Classwork about the Shoah (By the students of Lyc

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Classwork about the Shoah(By the students of
Lycée Montchapet, 1eres L-ES, EURO Class)

• Montchapet's 1ère L-ES European group worked
  about the holocaust during World War II.
• Here is an exhaustive list of the different
  topics students worked on.

Topics
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Before all, visit The US holocaust website
http//www.ushmm.org/holocaust/
This website was created to allow people to learn
or to remember what happened during these four
years of holocaust.
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• What is a genocide ? Slides 4 to 7 (go)
• Murder of the Jews by the Nazis 8-11 (go)
• The Einsatzgruppen 12 -16 (go)
• Killing centers 17-21 (go)
• The horror of Nazi Camps 22-26 (go)
• Jewish resistance 27-31 (go)
• Women during WWII
• Children during the Holocaust

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What is Genocide?
 geno  means  race  or tribe in Greek
 cide  means  killing  in Latin
Definition  it is referring to violent crimes
committed against groups with the intent to
destroy the existence of the group.
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Examples
Armenian genocide  it was the Ottoman
extermination of its minority Armenian because
the turks were in war against the Russians and
accuse the armenians of betrayal in favor of the
Russians
Jewish genocide  (Holocaust) it is the
extermination of the Jewish by the Nazis because
he wanted a one and only race. The Aryan race.
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Some differences...

• They were a lot of different genocides, but the
  one that stays in mind is the Jewish genocide
  because 11 million people died from the
  Holocaust, including 6 million Jews. The Nazis
  killed approximately two-thirds of all Jews
  living in Europe and an estimated 1.1 million
  children were murdered in the Holocaust.
• During WW1, 1.5 million Armenians died in the
  genocide which is a lot less than during the
  Holocaust. Thats probably why it wasn't as known
  as the Jewish genocide.
• Many Jews lived in Ghettos. During the Nazi
  regime, many Jews were forced to wear a yellow
  Star of David indicating their Jewish
  affiliation, and were not even allowed in public
  places.
• Armenians were not labeled by any symbol on their
  clothes Turks and Armenians lived together in
  peace for centuries
• Nazi Germany began exterminating the Jews, when
  they were at the peak of their power.
• The Ottoman Empire ever since the 1700s was
  declining.

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Common features...

• During both genocides, the governments planned
  out everything. This brings up another
  similarity both Genocides specifically targeted
  religious minorities.
• State police forces the Ottoman secret police
  (the secret organisation) and the Nazi Gestapo
• Inter-allied tribunals for the prosecution of war
  crimes The Malta Tribunals Nuremberg
  Tribunals

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Murder of Jews by the Nazis
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The Einsatzgruppen

• The Enisatzgruppen were defined as  German task
  forces , they were paramilitary death squads
  known for mass killings especially by shooting.
  They demanded the jews to gather in a specific
  street or place, they brought them to
  counterfoils. they had to lie down in the deep of
  the counterfoil and the SS shot them, the next
  jews having to lie on the corpse of the others.

The extermination camps
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• These are the places were the Jews were detained
  waiting for their death. They were treated as
  animals, they were tattooed with numbers, the
  Nazis forced them to work very hard. Most of them
  were gassed if they did not die from the work
  conditions, the cold, the lack of food.
• After entering the camp, Jews were sorted,
  children on a side, women on an other. Only the
  most forcefull men were choosen to work. Some of
  them were selected to bring the gassed people
  into counterfoils, where the corpses were
  burried. Before the extermination, the Nazis
  stole the goods of their victims, their jewels,
  their money. And after their killing, they kept
  the hairs, the skin, the golden teeth to recycle
  them

A crematorium at the Majdanek extermination camp,
outside Lublin. Poland, date uncertain
Eyeglasses of victims (Auschwitz)
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• Dachau concentration camp

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The Einsatzgruppen - Mobile Killing Units

• What were these units ?
• What were they used for ?

