Transcript Holocaust Research Terms You Should Know!

2. Holocaust Terms and
Events
Kristallnacht
“The Night of Broken Glass”
• In 1938 many Polish Jews living in
Germany were rounded up and sent to
a concentration camp, including the
family of Herschel Grynszpan, a 17 year
old Polish Jew living in Paris.
• Grynszpan went to the German
Embassy in Paris and shot a German
diplomat.
• In retaliation for this Jewish murder of a
German diplomat, Nazi Propaganda
Minister, Joseph Goebbels gave the
signal for a nationwide pogrom* against
the Jews.
*Pogrom
• Pogroms originated in Russia. They
were government sanctioned riots and
vandalism against Jews and Jewishowned property.
• On November 9 and 10, 1938, violence
raged throughout Germany against
Jews. Synagogues were set on fire,
Jewish businesses were vandalized,
many Jews were killed, and thousands
were rounded up and sent to
concentration camps.
• Shattered glass littered the streets and
created the name “Kristallnacht” or
“Night of Broken Glass” to memorialize
the event.
• This event marks the beginning of the
Holocaust.
• The Jews were forced to pay the Nazis
for the damages done to their own
property for Kristallnacht!
• Three days after Kristallnacht the Nazis
enacted policies that segregated Jews from
going to theatres, parks, schools, plus
prohibited them from owning and operating
businesses. Jewish businesses were taken
over by the Nazis.
Selection
• Selection means being chosen to continue
living because you are still physically fit for
slave labor.
• Selections occurred immediately upon arrival
at a camp.
• Those who were too old or too young, or that
appeared to be ill were immediately killed.
• Selections were held on a frequent
basis within camps to weed out those
prisoners that were becoming weak or
ill.
The Final Solution
• This was the Nazi code word for their
plan to annihilate every Jew living in
Europe.
• The Nazis had several other plans to
get the Jews out of Germany before
arriving at the Final Solution to the
Jewish Question:
• 1. Their first idea was to deport every
Jew to another country. The incident of
the St. Louis shows that this wasn’t a
viable option since no country wanted a
flood of refugees.
2. After the Nazis conquered France, they
wanted to use the French island of
Madagascar as a Jewish slave colony.
This was a good idea until Germany
invaded Poland.
• The Republic of
Madagascar is an
island country off the
coast of southeastern
Africa in the Indian Ocean.
• Madagascar is the fourth
largest island in the world.
Madagascar is about
1,000 miles long and 250
miles wide.
• Poland had the largest Jewish population in
all of Europe. Now there would be too many
Jews to send to Madagascar.
• After the September 1939 German invasion
of Poland, the Nazis developed a
comprehensive plan to annihilate the Jews
but they didn’t know how to achieve this. On
January 20, 1942, fifteen high ranking Nazi
and German government leaders met near a
lake in Berlin known as Wannsee. Reinhard
Heydrich called the meeting where the way to
achieve the “final solution to the Jewish
question” was formed . Not one person at the
meeting objected to killing every Jew in
Europe, thus giving government sanction to
1. Round up all of the Jews and
segregate them into ghettos so they
would have a large number of them
centralized in one location.
2. Create the Einsatzguppen (mobile
killing units) to massacre whole Jewish
communities.
3. Create death camps where large
numbers of people could be killed
efficiently and cost-effectively, and
their bodies could be disposed of
without attracting public attention.
4. Trains would be used to transport
victims to the camps
The Einsatzgruppen
• Mobile killing squads made up of
special duty units, composed primarily
of SS and police personnel, assigned to
kill Jews and other undesirables in
Poland and the Soviet Union.
• The Nazis’ first attempt at mass
executions operated under the
command of Heinrich Heydrich.
• They followed the German army into
Poland and rounded up “undesirables”
in every village, transported the victims
to a wooded area, stripped them of their
clothing, told them to lie down in a ditch,
and shot them.
• The Einsatzgruppen killed more than a million
Jews and tens of thousands of Soviet and
Polish political and religious officials, as well
as gypsies.
• They shot men, women, and children without
regard for age or gender.
• One of the worst massacres occurred near
the Ukranian city of Kiev where 34,000
people were machine-gunned to death in a
two day orgy of executions.
•
This first method of mass execution
encountered some problems for the Nazis:
1. The killers needed to look at their victims,
and as hardened and brain-washed as
they were, they turned to alcohol to help them
accomplish their work and also to forget what
they did. Many developed psychological
problems.
2. Gun fire attracted attention and they wanted to
keep their mass executions a secret, not only
from their own citizens, but from the world.
3. The Nazis needed to find a more
economical and efficient way to kill
a larger number of people, quickly
and more cheaply.
a. They experimented with many
methods including blowing
people up, but their remains
flew up into trees, etc. and were
difficult to hide.
• The Nazi idea to use gas as a means
for mass murder came from their
experiments with using gas to kill
victims in the T-4 Program.
