The Holocaust: The Nazi war against the Jews

Holocaust was originally a religious rite in which an offering was consumed by fire.
In current usage, holocaust refers to the almost complete destruction of the Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany.

During the 19th century, European Jewry was being emancipated and in most European Countries, Jews achieved some equality of status with non-Jew. Nonetheless, at times Jews were vilified and harassed by anti-Semitic groups. Indeed some anti-Semites believed that Jewry was an alien "race" not assimable into European culture, but they did not Formulate and 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. One early degree was a definition of the term Jew. Crucial in that determination was 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-Jews were considered Jewish only if they Themselves belonged to the Jewish religion or were married to a Jewish person. All other Half-Jews, people who had Jewish grandparent, were styled Mischlinge (half-breeds). Jews and Mischlinge were "non-Aryans". In Nazi doctrine, such emphasis on descent was Regarded as an affirmation of "race", but the principal purpose of these categorizations Was the clear delimitation of a target for discriminatory laws and directives.

From 1933 to 1939,concerted efforts were made by the Nazi party, agencies of 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 Aryan clients. Jewish firms were either put into liquidation and their inventory 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 were called "Aryanization". The proceeds of any sales, as well as Jewish savings, were subjected to special property taxes. The Jewish employees of liquidated r 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 BrokenGlass" (kristallnacht) was a signal to Jews in Germany and Austria to leave as soon as possible. Several hundred 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 II in September 1939, the German army occupied the western half of Poland and thereby added almost 2 million Jews to the German power sphere. Restrictions placed on Polish Jewry were much harsher than those in Germany. The Polish Jews 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. The food supply allowed by the Germans, however, consisted mainly of grain and such vegetables as turnips, carrots and beets. In the Warsaw ghetto, the official ration provided barely 1,200 calories to each inhabitant. Some black-market food, smuggled into the ghettos was sold at high prices, but unemployment and poverty were widespread. Housing was overcrowded, with six to seven people to a room, and typhus was common.

At the time of ghettoization in Poland, a drastic undertaking was launched further cast. In June 1941, German armies invaded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and at the same time the Reich Security Main Office-an agency of the Police and the Nazi party guard, known as the SS-dispatched 3,000 men in special units to newly occupied Soviet terrorists to kill all Jews on the spot. These mobile detachments, known as Einsatzgruppen (action squads), were soon engaged in wholesale shootings. 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, Herman 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 the German-dominated Europe. By September 1941, the Jews of Germany were forced to wear badges or armbands marked with a yellow star. In the following months, tens of thousands were deported to ghettos in Poland and to cities wrested from the USSR. Even as the movement was under way the stage was set for another innovation: the concentration camp.

FINAL SOLUTION

It remains uncertain as to when the Nazi leadership decided to implement the "Final Solution," the plan to annihilate the Jewish people. The genocide of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of Nazi policy, under the rule of Adolf Hitler.

The persecution and segregation of the Jews was implemented in stages. After the Nazi party achieved power, state-enforced racism resulted in anti-Jewish legislation, boycotts, "Aryanization," and the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogroms, all of which aimed to systematically isolate the Jews from German society and drive them out of Germany.

After the September 1939 German invasion of Poland (the beginning of World War II), anti-Jewish policy evolved into a comprehensive plan to concentrate and eventually annihilate European Jewry. The Nazis first established ghettos in the Generalgouvernement (a territory in central and eastern Poland in which the Germans established a German civilian government) and the Warthegau (an area of western Poland annexed to Germany). Polish and western European Jews were deported to these ghettos.

After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) began killing operations aimed at entire Jewish communities. The SS, the elite guard of the Nazi state, soon regarded the mobile killing methods--mainly shooting or gas vans--as inefficient and as a psychological burden on the killers. On July 31, 1941, Hermann Goering authorized Reinhard Heydrich to make preparations for the implementation of a "complete solution of the Jewish question."

THE HOLOCAUST

In the autumn of 1941, Heinrich Himmler entrusted SS General Odilo Globocnik (SS and police leader for the Lublin District) with the implementation of a plan to systematically murder the Jews of the Generalgouvernement. The code name Aktion Reinhard was eventually given to the plan, after Heydrich (who had been tasked with implementing the "Final Solution" and who was assassinated by Czech partisans in May 1942). Three extermination camps were established in Poland as part of Aktion Reinhard--Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Upon arrival at the camps, Jews were sent directly to the gas chambers. Globocnik's assistant, SS Major Hans Hoefle, was in charge of organizing the deportations to the Aktion Reinhard camps.