By T. Béréni and C. Thuillier
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These special units were created in 1939 by
Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS units.
These units were created to exterminate all
opponents -including Jews and all  ennemies 
of the Nazi regime. They worked in small units,
they grouped people together and shot them. It
was the only way to destroy people before the
invention of gas chambers Instead of deporting
Jews to killing centers, Einsatzgruppen came
directly to the home communities and massacred
them.
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Shooting was the most common form of killing.
Einsatzgruppen didn't want any survivors nor
prisonners. They often forced people to dig their
pits or graves.
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For instance, about 33,000 people were killed in
Babi Yar, one of the most important extermination
places, in Ukraine.
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The idea of gas chambers was inspired by
Einsatzgruppen's first invention  the gas van.
People stayed at the back of a van which was full
of gas ...
In 1942, permanent killing centres (as Auschwitz,
Sobibor and Treblinka, and other Nazi
extermination camps), replaced mobile death
squads as the primary method of mass killing. The
Einsatzgruppen remained active, however, and were
still participating in massacres.
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(No Transcript)
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KILLING CENTERS
CHELMNO - AUSCHWITZ - MADJANEK
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• During WWII, killing centers were planned to
  organise efficient mass murder in Europe. Unlike
  concentration camps which served as detention and
  labor centers, killing centers were essencially a
   death factory . German SS and police mudered
  nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers with
  poison gas or by shooting.

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CHELMNO

• It was the first killing center. Mostly Jews and
  gypsies were gassed. In the Operation Reinhard
  killing centers, the SS and their auxiliaries
  killed approximately 1,526,500 Jews between March
  1942 and November 1943.

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AUSCHWITZ

• Almost all of deportees who arrived in Auschwitz
  were sent immediately to death in the gas room.
  It was the largest killing center, which by
  spring 1943 had four gas chambers in operation.
  6000 Jews were gassed each day. A million Jews
  and 10 thousands of Roma, Poles and Soviet
  prisoners of war were killed here in november
  1944.

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MADJANEK

• The Madjanek camp is the sixth killing center.
  Recent research had shed more light on the
  functions and operations at Madjanek. Madjanek
  served to concentrate Jews whom Germans spared
  temporarily for forced labor.
• It occasionally functioned as a killing site to
  murder victims who could not be killed at the
  Operation Reinhard killing centers Belzec,
  Sobibor, and Treblinka II. It also contained a
  storage depot for property and valuables taken
  from the Jewish victims at the killing centers.
• The SS considered the killing centers top
• secret. The grounds of some killing centers were
  landscaped or camouflaged to disguise the murder
  of millions. See more at.

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NAZI CAMPS
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Type of camps  Hostage camps camps where
hostages were held and killed as reprisals. Labor
camps concentration camps where interned inmates
had to do hard physical labor under inhumane
conditions and cruel treatment. Some of these
camps were sub-camps of bigger camps, or
"operational camps", established for a temporary
need. POW camps concentration camps where
prisoners of war were held after capture. POWs
were usually soon assigned to labor
camps Extermination camps  These camps differed
from the rest, since not all of them were also
concentration camps. Although none of the
categories is independent, and many camps could
be classified as a mixture of several of the
above, and all camps had some of the elements of
an extermination camp, systematic extermination
of new-arrivals occurred in very specific camps.
Of these, four were extermination camps, where
all new-arrivals were simply killed.
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This photograph is called  Deportation from the
Westerbork transit camp. It was taken in The
Netherlands in 19431944.
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We can see an officier pushing children into a
train. The train is full of Jews, children and
elder people confonded. Women and babies are also
pushed in the train. These people are stacked in
the train, they come from a transit camp and
they're going to be deported in really hard
living conditions. They will not have any window
in the train and they will not eat and drink
during the deportation. We can see that Nazis
officier doesn't make any difference between
children and adults, they are treated all the
same. When the Jews arrive in the camp, they
will be separated, men on a side, women and
children on the other. Children, elder people,
sick people will be killed and other people will
work until they die.
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We chose Ruth Webber's interview, she witnessed a
horrible execution of Jews. She was forced to
live in a ghetto, and when the Nazi wanted to
liquidate the ghetto, Ruth was sent to several
concentration camps before eventually being
deported to Auschwitz, where she saw dying people
by a little window.
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Jewish resistance

• During WW2, the Nazis persecuted the Jews.
  Knowing that Jews were weak compared to Nazi's
  super-power, it was difficult for them to resist
  this attack! They were minorities and they did
  not have any country protection. However, some of
  them did! They resisted Nazi oppression both
  collectively and as individuals.
• Most Jewish armed resistance took place after
  1942, as a desperate effort, after it became
  clear that the Nazis had murdered most of their
  families and their coreligionists

