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Name: ______________________________ Date: ________________
Introduction to the Holocaust
The Holocaust was the German government-
sponsored persecution and murder of approximately
six million Jews by the Nazi regime. "Holocaust" is
a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire."
The Nazis, a political party who came to power in
Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans
were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed
"inferior," were a threat to the so-called German
racial community.
During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities
also targeted other groups because of their
perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the
disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles,
Russians, and others). Other groups were
persecuted, among them Communists, Socialists,
Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.
WHAT WAS THE HOLOCAUST?
In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at
over nine million. Most European Jews lived in
countries that Nazi Germany would take over
during World War II. By 1945, the Germans killed
nearly two out of every three European Jews as part
of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder
the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the
Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were
the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims
included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least
200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients,
mainly Germans, living in institutional settings,
were murdered in the so-called Euthanasia Program.
ADMINISTRATION OF
THE "FINAL SOLUTION"
In the early years of the Nazi regime, the National
Socialist government established concentration
camps to detain real and imagined opponents.
Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war,
SS and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma,
and other victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these
camps. To monitor the Jewish population, the
Germans and created ghettos, transit camps, and
forced-labor camps for Jews.
Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June
1941, German SS and police units, murdered more
than a million Jewish men, women, and children,
and hundreds of thousands of others. Between 1941
and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported
millions of Jews from Germany, from countries
they controlled to ghettos and to killing centers,
often called extermination camps, where they were
murdered in specially developed gassing facilities.
THE END OF THE HOLOCAUST
In the final months of the war, SS guards moved
camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often
called “death marches,” in an attempt to prevent the
American Allies freeing large numbers of prisoners.
As Allied forces moved across Europe, they began
to liberate concentration camp prisoners, as well as
prisoners en route by forced march from one camp
to another.
Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews
moved to Israel, including 136,000 Jewish
displaced persons from Europe. Other Jews moved
to the United States and other nations.
The crimes committed during the Holocaust
devastated most European Jewish communities and
eliminated hundreds of Jewish communities in
occupied eastern Europe entirely.
Prewar photograph of three Jewish children with their babysitter. Two of the children died in 1942.
Warsaw, Poland, 1925-1926.
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Name: ______________________________ Date: ________________ 1. Look through the text and highlight these words:
regime, persecution, occupy, the Final Solution, tyranny, concentration camp, detain, ghetto, incarcerate, deport, liberate, superior, inferior
2. Skim read the text and look for the answers to these questions:What does ‘Holocaust’ mean? How many Jews died in the
Holocaust? What was the name of the program to kill off all the Jews?
The Final ....
Where did the surviving Jews move to after the war?
What percentage of European Jews were killed?
What other groups of people besides the Jews were victims of the Holocaust?
3. Guessing from where they’re used in the article, match the words from question one to theirmeanings below:
regime persecution
occupy the Final Solution
tyranny concentration camp
detain ghetto
incarcerate deport
liberate superior inferior
a form of government that is dodgy
a small poor part of city where disadvantaged peoplelive
abuse of power by a leading group
better than
give freedom to
hold
move out of a country forcefully
place where prisoners of war are held
put into prison
severely mistreating people on a big scale
the name of the policy under which all of the Jews werekilled
to take over
worse than
4. Finish this word search for words from the article:P B R T C L W L D V U I M L K N E A O W M I O E H C N Y B L B A R D I B O M W O C C U P Y O A P S E R I U R E T A U O X Q E O R E G E B H H J R C U Y X J A W E C O F V M Z C Y V I F T D R V W U F N O Q E N I K E T O E F L B T E I Z R C S R R O I R E P U S I A Y A G R I B M D S C D F A J O N T H M F R Q H E E J Y Z U G N E E H H K I P P T S G Q H E A L T O H X B O H O A H Y B N R V T E Z F R R H Y F I Y P W Y G O V M T B O L G B Z N I G T J D V C
deport incarcerate
occupy superior detain inferior
persecution tyranny ghetto liberate regime
#210 Thematic Unit—Holocaust © Teacher Created Resources, Inc.