The Nazis also gassed Jews at other extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau (which was the largest camp), Majdanek, and Chelmno. At Majdanek, groups of Jews deemed incapable of work were gassed. At Chelmno, Jews were gassed in mobile gas vans. The Nazis systematically murdered over three million Jews in the extermination camps.
In its entirety, the "Final Solution" called for the murder of the Jews of Europe by gassing, shooting, and other means. Up to six million Jews lost their lives--two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe in 1939.

Camps equipped with facilities for gassing people were built in occupied Poland. Most prospective victims were to be deported to these killing centres from ghettos nearby. More than 300,000 were removed from the Warsaw ghetto alone. The first transports were usually filled with women, children or old men, who could not work; Jews capable of labour were retained in shops or plants but they too were eventually killed. The heaviest 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 round up. The battle lasted for 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 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 deliveries 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 Sweeden.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.

Transport of victims to the 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, the sick and the elderly died on route.

The arrival points in Poland were Kulmhof Belzee, Sobitor, Treblinka, Lublin and Auschwitz. Kulmhof, north-west of the ghetto, was supplied with gas vansand its death toll was 150,000. Belzee 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; in Auschwitz, the Jewish dead totalled more than 1 million.

Auschwitz, near Krakow, was the largest death camp. Unlike others, it used quick working hydrogen cyanide fir the gassings. The victims of Auschwitz came from all over Europe: Norway, France, the low Countries, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavakia, and Greece. A large inmate population, Jewish and non-Jewish,was employed by industry; some prisinors 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 the gassed could be incinerated. In 1944 the camp was photographed by Allied reconnaissance aircraft in search of industrial targets;its factories, but not its gas chambers were bombed.

When the war ended, millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehova's Witnesses, Communists and others targeted by the Nazis, had died in the Holocaust. The Jewish numbered more than 5 million: about 3 million in centres and other camps, 1.4 million in shooting operations, and more than 600,000 in ghettos. (Traditional estimates are closer to 6 million) Heavy pressure placed on the victorious powers to establish a haven in Palestine for Jewish survivors, so the establishment of Israel three years after Germany's defeat proved to be another aftereffect of the Holocaust.

1/ Skills I learned while doing the research topic.
(a). I learned how to find primary and secondary information from the local school library and the Internet

(b). I learned how to type up the essay using microsoft word and Windows 95/98.

(c). I learned how to analysis sources.

(d). I learned how to compile a list of sources and also how to complete a review.

2/ How was the project writtin up ?

The project was typed up using microsoft word + windows 95/98. Then it was spell checked and formatted. The finished essay was saves on disc and printed out.
Give two reasons why this subject is worth studying.

Sources
Internet:
* United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at http://wlc.ushmm.org/
* About.com's 20th century history guide
http://www.history1900s.about.com/homework/history1900s/library/holocaust
* Holocaust history project. http://www.holocaust-history.org/
* Teachers guide to the Holocaust at http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/default.htm
* Holocaust Memorial center at http://www.holocaustcenter.org/

Books:
* Finkelstein, N. The Holocaust Industry: Reflecting on the exploitation of
the jews Hardcover, New York, July 00 * Roth, J. The Holocaust chronicle. Hardcover Sept 00.
* Fremont, H. After a long silence: A memoir. Paperback, Feb 00
* Wyman, D. The Abandonment of the Jews : America and the Holocaust Paperback (April 1998).
* Rooney, A. My war, Hardcover May 00.

On the surface, Finkelstein's book, the 'Holocaust Industry' is startling. Using many citations in three focused chapters, he weaves a compelling narrative on the rise of our perceptions of the Holocaust, the Jewish reparation organizations, and personalities that are now profiting from it. As the book progresses however you become increasingly aware that he is less an 'objectifier' than a strident evangelist of his own beliefs that this process in inherently flawed, biased, and ultimately destructive. And it is here that the book loses some of its potential.

That there are misappropriations and misdirections in this particular process there can be little doubt (it can't be helped when this much money is at stake), but are they direct intentions of the process or only by-products? Only when the structure fails, as it will inevitably, will we know if it is corrupt and to what degree.

It is unfortunate however that the Jewish question of reparations, or for that matter any questions concerning their actions in the world, cannot be discussed without the term anti-Semite being bandied about to describe those who have honest questions and concerns. It is a powerful invective in today's Jewish lexicon and used often without discrimination to maim and silence. If not quite attaching the required objectivity to his thesis, Finkelstein unwittingly addresses the disturbing results of this pervasive slander.

As a result 'Holocaust Industry' only dances around its principal theme. The shame of it all is that 'Holocaust Industry', where it could have been significant, will do little more than exacerbate the 'them' against 'us' argument. And by so doing, does little to help an objective eye wander this landscape.