Teacher: Indira Braji Date: 27/03/2010

Student: Caterina Rende Dominis MYP3

The Holocaust 1 was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans was "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. Germany was defeated by the allied powers, and afterwards humiliated by the Versailles Treaty. Its pre-war territory was reduced immensely, as well as the armed forces. The recognition of the guilt for the war was demanded, and it was stipulated to pay for all the reparations to the allies. The Empire was destroyed and a new parliamentary government called the Weimar republic was formed. Because of all these new strict rules and demands the country suffered from economic instability and inflation, which grew worse in 1929. It was followed by a very high rate of unemployment which intensified class and political differences and began to weaken the government. The Holocaust started on the 30th January 1933 when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. He formed a new party called the Nazi party. His main ideas were to rid the world of Communism and Social Democracy, and to rule over the world without sub races. His aims were to get out of the economic crisis without big consequences, and to firstly exterminate Jews. His first aggressions started on the 27th February 1933, when one of Hitlers men made the Reichstag fire, and even though many people suspected the Nazis were involved, Hitler managed to blame the Communists, and convinced a big number of German people to vote for him. The fire indicated the end of German democracy. On the next day Nazis, under the will of controlling the Communists, decided to abolish democratic individual rights and protections: for example freedom of the press, meetings and demonstrations were cancelled out and abolished, as well as the right to privacy. When the elections were held on the 5th March, the Nazis received nearly 44 percent of the vote, and with 8 percent offered by the Conservatives, won a majority in the government. The real attach which made World War II actually start was the attach on Poland the 1 st September 1939. In August of the same year Germany made a non aggression pact with the USSR (The Nazi Soviet Pact), in which they secretly agreed to invade Poland and share it. But soon after they invaded Poland, Germany concluded that Russia is ineffective. 1

A major tool of the Nazis' propaganda assault was the weekly Nazi newspaper Der Strmer (The Attacker). At the bottom of the front page of each issue, in bold letters, the paper proclaimed, "The Jews are our misfortune!" Der Strmer also regularly featured cartoons of Jews in which they were caricatured as hooked-nosed and ape like. The influence of the newspaper was far-reaching: by 1938 about a half million copies were distributed weekly. To make people even more convinced of the Jews bad characteristics, they introduced Anti Jewish education in schools. The first text book they used was called Trau keinem Fuchs auf grner Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid (Don't Trust A Fox in A Green Meadow Or the Oath of A Jew). Some faithful Hitlers followers also wrote books for children against Jewish people. They always start with a very innocent and childish introduction, which is followed by the main part which characterises Jewish people as the Devils children and infamous liars who try to destroy humanity and must be extinct.

Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom) appeared in Germany in 1938 and leaves little question regarding the intended Nazi solution to the "Jewish problem." The book begins innocently enough by describing a favourite German pastime, picking wild mushrooms in the woods. A young boy, Franz, accompanies his mother on a walk in a beautiful, wooded area and helps her gather mushrooms. After carefully describing and showing Franz several varieties of both edible and poisonous mushrooms, his mother compares the good mushrooms to good people and the harmful mushrooms to bad people. The most dangerous people are, of course, the Jews. Franz proudly announces that he has learned in school that the Jews are bad people. His mother continues her comparison of Jews to mushrooms by emphasizing that, just as poisonous mushrooms are difficult to distinguish from edible ones, it is difficult to differentiate Jews from Non-Jews because Jews can assume many forms. Franz's mother repeatedly alludes to the terrible destructive force of the Jews. One Jew can destroy an entire people because the Jew is the Devil in human form. The Jew poses a deadly threat not only to the survival of the German people but to the survival of the world! It is Germany's obligation to warn the rest of the world about this terrible toadstool and thereby save humanity from destruction. Thus begins one of the most insidious storybooks ever composed for children.

Germans were now totally convinced by Hitler and the majority of German people hated Jews. So they were also totally ignored and thrown out of the society, and got thrown in very poor quarters, full of diseases, where Jews didnt have food and thick blankets, so they lived in hunger and coldness. They had to sleep very uncomfortably and often more people had to sleep in one bed. These quarters were called ghettos. Ghettos were also used before WWII, but for different purposes, and usually were formed naturally without interference of outside people and completely agreed about it and werent forced to live in these places. They were sometimes very fine and rich quarters, as well as poor and left behind. Jewish ghettos during WWII were places that a towns Jewish population was forced to live in. They did not have access to food, the Germans gave small portions to them, there was no clean water. Nazis used ghettos as a place to stake out sick and elderly Jews. They usually took an entire population to concentration camps though it. Concentration camps were originally a place in which non-combatants were accommodated, as instituted by Lord KITCHENER during the Second Boer War (1899 1902). The Boers, mainly women and children, were placed there officially for their own protection from Kitchener's scorched earth policy in the Transvaal and Cape Colony, but actually to prevent them from aiding the guerrillas. Some 20,000 detainees died, largely as a result of disease arising from unhygienic conditions. During the NAZI regime in Germany (193345) concentration camps became places in which to intern unwanted persons, specifically JEWISH PEOPLE, but also Protestant and Catholic dissidents, communists, gypsies, trade unionists, homosexuals, and people with disabilities. Described by GOEBBELS in August 1934 as camps to turn anti-social members of society into useful members by the most humane means possible, they in fact came to witness depraved acts of torture, slave labour, horror, and mass murder on a scale unprecedented in any country in any century. Some 200,000 had been through the camps before World began, when they were increased in size and number. The camps (Konzetrazionslager, or KZ), administered by the SS, were categorized into Arbeitslager, where prisoners were organized into labour battalions, and Vernichtungslager, set up for the extermination and incineration of men, women, and children. In eastern Europe prisoners were used initially in labour battalions or in the tasks of genocide, until they too were exterminated. In such camps as Auschwitz, gas chambers could kill and incinerate 12,000 people daily. 3