Holocaust WordsDraw a six-sided star to represent the Star of David on the chalkboard or overhead projector. Inside thestar, write the following vocabulary words and others that the students might suggest:
• Assign a pair of students to each word. After they have been given a few minutes to review theirwords, ask them to explain what the word means and how it relates to the Holocaust.
• After this exercise is completed, ask the students to think of different categories in which toclassify the words (e.g., Death Words, Injustice Words). Write these categories on the chalkboard.Then assign the pairs of students to work together classifying the words.
• Next, as a whole group, work together to decide on the classification of these words as the teacherwrites them under the designated categories. Note: Students may come up with new categorieswhen they begin the classification activity.
• Ask one student to write all the vocabulary words on small slips of paper that can be folded andplaced in a box.
• Then, as a follow-up to the definition and classification activity, put the words in a box, drawthree words from the box and ask the students to write a sentence that contains the three wordsselected. Ask for volunteers to share sentences. Continue until all words have been used.
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The Holocaust Web Quest
Task:
Your mission is to develop a thorough background on The Holocaust to better your understanding of our upcoming memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel. You will use the internet to find the answers to the following questions. Each question must be thoroughly answered in your own words in a minimum of 3-4 sentences. Use your own lined paper. Be sure to use a citation to credit where you found your answer.
For example: Your answer (“The Holocaust Encyclopedia”).
Resources:
Use the following resources to answer your questions.
“The Holocaust Encyclopedia” http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/
“The Holocaust: A Learning Site for Students” http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/
“The Simon Wiesenthal Center's 36 Questions About the Holocaust” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/36quest3.html
Questions:
1. How did Hitler rise to power?
2. When Hitler rose to power, what kind of government did he establish?
3. Why did Hitler and the Nazi Party hate the Jews to the point of planning to exterminate
the entire Jewish race?
4. Were Jews the only people that were targeted?
5. How did the Nazi Party convince the German people to hate and eventually allow the
killing of 6,000,000 Jewish people and 5,000,000 non-Jewish people?
6. What is the “final solution” and how was it implemented?
7. Did the Jews in Europe realize what was going to happen to them?
8. What were the conditions in the concentrations camps? How are they different from
extermination camps?
9. What was the response of the Allies and the United States to the persecution of the Jews?
Could they have done anything to help?
10. When did the liberation of the Holocaust prisoners take place? Who were the liberators?
Name: _________________________
Period: _____
The Holocaust Webquest - Events Leading up the Formation of the State of Israel
Directions: Answer the following questions, using the provided links. This is an INDIVIDUAL assignment.
Jews in Pre-war Germany: Anti-Semitism http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007691
1. Define anti-Semitism.
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
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2. How far does it go back? _____________________________________________________
3. What does the term pogrom mean?
____________________________________________________________________________________
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4. In what other countries were Jews treated as scapegoats?
____________________________________________________________________________________
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5. According to the site, what was the name of Hitler's hero? What did this individual blame Jews for?
______________________________
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Jews in Pre-war Germany: Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007689
6. When Hitler came to power, how many Jews lived in the countries in Europe that Hitler would later take
over? _____________________________
7. By the end of the war, what proportion of these Jews would be dead?
_____________________________
8. Where were the largest concentrations of Jews? _____________________________________________
9. How did Jews in Eastern and Western Europe differ?
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
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10. Click on the map on this page. In 1933, what percentage of the world's Jewish population lived in
Europe?
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________________________
11. Did most European Jews live in Western or Eastern Europe? _____________________________
Nazi Rule: Hitler comes to Power http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007671
12. What was the name of the German government in the early 1930s? What event caused it to be weak?
_____________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
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13. Click on the map on this page. What losses did the Germans face as a result of WWI?
____________________________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________________________
14. How did Hitler and the Nazi Party appeal to Germans? Be specific.
____________________________________________________________________________________
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15. Who did the Nazis appeal to in particular?
____________________________________________________________________________________
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16. In what year did the Nazis win 33% of the votes (the most of any political party) in the German
parliament (the Reichstag)? _____________ When was Hitler appointed chancellor (what year)?
_____________
Nazi Rule: The Nazi Terror Begins http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007673
17. What form of government did Hitler institute soon after coming to power as Chancellor?
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
18. What freedoms did Germans lose?
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
19. The website states that tens of thousands of young, unemployed German men were "lured by the wages,
a feeling of comradeship, and the striking uniforms," to join which organization within the Nazi Party?
