The Holocaust
When you think of the holocaust, what do you think about? Is it the millions of Jews lives that were taken? Or is it a great, but wicked speaker named Adolph Hitler? Adolph Hitler, Auschwitz, and American involvement are some key roles in the holocaust.
Adolph Hitler is probably one of the worst people ever to live. When people talk of evil deeds he is at the top of the list. He was a man of words, and could use them to his advantage. He had an ability to talk and make the Germans believe that the Jews were the reason for the problems in their country; so he gave them the idea to move them out. Then under his command they forced the Jews in to death camps.
After Adolph Hitler convinced the Germans that the Jews were the center of all problems, he started to make camps to place all the Jews. These camps weren’t nice places to be. They were all used to kill millions of Jews. Auschwitz was the most feared of all. Over 2 million Jews were killed there in ways that aren’t humane, such as shooting them, or gassing them in a chamber, or even burning them alive. This camp even bought little farms and houses for places to kill. They had the ever so famous Little Red house and the Little White house. These were places that they took Jews to kill them.
How does America get involved in this? They started to ban Jews in America. Nazism started up here in the land of the free. This made it harder for them to come to America and get out of harms way in Germany. They were leaving one country to come to another that feared the Jews taking jobs away, and believed they had to take action as did the Germans. Organizations tried to help bring people in to the country, and the government was making it almost imposable to get in.
After The Great depression and World War I, Germany was left in a fragile state. The economy was ruined, many people were unemployed and all hope was lost. The Nazis believed it wasn’t their own fault for the mess, but those who were inferior to the German people. These Nazi beliefs lead to and resulted in cruelty and suffering for the Jewish people. The Nazis wanted to purify Germany and put an end to all the inferior races, including Jews because they considered them a race. They set up concentration camps, where Jews and other inferior races were put into hard labor and murdered. They did this because Nazis believed that they were the only ones that belonged in Germany because they were pure Germans. This is the beginning of World War 2. The Nazi beliefs that led to and resulted in the cruelty and suffering of the Jewish people
The Nazi’s put the Jews, and the people they wanted to, like homosexuals, disabled people, and people with different political views in Concentration Camps. The Nazi’s said “These were for teaching their enemies to be Nazi’s”, but in fact many died there. The well known concentration camp during the Holocaust was Auschwitz. Auschwitz was made u...
Jews tried to escape this targeting however. As the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh states, even before the Holocaust, Jewish people had to flee Germany due to discrimination and anti-Semitism. They most of the time emigrated to Palestine, England, and the United States. Small numbers of Jews also immigrated to countries in South America. The amount of Jews that immigrated took an even larger jump when Hitler took leadership in 1933, especially when he introduced the Nuremberg Laws which began to actively restrict Jews in Germany (“Jewish Life during the Holocaust”). In the end we see that anti-Semitism, Germany’s loss of World War I and its economic decline, and a racial struggle between Aryans and Jews caused the Jews to be singled out for extermination.
The Jewish people were targeted, hunted, tortured, and killed, just for being Jewish, Hitler came to office on January 20, 1933; he believed that the German race had superiority over the Jews in Germany. The Jewish peoples’ lives were destroyed; they were treated inhumanly for the next 12 years, “Between 1933 and 1945, more than 11 million men, women, and children were murdered in the Holocaust. Approximately six million of these were Jews” (Levy). Hitler blamed a lot of the problems on the Jewish people, being a great orator Hitler got the support from Germany, killing off millions of Jews and other people, the German people thought it was the right thing to do. “To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community” (History.com Staff).
The Holocaust was an extremely horrific period of history. Millions were killed and lost everything, including money, family, and dignity. However, it has taught many lessons. We can study it today to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.
Before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the Jewish people lived all throughout Europe freely, just like everyone else. The Jewish people, mostly lived in Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania. They came from all different walks of life and all had a different life story. The Jewish people were able to talk, dress, and work, how, when and where they chose. They could work as an accountant, a doctor, a teacher, or a farmer. The Jewish people could live their dreams. If they dreamt it, they could pursue it. The Jewish people lived a perfectly normal life as free human beings, the way it should be. The Nazis changed everything when they gained enough power and started sending the Jewish population into ghettos. There, the Jews’ lives changed dramatically. They were confined to the over-crowded ghettos, which were horrible places where no human being should ever have had to experience as they were locked in like wild animals, starved and without other basic human needs.
