The Holocaust (1933-1945): Voices and Images

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The Holocaust (1933-1945)Voices and Images

• How did Hitler and the Nazis organize the
  systematic extermination of European Jews?
• How did individuals experience the Holocaust?

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Sometimes at night I lay

• and I cant believe what my eyes have seen.
  I really cannot believe it.
• - Helen K.

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EUROPE, 1930s
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Europe, 1930s

• The Nazis consolidate power
• Jan. 30, 1933 Hitler appointed chancellor
• Feb. 1933 Emergency Decree all civil rights
  suspended
• Mar. 23, 1933 Enabling Act government allowed
  to pass any law or perform almost any act it
  wanted to, even if it violated the constitution

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Europe, 1930s

• ... and the Holocaust begins
• 1933 1st concentration camp (Dachau)
• 1935 Nuremberg Laws forbade marriage and
  sexual relations between Jews and Aryans removed
  Jewish citizenship
• pogroms brief, planned, surprise attacks
  against defenseless Jewish communities
• Nov. 9, 1938 - Kristallnacht

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The cover and an illustration from an
anti-Semitic German childrens book called The
Poisonous Mushroom (1938).
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Christa M.Born Saarbrücken, Germany, 1930

• It had to be around when I was five, my nanny
  had taken me into town to go shopping. There was
  what I had thought was a church across the
  street, and it was all in flames. And I thought,
  Oh, my God! The church is burning! because
  there was a lot of commotion in the street. And
  then I saw a whole bunch of Brown Shirts, with
  their boots and caps and armbandsthey always
  wore the swastika armband. In the center there
  was a man in a long black robe and a long beard.
  They had put a big drum around his neck. They
  were pushing him and shoving him. And he had to
  beat the drum, and he had to say to the drum,
  Im a filthy Jew. Im a filthy Jew. And they
  shoved him and tried to even trip him. Every
  time he staggered or fell, they kicked him again.
  It was just horrible, horrible, horrible,
  horrible.

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Anti-Semitic graffiti on wall of a Jewish
cemetery The death of the Jews will end the
Saarlands distress.
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Golly D. 16 years old in Bremen, Germany,
during Kristallnacht

• We were fast asleep. I and my family, the four
  of us fast asleep when we heard pounding on the
  front door. Heavy pounding. My father quickly
  went down the steps, opened the door, and there
  were two Brown Shirt Nazi troopers standing
  there. Tell your family get dressed quickly and
  come with us. Come along! We had no choice.
  We quickly got dressed and the two troopers
  delivered us to a mess hall which was in the
  center of town. And as we entered, we realized
  that all the other Jews from the city had also
  been rounded up and also been brought to this
  mess hall. Nobody knew why. Nobody knew what
  was going to happen. They let us sit there for
  hours on end, hour after hour, until finally they
  separated the women from the men and the men were
  taken away. We didnt know where to...

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Map plotting concentrated areas of Nazi violence
during Kristallnacht
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Approximately 1,000 synagogues were burned or
destroyed during Kristallnacht
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Burning synagogue in Siegen, Germany during
Kristallnacht
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Europe, 1930s

• Why did they stay?
• Did not want to leave
• Pay taxes and lose property
• Germany was home More German than Germans
• Difficulty of starting all over again in another
  country
• False security
• months of peace between acts of violence
• could not believe that things would get worse

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GHETTOS
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Ghettos

• (n.) special place set aside for Jews in or near
  main cities
• Sept. 21, 1939 all Jews in Nazi-occupied areas
  ordered to be moved to ghettos
• terrible conditions

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Helen K.Warsaw, Poland

• The beginning, they organized the ghetto. They
  pushed in all the people from the small little
  towns. They pushed us in about I dont know how
  many square blocks and they built walls around
  the Warsaw ghetto. You were trapped! I dont
  know if anybody can feel this feeling. You know,
  with all the freedom we have today, nobody can
  feel this feeling of being trapped.

