WAW: Lesson - The Holocaust

An image from Auschwitz showing Hungarian Jews awaiting their fate.The Holocaust

As Allied troops pushed into Germany, they traveled through and liberated areas that provided evidence of the mass extermination of people. But the road to the Holocaust started long before World War II. In 1933, Hitler boycotted Jewish-owned businesses and banned Jews from working in the public sector or practicing Judaism. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews and also later Roma and Blacks (and those of Jewish, Roma, or African ancestry) of their citizenship, right to vote, or marry outside their race, and segregated them into ghettos.

On November 9-10, 1938, the Nazis destroyed hundreds of synagogues, several thousand Jewish-owned businesses, and Jewish cemeteries throughout the lands the Nazis invaded in what would later be called Kristallnacht (or "Night of Broken Glass"). In 1939, Germany mandated that all Jews over the age of ten wear the Star of David to quickly identify them.

Image note: The photo at the top of the page shows hundreds of Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz. Some already wear the stripped clothes given to labor prisoners, while others are in ordinary clothes. Three Nazi officers stand in front of the people (front-center of image). This photograph depicts the moment that some were unknowingly selected to work, and live as long as they could labor, or to go to the gas chambers, and die.

Genocide: Concentration Camps and Extermination Camps

Eventually, the Nazi government started moving Jews out of the ghettos and into concentration camps. The Nazis also forced Roma, Freemasons, Gay men, Communists, Socialists, the disabled, petty criminals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses into concentration camps. Not all concentration camps were extermination camps—but life within all was brutal. There, prisoners provided forced-labor for the German military as well as human "guinea pigs" for Nazi scientists.

While the conditions were awful and often led to death, the death rates weren’t high enough for the Nazis, so they constructed extermination camps. People were systematically murdered in gas chambers, which would end the lives of thousands in a single day. Germany built tens of thousands of incarceration centers, and concentration and extermination camps. Millions of people died in the camps, including 6 million Jews. The Nazi’s actions in World War II constituted a genocide.

A map of the Holocaust, marking locations of concentration and extermination campsImage note: This map shows some of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps just set up in Germany. This map does not include every camp – there were tens of thousands throughout all of occupied Europe.
Image text: Germany Concentration Camps (June 1944). Circle = camp. Name of camp (red) and Capacity of Camp (when known).

Photo Presentation of the Holocaust

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