During the time there was a group of people thought of as “outcasts” for a reason that was given by Germanys dictator. These people were known as the Jewish. They had beliefs and ways of life that they enjoyed. The population in Germany that weren’t Jewish thought of their ways as unacceptable. They beat them tortured them, destroyed family stores, discriminated them, gave them labels, they also gave them things that weren’t supposed to be given. Between 1939-1945 the Jews were sent to concentrati...
January 30th 1933 was just the beginning of a long journey for many people from the cause of an ethnic conflict. This particular conflict known as the Holocaust was between two groups, the Nazis and the Jews. Jewish councils fought to protect the population; the Nazis killed the president of the Jewish council for not giving up a list of names. The Holocaust started off in Germany, but later spread all across Eastern Europe. There are different causes, goals, and steps taken from both sides in this conflict where many people were killed for being of a particular group.
Eighteen million Europeans went through the Nazi concentration camps. Eleven million of them died, almost half of them at Auschwitz alone.1 Concentration camps are a revolting and embarrassing part of the world’s history. There is no doubt that concentration camps are a dark and depressing topic. Despite this, it is a subject that needs to be brought out into the open. The world needs to be educated on the tragedies of the concentration camps to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust. Hitler’s camps imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of Jews for over five years. Life in the Nazi concentration camps was full of terror and death for its individual prisoners as well as the entire Jewish society.
Fuel…. Flame…. Fire…. Inferno…. Ash…. Historically, the word holocaust meant a religious rite in which an offering was completely consumed by fire. In current times the word holocaust has changed to a darker more tragic meaning and refers to more than a religious sacrifice. During World War II, a fire raged throughout Eastern Europe. Guns, bombs, and military groups did not ignite this fire. This fire burned intensely in the hearts of men -- sparked by centuries-old prejudice. One man, Adolf Hitler, took this flicker of hatred and fanned the flames. Hitler energized and stoked the embers, spreading them throughout Eastern Europe causing widespread destruction in the pursuit of a perfect Aryan nation. Although the Holocaust is measured over the course of twelve long years, it does not begin with the mass murder of innocent victims. Michael Berenbaum, a survivor of the Holocaust believes, "Age-old prejudice led to discrimination, discrimination to incarceration, incarceration to elimination" (Altman 1). Thus, the progression of prejudice in the Holocaust began as a flicker of hatred in the heart of a leader and became a blazing inferno consuming the lives of the men, women, and children who crossed its radical path.
back at me." This is said to show that Wiesel was on the verge of death from
The Holocaust was the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis through an officially sanctioned, government-ordered, systematic plan of mass annihilation. As many as six million Jews died, almost two-thirds of the Jews of Europe. Although the Holocaust took place during World War II, the war was not the cause of the Holocaust. The war played a role in covering up the genocide of the Jewish people. How could this have happened? The answers can be found by understanding how violence of this magnitude can evolve out of prejudice based on ignorance, fear, and misunderstanding about minority groups and other
Gunshots fired, glass shattered, blood everywhere, cattle cars, concentration camps, gas chambers, deaths. What happened to the Jews of Hungary at Auschwitz? In the 1940s Hungary put anti-Jewish laws into place. These laws required Jews to be separate from other people. They went as far as not allowing Jews to go to the same school with other people and not letting Jews get married to other people. As of 1941 the Jewish population in Hungary was 825,000. Germany wanted Hungary to deport Hungarian Jews however Hungary refused due to political reasons. By 1944 German forces occupied Hungary. In May 1944 the Nazi’s were rounding up the Hungarian Jews to put them on trains and deport them to concentration camps. The Jewish population in Hungary decreased to 255,000 in 1944. In 1942 Auschwitz became the largest site for the murder of Jews and more than 1.1 million men, women, and children lost their lives here-most were Jews. Adolf Eichmann was the one who was in charge of the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Between May 14 and July 9, approximately 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It was in December 1948, when it was approved unanimous the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide at France which became the 260th resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations. What made the leaders of the 41 States create and sign this document in which the term Genocide was legally defined? This document serves as a permanent reminder of the actions made by the Nazis and their leader Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust where more than five million of European Jews were killed. In summary I will explain what were the events that leaded the ordinary Germans kill more than six million Jews in less than five years. To achieve this goal, I will base my arguments on the Double Spiral Degeneration Model provided by Doctor Olson during the spring semester of the Comparative Genocide class.