Give both the English and German terms. What did these "auxiliary policemen" do to those who
opposed the Nazi regime? How did this pressure others?
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
Nazi Rule: Nazi Racism http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007679m
20. What was Hitler's term for the "master race?" Describe this type of person.
____________________________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
21. Other than Jews, what types of German citizens were victims of Nazi racial ideology?
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
Jews in Pre-war Germany http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007687
22. How many Jews lived in Germany at the time of the 1933 census? ______________________________
23. How many of these Jews were German citizens? _____________________________
24. How were the remaining German Jews classified?
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
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Jews in Pre-war Germany: The Nuremberg Laws http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007695
25. How did the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 classify people in Germany as Jewish (by what standard did the
government judge if a person was Jewish)?
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
26. How did the Nazi government identify Jews within the society of Germans in general? Click on this
link for the answer
http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10007695&MediaId=2670.
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________________________
27. The Nuremberg Laws are labeled "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour." Go
to http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/nurmlaw2.html for the answer. How do you
think the Nazis intended for sections I, II, III and IV to provide this protection? Provide a specific
response for each separate section.
I. ______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
II. ______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
III. ______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________________________
IV. ______________________________________________________________________________
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Jews in Pre-war Germany: The Night of Broken Glass http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007697
28. Tell what happened on the night of November 9, 1938.
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29. What is the German name for this event? ______________________________
30. How was life even more difficult for Jewish children after this event?
____________________________________________________________________________________
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Map: Jewish Emigration from Germany
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=10005139&MediaId=467
31. Looking at the map, which country accepted the most Jews during this
period? ______________________________
32. How many Jews escaped to Palestine? ______________________________ To Shanghai?
______________________________
The Final Solution http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007704
33. What was the goal of the "final solution?"
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
34. What is the definition of the term "genocide"?
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________________________
35. Describe the two major stages of the Nazi plan to carry out the "final solution."
____________________________________________________________________________________
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36. Why did the Nazis place Jews in ghettos? Use this link to determine the answer
http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007706.
____________________________________________________________________________________
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37. After the Wannsee Conference, how did the Nazis change their tactics? (You can find the answer to
this question using the link at the beginning of this section – The Final Solution.)
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________________________
38. How many Jews were gassed in extermination camps? (You can find the answer to this question using
the link at the beginning of this section – The Final Solution.) ______________________________
39. Reflect on what you learned while completing this research assignment. Write a paragraph describing
what you learned, what stood out to you or what you found interesting. You can talk about one or more
topics.
____________________________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________________________
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A. Arrival at the Camp
When the victims arrived to the extermination camps in overcrowded trains, they were pushed out onto the arrival ramp. Here, German SS-men and brutal Ukrainian guards forced them to hand over their belongings and their clothes. Most of the victims had been told that they were merely to be moved to the east for new jobs and living places, and most of them had brought their favourite belongings.
Selection at the arrival ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The deported Jews were either selected for work or for immediate gassing. In the background: a group of people on their way towards gas chamber no. II.
In the extermination camps, men were separated from women upon arrival. Everybody had their hair shaved and all of their possessions and clothing were taken away. They were given a striped uniform to wear in the camp. All prisoners were given a number which was tattooed onto their arms.
The SS chose those able to work for the work camps. Those who could not work – the old, women and children – were immediately sent to the gas chambers or shot in the "camp hospital". Even those able to work eventually ended up in the gas chamber, or were the victims of random shootings within a few months when they had been worn out by the tough work. Those able to work did difficult jobs like helping to carry the bodies to the crematoria or search the bodies for valuables.
The bodies were looted of gold (from the teeth), before being thrown into large mass graves. When the Soviet armies started to advance through Poland, the Nazis tried to hide their terrible crime and the bodies were burned – either in mass graves or in the crematoria.
There are few examples of uprisings in the extermination camps. In Sobibor and Treblinka prisoners tried to rebel in 1943, and the same was tried in Auschwitz in 1944. Only a very few managed to escape.