In the west, Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald (a forced labour camp where doctors conducted medical research on prisoners) were notorious. An estimated six million Jews died in the camps, as well as some half million gypsies; in addition, millions of Poles, Soviet prisoners-of-war, and other civilians perished. After the war many camp officials were tried and punished, but others escaped. Maidanek was the first camp to be liberated (by the Red Army, in July 1944). After 1953 West Germany paid $37 billion in reparations to the surviving Jewish victims of Nazism. The Final Solution was the genocide (mass murder) of the Jews by the Nazis in 19411945. As mentioned before, the Nazis thought of the Jews as a sub-race which makes the Arian race dirty. They wanted to kill them all to make the world perfect, and this process was called Final Solution. Before instituting it, the Nazi government had abolished the Jews' rights, destroyed and confiscated their property, and sent them to concentration camps. Many historians view the Kristallnacht (Night of broken glass) as the genesis of The Final Solution as this event was triggered by the assassination of Ernst vom Rath by a 17-yearold Jewish youth. Mass killings of about one million Jews occurred before the plans of the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to eradicate the entire Jewish population that the extermination camps were built and industrialized mass slaughter of Jews began in earnest. This decision to systematically kill the Jews of Europe was made either by the time of or at the Wannsee conference, which took place in Berlin, in the Wannsee Villa on January 20, 1942. The conference was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich. He was acting under the authority given to him by Reichsmarshall Gring in a letter dated July 31, 1941. Gring instructed Heydrich to devise "...the solution of the Jewish problem..." During the conference, there was a discussion held by the group of German Nazi officials how best to handle the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". A surviving copy of the minutes of this meeting was found by the Allies in 1947, too late to serve as evidence during the first Nuremberg Trials. By the summer of 1942, Operation Reinhard began the systematic extermination of the Jews, although hundreds of thousands already had been killed by death squads and in mass pogroms. In Heinrich Himmler's speech at the Posen Conference of October 6, 1943, Himmler, for the first time, clearly elucidated to all assembled leaders of the Reich to what the "Final Solution" referred.

The racial policy of Nazi Germany were a set of policies and laws implemented by Nazi Germany, asserting the superiority of the "Aryan race," and based on a specific racist doctrine which claimed scientific legitimacy. It was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed to achieve "racial purity" of the "Aryan race" by using compulsory sterilizations and extermination of the Untermensch (or "sub-humans"), which eventually culminated in the Holocaust. These policies targeted, first of all, Jews, who were considered as the most "inferior race" of all on a hierarchy that included Jews at the bottom and the Herrenvolk (or "master race") of the Volksgemeinschaft (or "national community") at the top. Genocide refers to the mass murder of a tribe or an entire people (genos=tribe, people; cide=killing). According to Yehuda Bauer, one of the most prominent historians of the Nazi Genocide of the Jews, the term was first coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin , who defined it as "a synchronized attack" on the moral, political, cultural, religious, economic and social aspects of a people's life, involving a "policy of depopulation, introducing a starvation rationing system" and carrying out systematic "mass killings". After World War II, the United Nations convened hearings and formulated a legal definition of Genocide as an international crime in times of war and peace. This was called the Convention on Genocide of 1948, which was influenced and informed by the Nazi Genocide of the Jews. The Holocaust has been a horrifying event that should never been forgotten for if we did something like that could happen again! As I mentioned before, it has killed many people, and many people lost their families and friends in it, so it affected the people who survived too. After the holocaust many people killed themselves because they couldnt bare the huge loss that they experienced! I personally think that the holocaust was one of greatest mistakes mankind did, because of all the people who have been murdered without any important and reasonable reason, but also because of how negatively it affected the worlds economy. There were less people, which means less working force, less taxes were paid to the states, etc... The general idea of the Holocaust was useless, and horrid. People without any guilt were killed just because they belonged to a different race, culture, nation, or tradition. According to my opinion that honestly didnt make any sense at all. The fact that you look different, talk differently, behave differently, or dress differently, does not have anything to do with our minds, rights, and personality. There is no such thing that can allow you to kill someone, and even less to kill entire nations! 5

Everyone is different and has a different character and personality, but thats a fact that counts for every single individual. If you belong to the same nation, culture or race, it does not mean that you have to have the same ideas as someone that belongs too, as well as when you dont it doesnt mean that you have to have a different opinion then someone which doesnt. Everyone has its own rights and opinions, and its everyones job to respect them and tolerate them. I will certainly not support racism, and Ill try to convince my classmates and friends to support my opinion and not to make differences between people for their appearance, tradition nation or culture.

Resources: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/holocaust/ http://www.holocaustsurvivors.org/ http://www.holocaust-history.org/ http://pakistanthinktankyouth.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/holocaust_kwhuq_3868.jpg http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/camp_children1.jpg http://www.woodburysch.com/staff/userfiles/efirth/image/anne%20frank.jpg http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/2158911/2159086/2159087/070221_CL_HitlerEX.jpg

1. Great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of life, especially by fire. 2. a. Holocaust The genocide of European Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II b. A massive slaughter 3. A sacrificial offering that is consumed entirely by flames.