Holocaust Overview Paper

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Research Paper

Holocaust Overview

Andrew Gibbs

Eng Comp 102-102

Mr. Neuburger

5 April 2012


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German Workers Party 1919

http://bit.ly/HOBYkY

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic annihilation of six million Jews by

the Nazi regime and their collaborators as a central act of state during World War II. It is

known as the worst widespread anti-Semitic pogrom of all time. The Holocaust took

place over a length of many years, not just World War II like most people think. The

events that led to the Holocaust actually started in the early nineteen-thirties.

Nazi rise to power

Not many people thought that a group of unemployed soldiers, calling themselves

the Nazi party, would end up becoming the legal government of Germany in just 14

years. The German Workers' Party, the original Nazi Party, started as a group of

demobilized soldiers. Adolf Hitler joined this small political

party in 1919 and rose to leadership through his emotional and

captivating speeches. In his speeches he promoted national

pride and a commitment to a pure Germany. He changed the

name of the party to the National Socialist German Workers'

Party, called for short, the Nazi Party. By the end of 1920 Hitler

was the official leader of the group. In 1923 Hitler attempted an armed overthrow of local

authorities in Munich known as the Beer Hall Putsch. This failed miserably and Hitler

was charged with high treason and sent to jail. Hitler only served one year of his five year

term.Hitler began rebuilding and reorganizing the Nazi Party, waiting for an opportune

time to gain political power in Germany. Germany went into a depression in 1929. Hitler

used this to gain the support of the public. After gaining lots of public support, Hitler ran


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Paul Von Hindenburg

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for president in 1932. He lost to the incumbent but received thirty-seven percent of the

votes. On January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor.

On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building went up in flames. Nazis immediately

claimed that this was the beginning of a Communist revolution. This fact leads many

historians to believe that Nazis actually set, or help set the fire. Others believe that a

deranged Dutch Communist set the fire. The issue has never been

resolved. This incident prompted Hitler to convince Hindenburg to

issue a Decree for the Protection of People and State that granted

Nazis sweeping power todeal with the so-called emergency. This

laid the foundation for a police state. The regime passed civil laws

that barred Jews from holding positions in the civil service, in legal

and medical professions, and in teaching and university positions. The Nazis encouraged

boycotts of Jewish-owned shops and businesses and began book burnings of writings by

Jews and by others not approved by the Reich. Jews felt increasingly isolated from the

rest of German society. On August 2, 1934, President Hindenburg died. Hitler combined

the offices of Reich Chancellor and President, declaring himself Fhrer and Reich

Chancellor. In 1935 Hitler announced the Nuremberg Laws. More than 120 laws,

decrees, and ordinances were enacted after the Nuremburg Laws and before the outbreak

of World War II, further eroding the rights of German Jews. Many thousands of Germans

who had not previously considered themselves Jews found themselves defined as "non-

Aryans." In March 1938, as part of Hitler's quest for uniting all German-speaking people,

Germany took over Austria without bloodshed. In September 1938, Hitler eyed the


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Nuremberg Laws

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northwestern area of Czechoslovakia, called the Sudetenland, which had three million

German-speaking citizens. Hitler did not want to march into the Sudetenland until he was

certain that France and Britain would not intervene. Germany occupied the Sudetenland

on October 15, 1938. In Germany, open antisemitism became increasingly accepted,

climaxing in the "Night of Broken Glass" (Kristallnacht) on November 9, 1938. In

September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France had no choice but to

declare war on Germany. World War II had begun.

Nuremberg laws

On the evening of 15 September 1935, two measures were announced to the

Reichstag at the annual Party Rally in Nuremberg, becoming known as the Nuremberg

Laws. The first law, The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,

prohibited marriage between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood. Marriages

concluded in defiance of the law were void, even if, for the

purpose of evading the law, they were concluded abroad. The

Nuremberg Laws also said that Jews were not permitted to

employ female citizens under the age of 45, of German or

kindred blood, as domestic workers. Legal discrimination

against Jews had come into being before the Nuremberg Laws and steadily grew as time

went on; however, for discrimination to be effective, it was essential to have a clear

definition of who was or was not a Jew. This was one important function of the

Nuremberg Laws. The Nuremberg laws were based on a belief in scientific racism and


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derived from a primitive understanding of genetics. Although the Nazis took these ideas

to violent extremes, they were based on thinking that already existed across Europe and

America. Allies of the Nazis passed their own versions of the Nuremberg laws including

The Law for Protection of the Nation in Bulgaria and the ruling Iron Guard in Romania.

