Editing The Holocaust

{{Quote|The Holocaust was the most evil crime ever committed.|Stephen E. Ambrose}}

'''The Holocaust''', also known as '''the Shoah''' and the '''Final Solution to the Jewish Question''' (or simply the '''Final Solution''') was a government-orchestrated mass [[genocide]] that affected approximately eleven million people including six million Jews during the final years of [[World War II]]. The Holocaust was orchestrated by the [[Nazi Party|Nazi German]] dictator, [[Adolf Hitler]], and it advocated the idea of doing away with several fragments of society. This included other groups such as: Black people (including African immigrants), LGBT people (including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender); Slavs (including Russians, Ukrainians, Serbians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks), Romani, Greeks; various Christian denominations (primarily Jehovah’s Witnesses and Catholics); Brown people (including Mulattoes and Mamelukes); communists, socialists, capitalists, anarchists, feminists, and other dissidents and Allied POWs, especially Soviet POWs.

Though the Nazis were the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust, the wider network of regimes that comprised the [[Axis Powers]] (such as [[Benito Mussolini]]'s Italy, the Croatian [[Ustaše]], and, to a lesser extent, [[Imperial Japan]], among others) also participated in the genocide. Even the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Soviet Union]] was briefly involved.  

Everyone of these people was seen as "sub-humans", people that was not fit for the [[Nazi Party]]'s ideology of what they referred to as the Aryans, that was seen as the "master race" of Germany. Also that the Jews was seen as "responsible" by the Nazis that Germany lost [[World War I]] and causing the country's economy to collapse, the so-called "Stab-in-the-back myth".

{{Quote|If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!|Adolf Hitler}}The Holocaust was established through stages. At first, the German government passed laws that excluded Jews from social affairs, such as the [[Nuremberg Laws]] of 1935, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and forbade Jews to marry non-Jewish Germans.

The deportees were taken from their homes to railway stations and were put on trains to the Polish border, where Polish border guards sent them back into Germany. This stalemate continued for days in the pouring rain, with the Jews marching without food or shelter between the borders. Four thousand were granted entry into Poland, but the remaining 8,000 were forced to stay at the border. They waited there in harsh conditions to be allowed to enter Poland. A British newspaper told its readers that hundreds "are reported to be lying about, penniless and deserted, in little villages along the frontier near where they had been driven out by the [[Gestapo]] and left." Conditions in the refugee camps "were so bad that some actually tried to escape back into Germany and were shot", recalled a British woman who was sent to help those who had been expelled.

 

 

 

 

In January 1942, [[Reinhard Heydrich]], head of the [[Reich Security Main Office]], hosted the [[Wannsee Conference]] in Wannsee, a suburb in Berlin. The purpose of the conference was to coordinate the German government's response to the Jewish Question. After 90 minutes of discussion, the conference ended with the conclusion that the Jews were to be deported to the "labour camps" in Occupied Poland. Later that year, Hitler's personal secretary [[Martin Bormann]] signed an order that the Jewish problem was to be solved via "employment of ruthless force in the special camps in the East"; i.e., extermination in the camps. As a result, many European Jews were forcibly taken to the various camps set up in Nazi territories on freight trains. If any Jewish person was fortunate enough to survive the trip to the death camps, they would almost always find themselves being executed in [[Gas Chamber|gas chambers]] disguised as shower rooms. This was inspired by the use of gas chambers in the concurrent [[Aktion T4]] program. Others would be put to work doing extremely difficult forced labor with little to no food, and often died from overwork or starvation. This was part of the so called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", to exterminate all the Jews in Europe.

 

 

These systematic mass murders continued until the end of WWII in 1945.

Other Nazis that were involved in the genocide, such as [[Hermann Göring]] and [[Heinrich Himmler]], committed suicide before they even got to trial; others such as [[Amon Göth]] were captured and put into Soviet gulags or were executed. Still others, such as [[Adolf Eichmann]], [[Franz Stangl]], and [[Klaus Barbie]], remained on the lam for decades before being captured.

{{Quote|For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.|Elie Wiesel}}The Holocaust is believed to be the most horrific example of humanity at its worst. The Holocaust was also the most significant genocide to have ever occurred in the 20th century, leading to the deaths of approximately 11 million people, including children. Many people were killed in absolutely deplorable ways, including various forms of sadistic [[torture]]. Many victims of the Nazi Party's campaign of carnage would either be burned alive to death in the various ovens scattered throughout the camp, or some would even be forced to dig their own graves, and then be shot into said graves after they were finished digging. Many Jews were starved beyond recognition, and some of the Jewish people would be so weakened from malnutrition, that they would often fall into ditches whenever they escaped their captivity from the hands of Hitler and the Nazis. Many Jewish people were also [[Nazi Medical Experimentation|used as human guinea pigs in various experiments]]. For example, many Nazi doctors, such as [[Josef Mengele]] (who was perhaps the most infamous of the Nazi doctors) attempted to change their eye and hair colors to match what they considered to be the superior race, and these experiments would often lead to failure. Many people of Jewish descent were killed from these failed experiments. Because of this fact, many Nazi doctors were found guilty for crimes against humanity, and were executed.

*Pink - LGBT people, as well as other people who the Nazis considered sexually immoral, namely [[Rape|rapists]], [[Pedophilia|pedophiles]], [[Zoophilia|zoophiles]], [[necrophilia]]cs, [[incest]]uous etc.

[[Category:Anti-Semitic]]

[[Category:Animal Cruelty]]