HLOCAUST AND THE NAZI ERA Holocaust was a divastating and corrupt event which caused the non

german to suffer. Under Adolf Hitler the National Socialist German Workers Party became very powerful in Germany from 1933 to 1945. The Nazis, as they were called, wanted to get rid of people who they thought were not as good as they were. They especially hated Jews and thought they were evil . At the beginning they made life hard for the Jews in Germany and all over Europe. Later on, they decided to kill them. This mass killing was called the Holocaust. After 1939 about 6 million Jews were killed in the countries that Hitler controlled. But Jewish people were not the only ones murdered by the Nazis. Gypsies , homosexuals, mentally and physically disabled people and others who were against Hitler were killed in the Holocaust. In 1935 the Nazis passed a new law . Jews were no longer citizens of Germany and they were not allowed to marry other Germans. They lost all of their rights . Every Jew had to wear a yellow Star of David. Many Jews were afraid of Hitler and tried to escape before World War II started. On November 9th and 10th, 1938 the Nazis destroyed all Jewish synagogues and other public places the Jews went to. This event was called the Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Gl

What happened to Jews in Nazi Germany?

Hitler believed that the Jews were responsible for Germany's defeat in the First World War. As soon as he came to power he began to attack them: From 1933 Jews were subjected to increasing persecution in Nazi Germany. At first they were banned from some professions - medicine, dentistry,

the civil service, for example. They also found that their shops were boycotted from time to time. Then in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were announced - these made Jews second class citizens and prevented them from marrying non-Jews. They also lost the right to vote and had to use separate seats in buses and parks which were painted yellow. In 1938, Jewish synagogues, shops and houses all over Germany were attacked. This was known as Crystal Night. It took place after a Nazi was murdered by a Jew in Paris. 30,000 Jews were arrested, although most were released soon after. A fine of 1,000,000,000 marks was levied on Jews in Germany for the repair of the damage. From early 1939 Jews were banned from owning businesses and were forced to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing. The Nazis forced Jews out of Germany; many went to Britain, France and the USA. Once war broke out this became more difficult. Jews could not leave and were forced into Ghettos and then into Concentration Camps. Ghettos were areas of cities that were surrounded by fences. Jews were allowed out in the morning to work, but had to return before a curfew in the evening. In 1941 Hitler invaded the USSR, where there were millions more Jews. Death Squads, "Einsatzgruppen", were set up to shoot Jews at will. Finally the Nazis decided in January 1942 to set up Extermination Camps. This became known as the Final Solution. They intended to murder all of the Jews in Europe: Altogether at least 6,000,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis, along with more than 1,000,000 gypsies and 4,000,000 Soviet prisoners of war. Many Germans were unaware of what was happening. Extermination Camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka were built outside of Germany. The true story was only discovered when the Allies advanced across Europe in 1945. Many prisoners of war and Jews were worked to death in Concentration Camps, such as Belsen and Dachau in Germany. These were certainly known about and many German businesses used Jewish workers in their factories. The evidence given at the trials of the camp commandants was horrific. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, described how he tried to find the most efficient poison gas to kill the inmates of his camp, whom he thought were nothing better than vermin. Survivors described how the fittest inmates were allowed to live to be used as slave labour. The old, sick and young were all murdered. Altogether

between 6,000,000 and 12,000,000 people died. This mass murder has become known as the Holocaust, the Hebrew word for sacrifice.

Annes optimism One particularly captivating aspect of Annes story is her extraordinary optimism despite her terrifying circumstances and two years of hiding. Here are some of her own words:
Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart. Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know

how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is! I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains. No one has ever become poor by giving. We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same

her indomitable spirit made her one of Times 20 people who articulate the longings of the last 100 years, exemplifying courage, selflessness, exuberance, superhuman ability and amazing grace. Anne Frank became an international hero before she turned sixteen. Her inspirational story challenges each of us to make the most of each precious day of our lives.

Annes death and

After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were eventually transferred to theBergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died of typhus in March 1945. Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl. It has since been translated into many languages. The diary, which was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from 12 June 1942 until 1 August 1944.

Museum

The Anne Frank exhibition aims to inform people about what happened during the Holocaust and also to encourage them to think about the consequences that the story of Anne Frank has for today's world.

The exhibition makes use of images from the Frank family photo albums and quotations from the Diary of Anne Frank.

Each panel displays information about the most important developments of that time: the rise of National Socialism, the Second World War and the persecution of the Jews. The exhibition consists of eleven panels. Each panel displays approximately fifteen photos as well as accompanying texts. To emphasise the chronological order of events, almost every panel contains a time line. Below the time line is the personal story of Anne Frank and above the time line the visitor is confronted with the 'big historical events' of that time. In this manner it is easy to understand the connections between the 'small' and 'big' history.
Shortly after the book was published, visitors were shown around by the employees who had hidden the families and could see the secret rooms. But by 1955 the company had moved to new premises and the entire block to which the building belonged was sold to a single estate agent who served a demolition order with the intention of building a factory on the space. A campaign to save the building and to list it as a protected monument was started by the Dutch paper Het Vrije Volk on 23 November 1955. The building was saved by campaigners who staged a protest outside the building on the day of demolition. The Anne Frank Foundation was set up by Otto Frank and Johannes Kleiman on 3 May 1957 with the primary aim of collecting enough funds to purchase and restore the building. In October of that year the company who owned it donated the building to the Foundation as a goodwill gesture. The collected funds were then used to purchase the house next door, Number 265, shortly before the remaining buildings on the block were pulled down as planned. The building was opened as a museum to the public in 1960. The former hiding place of Anne Frank attracted a huge amount of interest, especially as translations and dramatisations of the Diary had made her a figure known throughout the world. Over 9,000 visitors came in its first year. In a decade there were twice as many. Over the years the building has had to be renovated to manage such a large number of visitors, and so it closed temporarily in 1970 and in 1999. On 28 September 1999 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands reopened the museum, which now incorporated the entire building between exhibition spaces, a bookshop, and a cafe, and featured the offices in the front house reconstructed to their state in the 1940s. In 2007, over one million people visited the museum. On display at the museum is the Academy Award that Shelley Winters won, and later donated to the museum, for her performance asAuguste van Pels in The Diary of Anne Frank. The award now sits in a bullet-proof glass case in the museum. In 1998 the Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin was opened, after the completion of a cooperation agreement with the Anne Frank House.