The T-4 Program
• In the fall of 1939 the German government
established the Euthanasie Programme
under the direction of Philip Bouhler and Dr.
Karl Brandt.
• The headquarters for this program were at
Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin and the code
name for this program was derived from its
address: T-4 Program.
• The word “euthanasia” means “mercy killing”
and is synonymous with physician-assisted
suicide. The Nazis corrupted this word.
• The Nazi regime’s goal was to remove those
people unfit to live and produce offspring from
their population.
• The first phase of this program came under
the Nuremberg Laws and required the
sterilization of anyone deemed “unfit.”
• Those “unfit” included Jews, gypsies, and any
person with a physical or mental defect. This
included all handicapped people or those with
incurable diseases or mental conditions in
Germany. These victims were referred to as
“life unworthy of life.”
• The very first victims were newborn babies
that presented defects at birth. They were
killed at birth in a discreet manner without
their mothers knowing it .
• Euthanasia progressed to handicapped
hospitalized patients that were killed by
doctors with lethal injections of drugs. Their
death certificates would state that they died of
complications of pneumonia, etc.
• Before long gas chambers were constructed
inside hospitals and handicapped patients
were placed inside of them in groups and
killed with carbon monoxide gas.
• Next, the Nazis constructed special
gassing facilities that were built to look
like medical institutions on the outside,
but were killing centers for the
handicapped.
Bernberg Euthanasia Facility
• Between December 1939 and August
1941, about 50,000 Germans were
secretly killed by the Euthanasia
Program.
• Under the T-4 Program it is estimated
that as many as 400,000 may have
been killed. The Nazis destroyed the
records so that an accurate accounting
can’t be made.
• It is important to note that when people began
to suspect that their loved ones were being
killed by medical facilities and physicians,
they were outraged. The Christian church
leaders spoke out against it and wrote to Nazi
officials. Hitler capitulated to public pressure
and the program was stopped for a year
before secretly starting up again.
A. This is important because it shows that
the Nazis responded to public pressure.
• At the end of World War II when
American troops went into German
hospitals, they found that doctors were
still gassing civilians in euthanasia
centers. Both doctors and nurses that
were found to have participated in this
program were put on trial in 1965.
None were punished, and many saw
nothing wrong with what they were
doing.
The Gestapo
• Created by Hermann Goring on April 26,
1933.
• Transferred to Heinrich Himmler in April
1934.
• Himmler answered only to Hitler and through
the SS was free to define “legality” and was
unhindered by moral constraints.
• When Himmler became the head of all of the
German police in 1936, the Gestapo was led
by Reinhard Heydrich.
• The Gestapo became a tool of terror, often
placing people in “protective custody” before
sending them to concentration camps.
• Orchestrated pogroms against Jews including
what came to be known as Kristallnacht.
• Some of the SS were part of the
Einsatzgruppen.
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Most of the SS were professional men
which included lawyers, physicians,
and even clergymen. They were people
that had “a heightened sense of duty.”
Pogroms
• Government sanctioned riots against a group
of people because of religious, racial, or
ethnic prejudice.
• Began in Russia in the late 1800’s under the
Czar as a way to drive Jews out of Russia
• Adopted by the Nazis as a way to terrorize
Jewish communities and kill Jewish citizens.
Ghettos
• Segregated, walled-in areas of cities where Jews
were forced to relocate before they were transported
to concentration or death camps.
• Jews were made to wear some kind of outward
identification sign, such as a yellow star or an
armband with a Star of David.
• The first ghetto was created by the
Nazis on October 8, 1939, in the Lodz
district of Poland. Other large ghettos
in Poland were Lublin, Warsaw, and
Krakow. Ghettos were formed in many
Eastern European cities.
• Warsaw had the largest Jewish
population in Europe with Jews
comprising 30% of the city’s population.
• About 400,000 Jews were forced to move into
the Warsaw ghetto. German authorities
forced ghetto residents to live in an area of
1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2
persons per room.
• Besides being over-crowded, the residents
had restricted food rations thus producing
hunger and then starvation. Squalid living
conditions created an environment for
diseases to breed which brought about
immense suffering and death.
•
During 1942 and 1943 the Nazis “liquidated”
the ghettos by deporting the inhabitants to
death camps, or by murdering them in the
ghettos.
•
In the summer of 1942 the Nazis removed
300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to
the Treblinka death camp. About 60,000
people remained in the ghetto.
1. Of those remaining in the ghetto, 750 young
men and women decided to fight to the death
rather than be sent like sheep to the slaughter
house .
2. They were able to obtain some
guns and ammunition and train
themselves to fight.
3. With their limited resources, these
brave young people were able to
defend themselves against the
Nazis from April 19 - May 16,
1943. Finally, the Germans began
burning the ghetto, building by
building until they either killed or burned
to death everyone.