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• Time line.
• After 1942, organized armed resistance ? the most
  powerful form of Jewish opposition to Nazi
  policies in German occupied-Europe.
• Jewish civilians ? resistance in over 100
  ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union.
• April-May 1943 ? Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose
  in armed revolt.
• 1943, Jewish groups attacked German tanks with
  Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, and a handful
  of small arms.
• Ghetto inhabitants rose against the Germans in
  Vilna (Vilnius), Bialystok, and a number of other
  ghettos.
• 1944, Many ghetto fighters took up arms.
• They fought for the sake of Jewish honor, and
  also to sek revenge for the slaughter of so many
  Jews.

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• Thousands of young Jews resisted by escaping from
  the ghettos into the forests.
• There they joined Soviet partisan units to harass
  the German occupiers.
• Although many Jewish council (Judenrat) members
  cooperated under compulsion with the Germans
  until they themselves were deported

Jewish partisans, survivors of the Warsaw ghetto
uprising, at a family camp in Wyszkow forest.
Poland, 1944. YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research, New York
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For example Many ghetto fighters took up
arms in the knowledge that the majority of ghetto
inhabitants had already been deported to the
killing centers and also in the knowledge that
their resistance even now could not save from
destruction the remaining Jews who could not
fight. But they fought for the sake of Jewish
honor and to avenge the slaughter of so many
Jews. Jews in the Warsaw ghetto organized an
armed rebellion after rumors that the Germans
would deport the remaining ghetto inhabitants to
the Treblinka killing center. Jewish
prisoners rose against their guards at three
killing centers. At Treblinka in August 1943 and
Sobibor in October 1943, prisoners armed with
stolen weapons attacked the SS staff and the
Trawniki-trained auxiliary guards.
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• Testimony. 
•  Once, I was in a truck, with 5 or 6 mates when
  we met a group a Nazis who compelled us to stop.
  They lined us up in front of a ditch, a soldier
  behind each of us, while they asked for our
  ausweiss . They rammaged through the truck, in
  vain. So they let us go. Actually, we were lucky,
  because we really had these guns they wer looking
  for, but hidden under a subfloor. 
• Joseph, 15 years old.

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Women during the Holocaust

• The Nazi regime targeted all Jews, both men and
  women, for persecution and eventually death. The
  regime frequently subjected women, however, both
  Jewish and non-Jewish, to brutal persecution

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Camps for women

• Some individual camps and certain areas within
  concentration camps were designated specifically
  for female prisoners.
• In May 1939, the SS opened Ravensbrück, the
  largest Nazi concentration camp established for
  women. Over 100,000 women had been incarcerated
  in Ravensbrück. Soviet troops liberated the camp
  in 1945.
• There was an other camp 
• Bergen-Belsen, build in 1944.

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Ladies first?

• Nazi ideology promoted the complete annihilation
  of all Jews, regardless of age or gender.
• SS and police officials carried out that policy
  under the codename Final Solution. German SS
  and police officials shot both women and men in
  mass shooting operations at hundreds of locations
  on occupied Soviet territory.
• During deportation operations, pregnant women and
  mothers of small children were consistently
  labeled incapable of work.
• They were sent to killing centers, where camp
  officials often included them in the first groups
  to be sent to the gas chambers.

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Experimentations

• In ghettos and concentration camps, German
  authorities deployed women in forced labor under
  conditions that often led to their deaths.
• German physicians and medical researchers used
  Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) women as subjects for
  sterilization experiments and other unethical
  human experimentations. . .

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dreadful living conditions

• In both camps and ghettos, women were not enough
  fed and they were in an unhealthy environment.
  Women were particularly vulnerable to beatings
  and rapes by the Nazis.

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Resistance fighters

• Women played an important role in various
  resistance activities.
• This was especially the case for women who were
  involved in Socialist, Communist, or Zionist
  youth movements.
• Many women escaped to the forests of eastern
  Poland and the Soviet Union and served in armed
  partisan units.
• Women played an important role in the French (and
  French-Jewish) resistance.