Kristallnacht

Can one picture their entire town in full on mass panic? Even better, try to picture

this happening in the darkest hours of the night. The only thing that can be heard is shrill

screams and yells of people randomly getting bludgeoned in the streets by groups of men.

One turns to see shops that they go to every day, places family and friends own or work

at, being looted and set ablaze. One witnesses churches

and centers where they go to worship a higher deity being

burnt to the ground. The only thing going through their

head is this cant be happening. One can feel the fear in

the air as they try to find a place to hide. Just as you get

into motion a man grabs you and throws you into a cart with other people. The individual

then has to suffer in this confined space for hours on hours as they haul them out to some

desolate landscape somewhere between two countries borders. That is where they drop

them off. One might say that this all sounds pretty outlandish and over the top. Like

nothing that has ever happened before. Well for thousands of Jews living in Germany

and Austria this horrible nightmare of a thought was a reality on one dark night in

nineteen thirty-eight.

Synagogue burning during kristallnacht

http://bit.ly/hR0qT5


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Herschel Grynszpan

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Herschel Grynszpan grew up pretty normal. He and his family were all Polish

Jews living in Hanover, Germany. His parents made a decent, honest living and they

didnt really have a lot of problems. When Herschel was fourteen he studied Hebrew for

a year preparing to immigrate to the British mandate of Palestine. When he applied,

however, he was told by the Palestine immigration office that

he was too young and would have to wait a year. He then tried

to find work as an apprentice plumber or mechanic to help pass

time for the year he had to wait. Sadly he could not find any

work. According to Auschwitz.dk, that is when Herschel

turned his attentions toward France and his father made

arrangements for the boy to live with his uncle and aunt in

Paris while the rest of the family remained in Germany.(Herschel Grynszpan) He then

illegally moved to France and lived in a small Jewish community. Meanwhile in

Germany the authorities announced that all residence permits for foreigners were being

cancelled and would have to be renewed, though they were not renewing any Jewish

foreigners permits. Then Poland said that it would not accept Polish Jews after the end of

October. Nazi officials were then ordered to arrest and immediately deport all Polish

Jews in Germany. Herschels family was then arrested, stripped of their possessions and

deported back to Poland. An outraged Herschel then went out and got a gun. He headed

to the German Embassy in Paris, France. He claimed to be a German citizen and asked to

see an Embassy official. Ernst Vom Rath, the more junior of the two Embassy officials

available, said he would meet with him. When Herschel entered his office he pulled out a


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Ernst Vom Rath

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gun and shot Ernst in the chest multiple times. Grynszpan did not try to resist arrest and

cooperated with the authorities. An article on roizon.com states that right after the

assassination Herschel said, Being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to

live and the Jewish people have a right to exist on this earth. Wherever I have been I have

been chased like an animal.(The Fate of a Forgotten Assassin) Hitler and his leading

officers saw this as the perfect opportunity to lash out at the Jews. They used this

assassination as a way to justify their next attack on the Jewish people.

After the death of Ernst Vom Rath in November of 1938, Hitler had decided on his

next big pogrom against the Jews. According to United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum (USHMM), Hitler had one of his officials, Joseph Goebbels, tell everyone at the

celebration of the one year anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch that "the Fhrer has

decided demonstrations should not be prepared or organized

by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are

not to be hampered."(Kristallnacht: A Nationwide Pogrom,

November 9-10, 1938) Later that night and early the next

morning groups of Hitler youth and SA troopers took to the

streets and destroyed Jewish homes, shops, and synagogues

all over the Reich. They wore civilian clothes to try and make it look like it was an

enraged reaction by the public. In the end the rioters set fire to around 267 synagogues

and destroyed a full 101 of them throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland.

Firefighters of the local areas were given orders to only prevent fires from spreading to


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Rounding up Jewshttp://bit.ly/HM7yLf

nearby buildings. Most of the synagogues burnt throughout the night. The gangs of

Nazis and Nazi supporters smashed in the windows and looted at least 7,500 Jewish

owned businesses. Jews were pulled out of their homes into the streets and beaten. They

were then all loaded up into carts and taken to a wasted space of land in between

Germany and Poland. There they set up some of the first concentration camps. By the end

of the night 91 Jewish people were dead and around 26,000 were arrested and sent to

concentration camps. For many people the night will forever be remembered as

Kristallnacht or crystal night. This refers to the way all the glass from the Jewish shops In

America it is most commonly known as the night of broken glass. It was the first major,

widespread anti-semantic pogrom against Jews and the turning point in sad downfall of

the European Jews.

