The Holocaust: Difference between revisions
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==Prelude== | ==Prelude== | ||
{{Quote|We shall only talk of peace when we have won the war. The Jewish capitalist world will not survive the twentieth century.|Adolf Hitler}}The Holocaust was established through stages. At first, the German government passed laws that excluded Jews from social affairs, such as | {{Quote|We shall only talk of peace when we have won the war. The Jewish capitalist world will not survive the twentieth century.|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. | ||
In August 1938 the German authorities announced that residence permits for foreigners were being cancelled and would have to be renewed. This included German-born Jews of foreign citizenship. Poland stated that it would renounce citizenship rights of Polish Jews living abroad for at least five years after the end of October, effectively making them stateless. | In August 1938 the German authorities announced that residence permits for foreigners were being cancelled and would have to be renewed. This included German-born Jews of foreign citizenship. Poland stated that it would renounce citizenship rights of Polish Jews living abroad for at least five years after the end of October, effectively making them stateless. | ||
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{{Quote|It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.|Elie Wiesel}}The Holocaust was set off with an event known as ''[[Kristallnacht]]'', or the "Night of Broken Glass", a [[pogrom]] carried out by both the ''[[Sturmabteilung]]'' and the ''[[Schutzstaffel]]'', as well as the [[Hitler Youth]], on November 9 and 10, 1938. Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked, [[Looting|looted]], and [[Vandalism|vandalized]] as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Following the violence, police departments recorded a large number of suicides and [[rape]]s. The whole event was overseen by Minister of Propaganda [[Joseph Goebbels]]. | {{Quote|It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.|Elie Wiesel}}The Holocaust was set off with an event known as ''[[Kristallnacht]]'', or the "Night of Broken Glass", a [[pogrom]] carried out by both the ''[[Sturmabteilung]]'' and the ''[[Schutzstaffel]]'', as well as the [[Hitler Youth]], on November 9 and 10, 1938. Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked, [[Looting|looted]], and [[Vandalism|vandalized]] as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Following the violence, police departments recorded a large number of suicides and [[rape]]s. The whole event was overseen by Minister of Propaganda [[Joseph Goebbels]]. | ||
This event | This event was followed by mass deportations of Jews to German [[Concentration Camp|concentration camps]] at [[Dachau concentration camp|Dachau]], [[Buchenwald concentration camp|Buchenwald]] and [[Sachsenhausen concentration camp|Sachsenhausen]]. At this time the camps were merely used as prison camps as deportation to Palestine or Madagascar as a final solution was under consideration and the majority of the prisoners were released by the end of the year; however, anti-Jewish laws were ramped up and Jews were stripped of all remaining rights. | ||
With the outbreak of World War II and the invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, paramilitary [[death squad]]s, dubbed the ''[[Einsatzgruppen]]'', were established, with the job of eliminating all "anti-German elements". Jews were rounded up and placed in ghettoes, areas constructed to confine them until they could be deported to another location. These ghettoes had deliberately poor conditions, leading to thousands of deaths. The Nazis then begun the construction of death camps in Poland, most infamously [[Auschwitz Birkenau]], [[Majdanek concentration camp|Majdanek]], [[Sobibor concentration camp|Sobibor]] and [[Treblinka concentration camp|Treblinka]]. Meanwhile, France, Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia and Greece were annexed by Germany and Jews in those countries were either exterminated or deported to the German camps depending on the country. During the 1941 - 1942 invasion of the Soviet Union, the [[Wehrmacht]] were ordered to exterminate all male Jews; this was later amended to all Jews at the order of [[Heinrich Himmler]]. [[Walther von Reichenau]]'s [[Severity Order]] mandated that all Jews on the Eastern Front be treated as enemy partisans and either shot or handed over to the ''Einsatzgruppen'' for execution. The main method used was to force them to line up in front of a trench to be shot, a method started by [[Friedrich Jeckeln]]. | |||
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. 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. | During the genocide, SS-Hauptsturmführer [[Amon Göth]], who served as the commandant of [[Płaszów concentration camp]] in Poland from 1943 to 1944, personally executed over 500 people, arguably the most [[murder]]s committed by one man in Nazi Germany. | ||
These systematic mass murders continued until the end of WWII in 1945. | |||
==Aftermath== | ==Aftermath== | ||