Learning goal 5: Holocaust

• History
• Middelbare school
• havo, vwo
• Leerjaar 3

The Time of World Wars

Goal 5: You explain the ways in which the Jewish population of Europe got discriminated and murdered. 

The Holocaust

From discrimination to extermination

Prof, Yehuda Bauer, historian

About understanding the Holocaust:

“The problem is that the nazis could do this not because they were inhuman, but because they were human”.

Genocide: 

The crime of genocide is characterised by the specific intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group by killing its members or by creating living conditions that prevent the group from surviving.

Holocaust: 

The systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution (Endlösung) to the Jewish question".

Five phases that led to the Holocaust: 

1. discrimination
2. isolation
3. concentration
4. deportation
5. extermination

Phase 1: discrimination

Jews are defined as the “other” through legalized discrimination.

How?

• Through racism: categorizing people into fixed categories based on (supposed) bloodlines.
• Through laws: The Nuremberg laws (1935) defined who was a Jew and who was not a Jew.
• Through propaganda: Cartoons, books, movies, and posters portrayed Jews as different from (and inferior to) their Aryan neighbors.

boycott Jewish shops

April 1933

On April 1, 1933, the Nazi regime organizes a boycott of Jewish goods. SA men line up in front of Jewish-owned shops. They paint the Star of David on shop windows, hinder customers from entering the stores and carry signs with anti-Jewish slogans.

www.britannica.com

Phase2. Isolation: 

Once individuals are labeled as Jews, they are separated from mainstream society

How?

• Through laws: Jews were not allowed to attend German schools or universities.They could not go to public parks or movie theaters. 
• Through social practices: Many Germans stopped “being friends” with Jews. 
• Through the economy: Jews were excluded from the civil service and Jewish businesses were taken over by Germans. Jewish doctors and lawyers lost their license.

Nuremberg Laws

September, 1935

The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag.

Phase 3. Concentration: 

Jews are forcibly removed to segregated sections of Eastern 

European cities called ghettos

How?

• Ghettos were walled-off areas of a city where Jews were forced to live. They were not allowed to leave their ghetto without permission from Nazi officials. 
• Conditions in the ghettos were crowded and filthy. Many families were forced to share one small apartment. There was limited access to proper waste disposal. Jews had to give up their property and valuables. There were very few jobs in a ghetto. Food and medicine was scarce.

Phase 4. Deportation:

 Jews are transported from ghettos to concentration camps 

and death camps.

How?

• Because these camps were located away from major cities, victims had to be transported to them via train. Some rides lasted for several days. Thousands of prisoners died en route to the camps.

Phase 5: mass extermination

On arrival in the death camps the Jews went through a 

selection process: those who could work  and those who could not work. The latter group was immediately killed in the gas chambers.

How?

• Victims were told to undress for a disinfection shower. Once in the shower, which had actual shower heads, gas was poured into the room, killing everybody inside.
• The gas was Zyklon B, a pesticide. These are crystals that, when mixed with oxygen, spread a poisonous gas.
• Afterwards, the bodies were cremated in ovens.

What is a concentration camp? 

The Nazis built the first concentration camp in 1933 as a place to detain (place-byforce) communists and other opponents to the Nazi Party. At the beginning of World War II, the Nazis began building more concentration camps where they could imprison “enemies of the state,” including Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, as well as prisoners or war. Many concentration camps functioned as labor camps,

where inmates worked until they either starved to death or died of disease.

What is a death camp? 

Death camps, also called extermination camps, were designed for the purpose of killing large numbers of people in the most efficient manner possible.

Who were affected by these camps?

Of course, there were the victims; millions of children, women, and men suffered as inmates in this camps. But there were also bureaucrats—the train conductors, prison guards, cooks, secretaries, etc.—that made sure that millions of victims were transported to camps throughout Europe and who ran the camps once the victims arrived.