The War against the Jews 1933-1945

by

Samantha Behan

Riversdale community college

4B

The word Holocaust come s from the Greek word’s holo which mean “whole” and from caustos which means “burned”. It was originally a religious rite in which an offering was consumed by fire. In past usage, holocaust referres to any widespread human disaster, but when written Holocaust mostly refer’s to the complete destruction of the Jew’s in Europe by Nazi Germany. Between the 19^th century, European Jews was being emancipated and in most European countries, Jews achieved some equality of status with non-Jews. At times Jews were vilified and harassed by anti-Semitic’s groups. Most of the anti Semitic believed that Jewry was an alien “race” not assimilable into the European culture, but they did not formulate any coherent anti-Semitic campaign

When the Nazi regime came to power in Germany in January 1933, it immediately began to take systematic measures against the Jews. Once early decree was a definition of the term Jews. Crucial in the determination was the religion of one’s grandparents. Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was automatically a Jew regardless of whether that individual was a member of the Jewish community. Half Jew’s were considered Jewish if they themselves belonged to religion or were married to a Jewish person. All the other half Jews were styled Mischlinge (half breeds). Jew’s and Mischlinge were “non-Aryans”. The Nazi believed that it was important for all people to know there backgrounds. They then later used this for the killing’s of Jewish’s people.

From 1933 to 1939, strong efforts were made by the Nazi party, people from the government, banks, and business enterprises to eliminate Jews from economic life. Non-Aryans were dismissed from civil service positions, and Jewish lawyers and doctors lost their Aryans clients. Jewish firms were either put into liquidation and their assets disposed of, or they were purchased for much less than their full value by companies that were not owned or operated by Jews. The contractual transfer of Jewish enterprises to new German owners was called “Aryanization”. The proceeds of any sales, as well as Jewish savings, were subjected to special property taxes. The Jewish employees of liquidated or aryanized firms lost their jobs.

The proclaimed objective of the Nazi regime was Jewish emigration. In November 1938, following the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jew, all synagogues in Germany were set on fire, windows of Jewish shops were smashed, and thousands of Jews were arrested. This Night of Broken Glass was a signal to Jews in Germany and Austria to leave as soon as possible. Several hundred thousand people were able to find refuge in other countries, but a similar number, including many who were old or poor, stayed to face an uncertain fate.

When World War Two began in September 1939 when the German army occupied the western half of Poland and thereby added almost two million Jews to the German power sphere. Restrictions placed on the Polish Jewry were much harsher than those in Germany. The Polish Jews were forced to move into ghettos surrounded by walls and barbed wire. The ghettos were like captive city-states. Each ghetto had a Jewish council that was responsible for housing, sanitation, and production. Food and coal were to be shipped in and manufactured products sent out. In the Warsaw ghetto, the official ration provided barely 1,200 calories to each inhabitant. Some black- market food, smuggled into the ghettos, food was sold at high prices, but unemployment and poverty were widespread.

At the time of ghettoization in Poland, a drastic undertaking was launched further east. In June 1941, German armies invaded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and at the same time the Reich Security Main Office dispatched 3,000 men in special units to newly occupied Soviet territories to kill all Jews on this spot. The massacres usually took place in ditches or ravines near cities and towns. Occasionally, they were witnessed by soldiers or local residents. Before long, rumours of the killings were heard in several capitals of the world.

A month after the beginning of mobile operations in the occupied USSR, the second in command of Nazi Germany, Hermann Goring, sent a directive to the chief of the Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich, charging him with the task of organizing a Final Solution to the Jewish Question in all of German-dominated Europe. By September 1941, the Jews of Germany were forced to wear badges or the armband marked with a yellow star. In the following month, tens of thousands were deported to ghettos in Poland and cites wrested from USSR. Even as that movement was under way, the stage was set for another innovation: the Concentration Camps.

Camps equipped with facilities for gassing people were built in occupied Poland. Most prospective victims were to be deported to these killing centers from ghettos nearby. More than 300,000 were removed from the Warsaw ghettos alone. The first transports were usually filled with women, children and old men, who could not work. The destinations of the transports were not disclosed to the Jewish communities, but reports of mass deaths eventually reached the surviving Jews, as well as the governments of the United States and Great Britain. In April 1943, the 65,000 remaining Jews of Warsaw offered resistance to German police who entered the ghetto in a final roundup. The battle lasted three weeks.

Throughout Europe, the deportations generated a host of political and administrative problems. In Germany itself,

extensive discussions were held about the Mischlinge, and eventually they were exempted. In the countries allied with Germany, such as the satellite states of Slovakia and Croatia, diplomatic negotiations were conducted to bring about deportations. The government of Vichy France, which had already extended its anti-Semitic laws, began imprisoning Jews before Germany had even asked them. The Italian Fascist government refused to cooperate with Nazi Germany until after Italy was occupied by German forces in September 1943, and the Hungarian government was similarly reluctant to give up its Jews until after German troops entered Hungary in March 1944. Although the Romanian government had been responsible for several large-scale massacres of Jews in the occupied USSR, Romania also declined to deliver its Jews to the Germans. In occupied Denmark, Danes from all walks of life resolved to save that country’s Jews from certain death, ferrying thousands of them in small boats to neutral Sweden.