B. Life in Auschwitz
Auschwitz Concentration Camp opened in June 1940. By 1942, the camp had 28 two-story buildings, the most of which were used to hold prisoners. In each building there were two large rooms upstairs and a number of smaller rooms downstairs. The buildings were made to hold about 700 prisoners each, but in reality they housed up to 1,200.
During the first several months, the prisoners’ rooms had neither beds nor any other furniture. Prisoners slept on straw-stuffed mattresses laid on the floor. When they woke up, they piled the mattresses in a corner of the room. The rooms were so overcrowded that prisoners could sleep only on their sides, in three rows. Three-level bunk beds began being put in the rooms in February 1941. There was always more than one person sleeping on each bunk.
Each building had bathrooms with 22 toilets, urinals, and long sinks with 42 taps. The fact that prisoners from the upstairs and downstairs had to use a single bathroom meant that people had to wait a long time to use it.
Prisoners had three meals per day. In the morning, they received only half a liter of “coffee” (which was actually boiled water with a coffee substitute added) or “tea” (a mix of different plants). These drinks were very bitter. The noon meal was about a liter of soup. The main ingredients of the soup were potatoes, rutabaga, and small amounts of groats, rye flour, and Avo food extract. The soup was gross, and new prisoners were often unable to eat it because it was so disgusting. Supper consisted of about 300 grams of black bread, served with about 25 grams of sausage, or margarine, or a tablespoon of marmalade or cheese. The bread served in the evening was supposed to cover the needs of the following morning as well, although the famished prisoners usually consumed the whole portion at once.
The combination of not enough food and a lot of hard work meant that people’s bodies stopped working properly. This led to emaciation and starvation sickness, the cause of a significant number of deaths in the camp. Emaciation is when a person becomes extremely thin and their body has no fat left.
Prisoners in Auschwitz
C. Working in Auschwitz
In the summer, the prisoners started working at 4:30 in the morning. In the winter, they started working at 5:30am. The prisoners got up at the sound of a gong and carefully tidied their living quarters. Next, they attempted to wash and relieve themselves before drinking their “coffee” or “tea.” At the sound of a second gong, they ran outside to the roll-call square, where they stood in lines. The prisoners were counted during roll call. If the numbers did not add up, everyone had to stand and wait while the guards figured it out. Finally, the prisoners were ordered to get into their work groups. After February 1944, the guards got rid of the roll-call because they thought it took up too much time. From that point on, prisoners went right to their work groups when the second gong rang.
Prisoners did many different kinds of work inside and outside the camp borders. Beginning at the end of March 1942, prisoners had to work at least 11 hours. They worked longer in the summer and a little shorter in the winter. The break for lunch lasted from 12 until 1 o’clock. Depending on the time of year, prisoners might get an extra hour or only get half an hour. In the early days, a roll call followed lunch, but this was ended eventually.
Prisoners returned to the camp under SS escort before nightfall. They often carried the bodies of those who had died or been killed while laboring. The evening roll call began at 7 o’clock and, as in the morning, could be longer if number of prisoners was off. After roll call, the prisoners received their evening bread. They had free time after the evening meal. Prisoners waited their turn for the washrooms and toilets until the first gong rang, meaning everyone had to return to their rooms. They could also receive mail or visit acquaintances in other blocks. The second gong, at 9 o’clock, meant everyone must be silent and sleep.
Prisoners did not have to work at all on Sundays and holidays, which they spent tidying up their quarters, mending or washing their clothes, or shaving and having their hair cut. They could also attend concerts by the camp orchestra and, every other week, send official letters to their families.
Roll call in Auschwitz, 1944.
D. Experiments
During World War II, some German doctors did painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their permission.
There were three kinds of experiments. The first kind was to help make the army better. In Dachau, physicians from the German air force did high-altitude experiments. They wanted to find how high was safe for people to parachute out of an airplane. Scientists in Dachau also did freezing experiments using prisoners to find out how to rewarm the human body. Some people were dunked in freezing water for three hours and then the doctors would try different ways of stopping the person from dying from the cold. They also used prisoners to try and find out how to make water from the ocean drinkable.
