Ghettoes• Mandatory wearing of clothing to identify

them as Jews• Forced labor• Not allowed to leave• Hunger, fatigue, disease kill thousands of

Jews by month

Other Victims of the Holocaust

• Political opponents– Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats,

and trade union leaders

• Roma (Gypsies)– On racial grounds - Accused of being work-

shy/asocial, 1st victims of gas chambers

• Poles/Slavic peoples (considered racially inferior)

• Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals, mentally + physically disabled

• Video: The Path to Nazi Genocide

Radicalization after USSR invasion

• German movement East places much larger Jewish population under Nazi control

• Einsatzgruppen follow troops and exterminate all racial and political enemies– 1 million people gunned down 1941-1943

• Method eventually considered too inefficient and wearing on assassins

First Extermination Camps Fall 1941

• Built in East (e.g. Belzec, Poland)• December 1st gassings occur in

Chelmno, Poland in trucks• Turning Point of conscious policy of

total extermination

CAMPS IN

EUROPE

1933 -1945

Mass Extermination

• The Final Solution– Genocide on European scale as of 1941–Made official at Wannsee Conference Jan

20, 1942– SS Reinhard Heydrich defines

administrative and practical methods to exterminate all Jews in Europe

– Physically capable Jews used in the German war effort, all others eliminated

– Gypsies sent to death camps from 1943

Planned and methodical organization

• 2 sorts of camps, overseen by the SS– Concentration Camps• Work camps created after 1933, • e.g. Dachau, stone quarry: Mauthausen

(Austria), chemical plant: Auschwitz• Conditions variable: death more or less

frequent from overwork, abuse, starvation• Detainees diverse, resistance members

progressively sent, some camps only female• Systematic treatment of humiliation to make

prisoners feel a loss of humanity

Death Camps

• In Poland– Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chalmno,

Majdanek, Sobibor & Treblinka

• Death organized in an industrial fashion• Populations throughout Europe

transported like animals in wagon cars– Apt workers separated from the weak who

are killed in gas chambers– Bodies burned or buried in communal graves– Detainees used as guinea pigs for medical

experiments under authority of doctors like Josef Mengele in Auschwitz

Outcome• 10 million people killed from Nazi

extermination policy• Jewish victims the most numerous: – 5.1 – 5.8 million deaths– Half the Jewish population in 1939– Gypsies suffer 240,000 deaths (1/3

population)

• Regions Unevenly affected– Extermination more systematic in the East– The Polish Jewish population decreased by

89% between 1939 and 1945

Local Reactions to Nazi Extermination Policy

• Occupied territories of Nazi Germany reacted differently– Local governments and civilian populations cooperated

differently depending on the country• Resistance of Danish & Swedish authorities and

populations saved Jewish population of the country• French collaboration (state and people) led to

extermination of 28% of Jewish population• Opposition of Finnish and Bulgarian governments (Nazi

allies) led to end of deporting their Jewish citizens to extermination camps

• Jewish populations resisted policies in some areas– Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

• Video: To Live and Die with Honor Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (4’45)• Video: Holocaust Survivor Barbara Steiner

Country Number of Deaths

% of Jewish population

exterminated

Germany 120,000 50%

Austria 50,000 83%

Belgium 24,000 27%

Estonia 2,000 44%

France 75,000 28%

Greece 60,000 81%

Hungary 180,000 45%

Italy 9,000 18%

Latvia 70,000 74%

Lithuania 130,000 90%

Norway 1,000 50%

The Netherlands 100,000 71%

Poland 3,000,000 89.5%

Romania 270,000 36%

Czechoslovakia 260,000 82.5%

USSR 700,000 23%

Yugoslavia 60,000 80%

Survivors of the Concentration Camp of Dachau celebrate their release

HOMEWORK

Reading MaterialMastering Modern World History

Part I. War and International Relations

Chapter 6 The Second World War, 1939-1945

Genocide (pp. 111-117)