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Relocation to the Warsaw ghetto (late 1940)
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Warsaw ghetto wall
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Bustling Pawia Street, Warsaw ghetto, in early
1941. About 37 of the Greater Warsaw population
was squeezed into 4.6 of the area of the city.
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Forced labor in Warsaw Ghetto
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Ghetto Ration Card (Oct. 1941) - officially
entitled the holder to 300 calories daily.
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A line of people wait to get a drink of water in
the overcrowded Warsaw ghetto.
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Renée G.Losice, Poland

• People were getting sick in the ghetto because
  of lack of food and lack of sanitation facilities
  and lack of water. The Germans were very, very
  clever because when they built the ghetto, they
  probably purposely avoided a well in the ghetto.
  The well, the water well, was outside of the
  ghetto, and in order to get water people had to
  go out. Well, some people had special passes, or
  there were special water carriers that would
  bring in the water. At times when somebody got
  out to get water and didnt have a pass, the
  Germans would just shoot them.

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Two German soldiers execute a Jewish man in the
Lódz ghetto in 1941.
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EINSATZGRUPPEN
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Einsatzgruppen (Special Action Groups)

• (n.) mobile firing squads that followed the
  victorious German army through Eastern Europe and
  parts of Russia, executing Jews wherever they
  were found

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Einsatzgruppe member kills a Jewish woman and her
child near Ivangorod, Ukraine, 1942
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Einsatzgruppe A members shoot Jews on the
outskirts of Kovno, 1941-1942
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Einsatzgruppe D executes Jews at Vinnitsa,
Ukraine, 1942
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Part of a report detailing murder of Jews in the
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belorussia, by
Einsatzgruppe A, submitted Feb. 1, 1942.
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DEPORTATION
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Deportation

• (n.) transportation of Jews from across Europe to
  the camps
• traveled in sealed cattle trains under miserable
  conditions

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A group of men who have been rounded up for
deportation march out of town
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Abraham P.Deported from Romania to Auschwitz at
age 24

• two gendarmes police knocked at the door. It
  was a Wednesday morning. They said, Get up!
  You be ready in fifteen minutes and go to the
  school. You can only take so much with you.
  Everybodysick, kids, it didnt matter old,
  youngeverybody had to be there within a specific
  time. And the gendarmes, they went over our
  luggage to see what we have. Not too many
  luggages were there because they didnt let you.
  So we just tied it up in sheets, whatever you
  could do. They kept us there all day long, not
  knowing what is going to happen, what they are
  going to do. And everybody was just sitting
  there, with their own thoughts. Hardly anybody
  was talking to one another.

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A Jewish family that has been rounded-up for
deportation waits outside the assembly center
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Abraham P.Deported from Romania to Auschwitz at
age 24

• All of a sudden, with a loudspeaker they said,
  Get yourself ready and go over to the railroad
  station. They handed us buckets and they threw
  us into those boxcarseighty of us in a boxcar.
  They didnt even write your name or who you are
  or what you are or something like that. They
  just threw you into the boxcar. And those people
  who couldnt get into the boxcars, the younger
  ones had to help them. And they couldnt help
  them. The gendarmes used to kick them so he
  should be able to move. So you finally got about
  seventy or eighty of us in a boxcar, and the
  minute you got in there, they locked us up.

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Jews from the Warsaw ghetto board a deportation
train
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Jewish deportees are transferred from a closed
passenger train to a train of open cars
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Helen K.19 years old when deported to Majdanek

• My brother died in my arms. My younger brother
  long silence and my husbands two sisters.
  There was not enough oxygen for all those people.
  They kept us in the wagons for days. They
  wanted us to die in the wagons.