The second kinds of experiments were for making and testing medicine and treatments for injuries and illnesses which could happen to German soldiers. At the German concentration camps of Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Natzweiler, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme, scientists tested immunizations to stop contagious diseases from spreading, such as malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis. The Ravensbrueck camp was the site of bone-grafting experiments. Bone grafting is surgery to try and replace missing bone when it gets broken. At Natzweiler and Sachsenhausen, prisoners were forced to breathe in mustard gas in order to test possible antidotes.
The third kind of medical experimentations were to try and prove that the Nazi’s were the superior race. The most infamous were the experiments of Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Mengele conducted medical experiments on twins. Experiments on twin children in concentration camps were created to show the similarities and differences in twins, as well as to see if the human body can be unnaturally changed. Mengele did experiments on over 1,500 sets of imprisoned twins. Less than 200 people lived after his experiments. Mengele organized the testing of genetics in twins. He did things like inject different chemicals into the eyes of the twins to see if it would change their colors, and literally sewing the twins together to try and create conjoined twins.
Mengele also directed blood experiments on Roma (Gypsies), as did Werner Fischer at Sachsenhausen, in order to determine how different "races" survived different kinds of contagious diseases. The research of August Hirt at Strasbourg University also tried to prove "Jewish racial inferiority." Other gruesome experiments meant to further Nazi racial goals were a series of sterilization experiments, mostly done at Auschwitz and Ravensbrueck. There, scientists tried to find an easy way to make sure Jews, Roma, and other groups Nazi leaders hated, could no longer have children.
E. Extermination Methods
The Nazis and their helpers used the most terrible methods of murdering Jews, gypsies and other “undesirable” population groups. In the attempt to carry out the Final Solution as well as possible, different methods of mass murder were tested. The Nazis began by using mass shootings, then used gassing trucks (in the first extermination camp, Chelmno) and ended up by building large facilities of mass destruction as in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the very deadly Zyklon B gas was used. One of the most effective killing methods was by forcing Jews into gas chambers, where they were gassed to death using exhaust fumes or Zyklon B. In five of the six extermination camps, gas chambers were built with the single purpose of killing Jews, gypsies and other ’undesirables’. In the Chelmno extermination camp gassing trucks were used for this horrible activity. The process of killing the victims in gas chambers was the following: the victims were forced into the gas chamber, the door was closed and either exhaust fumes or Zyklon B-gas flowed into the room. In the extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka exhaust fumes were used, while Zyklon B was used in Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Gas chambers were sometimes disguised as shower rooms so that prisoners would go in willingly. Once the gas chamber was full of adults, children were sometimes pushed in above the adults’ heads to kill as many people as possible. At least 3 million Jews were killed in the extermination camps that had been constructed with the single purpose of killing Jews as effectively, quickly and secretly as possible.
Holocaust Worksheet: Inside the Death Camps
Read the article for your section and answer the questions with your group. You will all become experts on your section. Make sure you write down the answers for each question so you do not forget. The groups will then be split up and we will make new groups with one person from each of the sections (every group will have one person who was in Group A, one person from Group B, etc.). Everybody will take a turn explaining the answers to their questions and any other interesting information their group read in the article.
Group A: 1. Where did many prisoners think they were going before they arrived at Auschwitz? 2. What happened to the men and women when they got there? 3. How did the Nazis label the prisoners? 4. What did the Nazis do with the dead bodies? 5. What other information does your group think is interesting?
Group B: 1. Where did everybody in the camp sleep? What were their beds like? 2. How many people lived in each building? 3. What made using the bathroom difficult for the prisoners? 4. How many meals did the prisoners get every day? 5. What happened to people when they did not have enough food? 6. What other information does your group think is interesting?
Group C: 1. How early did the prisoners have to wake up in the morning? 2. How long did the prisoners usually have to work? 3. What did prisoners usually have to bring home with them from work? 4. Did the prisoners get days off? What days did they not have to work? 5. What other information does your group think is interesting?
Group D: 1. How many kinds of experiments did the Nazis do? 2. What were the different kinds of experiments? 3. What were the twins experiments? What kinds of things did Mengele do? 4. How many people lived after Mengele experimented on them? 5. What other information does your group think is interesting?
Group E: 1. What were the three ways the Nazis tried to finish the Final Solution? 2. What was the name of the common gas used by the Nazis? 3. What kind of gas did they use at Auschwitz? 4. What other information does your group think is interesting?