Rounding up Jews

The Germans rounded up the Jews slowly over the years using a series of steps.

The first step towards rounding up the Jews was making them

show documentation. On this showed that they were Jewish. If

Jewish then they had to wear a star to separate them from other

common civilians. The stars helped the Germans later on when

actually rounding up the Jews because it made it easier to locate

them. After this they separated the Jews from the common people, stripping them of their

jobs and homes. After doing this they moved all the Jews into one central area called a


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Where Wannsee conference was held

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ghetto. By then all the Jews were rounded up. The only thing left was to move them for

the final time, to death camps.

Wannsee conference

The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior officials of the Nazi German

regime, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the

conference was to inform administrative leaders of Departments responsible for various

policies relating to Jews that Reinhard Heydrich had been

appointed as the chief executor of the "Final solution to

the Jewish question". In the course of the meeting,

Heydrich presented a plan, presumably approved by

Adolf Hitler, for the deportation of the Jewish population

of Europe to German-occupied areas in Eastern Europe, and

the use of the Jews fit for labor on road-building projects, in the course of which they

would eventually die. Instead, as Soviet and Allied forces gradually pushed back the

German lines, most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were sent to extermination

or concentration camps, or killed where they lived.

Death camps

Death camps were built for the systematic killing of Jews by gassing and extreme

work under starvation conditions. Six camps are identified, all occupied in Poland.

Operationally, there were three types of death camps; aktion Reinhardt extermination


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Mass grave

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camps, concentration-extermination camps, and minor extermination camps. Aktion

Reinhardt extermination camps were where prisoners were promptly killed upon arrival.

Initially, the camps used carbon monoxide gas chambers; at first, the corpses were buried,

but then incinerated atop pyres. Later, gas chambers and crematoria were built.

Concentrationextermination camps were where some

prisoners were selected for slave labor, instead of

immediate death; they were kept alive as camp inmates,

available to work wherever the Nazis required. Minor

extermination camps initially operated as prisons and

transit camps, then as extermination camps late in the

war, using portable gas-chambers and gas vans.

Extermination methods

The Nazis used many different methods to exterminate Jews during the

Holocaust. One of the first methods was mass open line shootings. They would dig long

graves and then line prisoners in front of it. They would then shoot the prisoners and their

bodies would fall into the grave. They would also work Jews to death. With very poor

nutrition and extreme labor, it was easy for the Nazis to work them to the point of death.

Some Prisoners died while being used as test subjects for different experiments for the

Nazis. The most popular method of extermination was the gas chambers. They would

trick prisoners into thinking that they are going to get showers. Once in the shower room


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Celebration after being liberatedhttp://bit.ly/HrRe4s

the Nazis would barricade the door and release a gas into the chamber, killing the

prisoners.

Liberation

As Allied troops entered Nazi-occupied territories, the final rescue and liberation

transpired. Allied troops who stumbled upon the concentration camps were shocked at

what they found. Large ditches filled with bodies, rooms of baby shoes, and gas

chambers with fingernail marks on the walls all testified to Nazi brutality. General

Eisenhower insisted on photographing and documenting the horror so that future

generations would not ignore history and repeat its mistakes. He also forced villagers

neighboring the death and concentration camps to view what had occurred in their own

backyards.

Approximately 5.9 million Jews were killed during the mass genocide from 1938

to 1945. It is the absolute worst crime against a group of people ever committed. The acts

that happened in Eastern Europe will never be forgotten.


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Works Cited

Bulow, Louis. "Herschel Grynszpan." The Holocaust, Crimes, Heroes and Villains. 2007. Web.

15 Apr. 2012.

Roizen, Ron. "Herschel Grynszpan: The Fate of a Forgotten Assassin." Welcome to Roizen.

Web. 15 Apr. 2012.

"Kristallnacht: A Nationwide Pogrom, November 9-10, 1938." United States Holocaust

Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 6 Jan. 2011. Web. 15

Apr. 2012.

KRISTALLNACHT." Middle Tennessee State University. Web. 15 Apr. 2012.

"World War II in Europe Timeline: November 9/10 1938 - Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken

Glass." The History Place. The History Place, 1997. Web. 15 Apr. 2012.

"Timeline of Adolf Hitlers Life: 21st Century Academy." Timeline of Adolf Hitlers Life: 21st

Century Academy. Dieter Drumaze, 19 May 2009. Web. 18 Apr. 2012.

Bulow, Louis. "Gates To Hell - The Nazi Death Camps." Gates To Hell. Louis Bulow, 2008.

Web. 18 Apr. 2012.

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