Holocaust

Through out history the Jewish people have been abused, blamed, stolen from, and even put to death because of their religion. Even in the Middle Ages they were forced to wear marks on their clothing, identifying them as Jews. Myths emerged of Jews stealing Christian children because they needed their blood for their religious rituals. The period of time, 1933 to 1945, which is known as the holocaust, or shoah in Hebrew, saw many autocracies committed. Not only against the Jewish population, but also against any minority group that was not favored of the Nazi regime. Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist came into power the year 1933, but he had a political history reaching farther back than that. Germany was in economical crisis that had resulted from their loss in the First World War, and a young Hitler was the head of the NSDAP (National Socialist Party of German Workers.) By the 1920’s the NSDAP was spreading anti-Semitism feelings. While economical situations grew worse, the party’s popularity rose among the working class. At this stage the National Socialists down played their anti-Semitism views. The Nazis were elected in 1933 and the Nuremberg

Laws were immediately introduced. These laws stripped Germany’s Jewish population of many of the basic rights as citizens of that county. Jews were not allowed to marry non-Jews and were banned from many professions. Jews were to mark all their clothing with the Star of David so that any one that saw them would know that they were to be treated as “sub-humans”. On November 6, 1938, a German ambassador was murdered while in France by a young Jewish boy whose family had been deported from Germany. This was the excuse that the Nazis needed to make war on the Jews. Synagogues were burned to the ground, along with Jewish books. Shops owned by Jews were looted and destroyed. This event became to be known as Kristallnacht or “The Night of Broken Glass”. Nearly 100 Jews were killed and another 26,000 were arrested and taken away to work camps. The German government blamed the Jews for the chaos and forced them compensation for all the damage. During the following years all those who where able to leave the country did so. While this was happening Hitler was further developing Nazi policy. He decided that he would have to take over other lands to provide Lebensraum, or “living space” for the pure Aryan race. To the east of Germany lay Poland and the Soviet Union and Poland, home of the Slavs. Nazis considered Slavs to be an inferior race, so Hitler set about conquering their lands. In the following two years he had conquered Belgium, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Luxemburg, and France. In 1941 he invaded Greece, the USSR, and Yugoslavia. By then Hitler had most of Europe’s Jewish population at his mercy. Jews who had fled Germany found themselves trapped once more. The German army now found it’s self-opposing The Soviet Union and Britain’s armies. As Hitler took over Europe he treated all Jews with the same cruelty that he had shown to those who live in Germany. His plan to create a major death camp in Poland to hold all the Jews would eventually lead to the mass genocide.

In 1941 desperate measures were introduced in the action that the Nazis called “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. Jewish populations were forced to live in ghettos, where they were deliberately deprived of some of the resources needed to stay alive. Hundreds of thousands were forced onto cattle trucks and transported to death camps. There they were starved, beaten, worked to death, shot, or gassed to death. It was not only the Jews that received this treatment. Gypsies, communists, gays, Jehovah’s witnesses, and anyone who was mentally or physically disabled were exterminated. These crimes were kept secret from the general public. Families of the insane or mentally ill were told that they were receiving the best medical care. Even the Jews being sent to death camps were unaware of their fate. Those being deported were told to pack all their possessions, because they would need them. They were issued postcards to reassure the families of their wellbeing, but these postcards were sent after their deaths. Even the death camps were disguised. Fake signs posted at entrances gave the impression of a train or bus station, even the gas chambers were referred to as “showers”.

Despite the Nazi attempts to keep the details of the death camps secret, news soon spread. Partisan