Wherever possible, the Germans collected the belongings of the deportees. In Germany, bank accounts and the contents of apartments were confiscated, and from occupied France, Belgium, and Holland furniture was shipped to Germany for distribution to bombed-out people.

The transport of victims to death camps was generally by rail, and the police had to pay the German state railways a one-way third-class passenger fare for each deportee. When as many as 1,000 people were loaded on a train, a group rate that was half the normal tariff was allowed. The trains, consisting of freight cars, moved slowly on special schedules to their destinations. Often, sick old women died en route.

The arrival points in Poland were Kulmhof, Belzec, Sobilbor, Treblinka, Lublin, and Auschwitz. Kulmhof, north west of the ghetto, this was supplied with gas, vans and its death toll was 150,000. Belzec had carbon monoxide gas chambers in which 600,000 Jews, mostly from the populous Galician area, were killed. Sobibor’s gas chambers accounted for 250,000 dead and Treblinka’s for 700,000 to 800,000. At Lublin, some 50,000 were gassed or shot.

Auschwitz, near Krakow, was the largest death camp. The victims of Auschwitz came from all over Europe: Norway, France, the Low Countries, Italy, German, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yogoslavia and Greece. A large inmate population, Jewish and non-Jewish, was employed by industry; some prisoners were subjected to medical experiments, particularly sterilizations. Although only Jews and Gypsies were gassed routinely, several hundred thousand other Auschwitz inmates died from starvation, disease or shooting. To erase the traces of destruction, large crematoria were built so that the bodies of gassed victims could be incinerated. In 1944 the camp was photographed by allied reconnaissance aircraft in search of industrial targets; its factors, but not its gas chambers, were bombed.

When the war ended, millions of Jews, Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah witnesses, communist, and other targeted by the Nazis, had died in the holocaust. The Jewish dead numbered more than 5 million: about 3 million in extermination centres and other camps, 1.4 million in shooting operations, and more than 600,000 in the ghettos. Heavy pressure was placed on the victorious powers to establish a permanent haven I Palestine for Jewish survivors, so the establishment of Israel three years after Germanys defeat proved to be another aftereffect of the Holocaust

A second outcome was the issue of the war crimes tribute. Beginning in the winter of 1942, the governments of the allied powers announced their determination to punish Nazi war criminals. On December 17, 1942, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union issued the first joint declaration officially nothing the mass murder of European Jewry and resolving to prosecute those responsible for violence against civilian populations.

The October 1943 Moscow Declaration, signed by U.S president Franklin D.Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin, stated that at the time of an armistice person deemed responsible for war crimes would sent back to those countries in which the crimes had been committed and adjudged according to the laws of the nation concerned. Major war criminals, whose crimes could be assigned no particular geographic location, would be punished by joint decisions of the allied government. The trials of leading German officials before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), the best known of the postwar war crimes trials, took place Nuremberg, Germany, before judges representing the allied powers.

Between October 18, 1945, and October 1, 1946, the IMT tried 22 “Major” war criminals on charges of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The IMT defined crimes against humanity as“muder, extermination, enslavement, deportation….or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds”. Twelve of those convicted were sentenced to death, among them Hans Frank, Hermann Goering, Alfred Rosenberg, and Julius Streicher. The IMT sentenced three defendants to life imprisonment and four to prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years. It acquitted three of the defendants.

Short Question’s

Q.1 Bibliography

Q.2 Review

Five Chimneys

Olga Lengyel

Paperback: 221 pages (December)

Publisher: Academy Chicago publication

Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel’s work in the prisoners’undergrond resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness the subjects, FIVE CHIMNEYS does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. When first published ( two years after world war 2 ended ), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote her a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her “very frank, very well written book”. Today, with ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia and neo-Nazism on the rise in Western Europe, we cannot afford to forget the grisly lesson of the Holocaust. FIVE CHIMNEYS is stark reminder that the unspeakable can happen whenever and whenever ethnic hatreds, religious bigotries, and racial discrimination a permitted to exist.

This book was first published in English in 1947. It presents life and death in Auschwitz in great detail, and offers an excellent overview of the concentration camp world. The author’s own story is gripping and heart-wrenching. The early data, 2 years after WWII ended, ensures that the author’s memories of the camp are still lucid and the details very precise. Olga Lengyel studied to be a physician, and her informed analysis of the treatment meted out to inmates make this book special. I view this book as a Holocaust studies “benchmark” – other accounts often fall short of its quality and level of detail. It is also significant as an account of a women’s experience. Until recently, women’s Holocaust experiences were a rather neglected area.

Q .3 Skills

While doing my essay I had to learn to look up for books in my local library to find information on my topic.

Using the Internet to search for information to find more details and dates for my essay.

I have leant new skills on Microsoft Word.

Within a few days I also leant to read and compare many different sources for my essay.

Q .4 How the essay was completed

When I came into history class after Christmas holidays we were told about are essay and how much it’s worth in the leaving cert. Its worth about 20%. We were giving a week to think of a topic we wanted to write about. After I chose my topic I went to my local library to look up books on it to help me with my essay. After I looked up books in the library I then went on to the internet to get more information. So I had books from the library and information from the internet. I then planned how I’d write it up. I then wrote up the first draft and then added bits in from my book. After I was finished the draft I checked all the dates. Then I typed up my essay on Microsoft words and printed it out. When it was printed up I made changes in it like corrections etc, and printed it out again then I put it on the school web site.