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CONCENTRATION CAMPS
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Concentration Camps

• (n.) a prison camp where the Nazis sent people
  they thought were dangerous
• scattered throughout Nazi-controlled Europe
  6,000 camps in Poland alone
• inmates used as labor
• Auschwitz largest camp (Auschwitz I)

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Arrival of a transport of men, women and children
to one of the Jasenovac camps
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Walter B.Arrival at Auschwitz from Germany

• We got out of the freight cars in no time. I
  would say, in a few minutes they had separated
  one thousand peoplewomen on one side, men on the
  other side. And its well known, you know. The
  one side meant death, the other side maybe going
  to Hitler camp. But we didnt know. We really
  did not know.

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Newly arrived prisoners lined up for registration
at Buchenwald
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A Jewish prisoner is forced to remove his ring
upon his arrival in Jasenovac
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Joseph K.Deported from Gorlice, Poland

• They shaved us all hair and this is an extremely
  painful experience, when men used rusty razor
  blades and nick you, and then they use Lysol on
  the cut. Thats an excruciating pain. It just
  burns and some people didnt even survive from
  that.

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Washing and shaving newly arrived prisoners in
Buchenwald
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Identification numbers tattooed on every camp
prisoners arm upon arrival
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Forced labor prisoners from Buchenwald building
the Weimar-Buchenwald railroad line
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Forced labor female prisoners digging trenches
at the Ravensbrueck camp
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Womens bunks in Auschwitz
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Women line up for their extremely small daily
ration of thin soup
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Herbert J.Age 23, American POW, Mauthausen

• The main thing in the camps was the definite
  intent to dehumanize all the people that were
  there, to make them feel that they were of no
  value. This was a definite effort on their part,
  to take away any semblance of humanness and
  respect and whatever you might call dignity, to
  take all that away.

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FINAL SOLUTION
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Final Solution

• (n.) Nazi plan to murder all the Jews of Europe
  (1942)
• Why? Other methods of eliminating Jews were not
  efficient/practical enough for the Nazis (deaths
  in ghettos, Einsatzgruppen executions, emigration
  to Madagascar)
• concentration camps already existed ? death camps
  set up

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DEATH CAMPS
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Death Camps

• (n.) a camp whose basic purpose was to kill Jews
• gas chambers, crematoria
• 6 death camps, all in Poland
• Auschwitz largest camp (Auschwitz II/Birkenau)

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Concentration and Death Camps
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A gas chamber
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Crematoria ovens at Buchenwald
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American soldiers view a pile of human remains
outside the crematorium in Buchenwald
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Camp deaths
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Using stretchers and carts, survivors of Ebensee
remove bodies to the crematorium for burning
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LIBERATION
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Liberation

• (n.) freedom of prisoners from the camps by
  Allied armies
• spring 1945 along with victory in WWII
• Before liberation, Nazis liquidated (emptied) the
  camps and sent prisoners on death marches in a
  final attempt to fulfill the Final Solution

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A death march from Dachau
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Arnold C. Age 11, January 1945

• I got very tired of walking. I just wanted to
  go to sleep. I couldnt continue. So I began to
  fall back. And as I was almost to the end of the
  thousands of people who were marching, I saw the
  Germans were shooting people who were falling
  down

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German civilians help evacuate survivors from the
Schwandorf death train
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Corpses lie in one of the open railcars of the
Dachau death train
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Soviet troops liberate Auschwitz-Birkenau on
January 27, 1945
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Renée G.Age 12, Soviet troops enter the area
where she and her family were hiding

• The biggest thrill was when we started hearing
  shooting and we knew that the Russians are
  approaching. One day, we saw planes coming
  overhead and we were rejoiced. We knew we could
  get killed again, because many of the barns were
  burning all around us. But as long as we were
  being killed by the Russians, it wasnt so bad.

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Dachau inmates are ecstatic upon their liberation
by American soldiers in April 1945.
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Colonel Edmund M.Participated in US armys
liberation of Mauthausen

• The thing that impressed I think all of us
  immediately was the horrible physical condition
  of most of the inmates whom we saw Most of them
  were in very, very bad shape. Some of them
  actually looked almost like living skeletons.

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The Survivors
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Remember

• For the dead and the living, we must bear witness