NIGHT

By Elie Weisel

Tappan Zee High SchoolJanuary 2002

1918 World War I ended

1919 Germany is punished severely by AlliesHitler became leader of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. He spoke about a racially “pure” Germany

1

1925 Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. The Nazi Party began building a mass movement

1929-32 The Great Depression affected Germany. By 1932, one out of three people were

unemployed

1933 Hitler appointed Chancellor Dachau Concentration Camp started This became a training center for

concentration camp guards Boycotts of Jewish-owned shops and

bookburning were encouraged

1934 Hitler declares himself Führer

1935 Hitler announced Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of their civil rights

1932 Hitler did not win election, but received37% of the vote

1936 Berlin hosted Olympics. Hitler viewed this as an opportunity to promote a favorable image of the Nazi regime.

1938 Hitler took over AustriaHitler took over the SudetenlandAnti-Semitism widely accepted“Night of Broken Glass”(Kristallnacht) Jewish pupils were expelled from schools.

Jewish pupils were expelled from school

1939 World War II officially begins when Hitler invades Poland

New Order established to eliminate Jews and Slavs

Hitler intends for Poles to become slaves of Germany; Jewish neighborhoods turned into prisons (ghettos).

Jewish had to wear Star of David on armbands or pinned to the chest or back

1940 Jews not allowed to leave “Jewish residential districts” under penalty

of death

1941 General deportations began from Germany

to major ghettos in Poland. Many people starved due to lack of food

Many ghetto members resisted dehumanization and continued to hold religious services secretlyNazis established Terezin a model ghetto with gardens, café and schools to demonstrate a “typical” ghetto to the Red Cross

Members of the Nazi occupation authorities gather outside a wall dividing the ghetto from the rest of Warsaw. Joseph Goebbels called the ghettos "death boxes." Photo credit: Meczenstwo Walka, Zaglada Zydów Polsce 1939-1945. Poland. No. 78.

Ghetto Ration Card

Ghetto Ration Card

Ghetto ration card for October 1941. This card officially entitled the holder to 300 calories daily.

Photo credit: Meczenstwo Walka, Zaglada Zydów Polsce 1939-1945. Poland. No. 137.

Homeless Children

Warsaw ghetto, 1941. Homeless children.Photo credit: Meczenstwo Walka, Zaglada Zydów Polsce 1939-1945. Poland. No. 126.

Jewish women and children who have already surrendered their belongings form a small group as others in the background are ordered to discard their outer clothing and their possessionsprior to execution. Photograph was taken October 16, 1941 in Lubny, the Ukraine. Photo credit: Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

In the beginning of the systematic mass murder of Jews, Nazis used mobile killing squads called Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen consisted of four units of between 500 and 900 men each which followed the invading German troops into the Soviet Union. By the time Himmler ordered a halt to the shooting in the fall of 1942, they had murdered approximately 1,500,000 Jews. The death camps proved to be a better, faster, less personal method for killing Jews, one that would spare the shooters, not the victims, emotional anguish.

1941 The first death camp, Chelmno, began operating in late 1941

Nacht und Nabel (“night and fog”) order issued—This allowed military courts to swiftly sentence resisters to death.

1942 The Final Solution is agreed to at the Wannsee Conference. The Nazi officials agreed to SS plans for the transport and destruction of all 11 million Jews of Europe

In 1942, Auschwitz 2 (Birkenau), Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor began operations as death Camps.

A fence around the barracks in the main camp - Auschwitz I. Photo credit: Glowna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu,

courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

Auschwitz

Prisoners at forced labor constructing the Krupp factory at Auschwitz, 1942-43

Photo credit: Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

By the end of 1943 the Germans closed down the death camps built specifically to exterminate Jews. The death tolls for the camps are as follows:

Treblinka (750,000 Jews) Belzec (550,000 Jews)

Sobibór (200,000 Jews) Chelmno (150,000 Jews) Lublin (50,000 Jews).

Auschwitz continued to operate through the summer of 1944; its final death total was about 1 million Jews and 1 million non-Jews. Allied encirclement of Germany was nearly complete in the fall of 1944. The Nazis began dismantling the camps, hoping to cover up their crimes. By the late winter/early spring of 1945, they sent prisoners walking to camps in central Germany. Thousands died in what became known as death marches.

A total of eleven million lives were lost during the Holocaust.

Approximately six million Jews

Approximately half a million GypsiesApproximately three million Polish

Christians and CatholicsThousands of handicapped people were deemed useless and put to death like cats and dogs

All children of African descent were sterilized

Homosexuals were persecuted, tortured and Executed. Between 5,000 to 15,000 died inConcentration Camps during the Holocaust

Jewish women at forced labor pulling hopper cars of quarried stones along "Industry Street" in the Plaszlow concentration camp, 1944.

Photo credit: Prof. Leopold Pfefferberg-Page Collection, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

Resistance

Resistance was very dangerous and took many forms:

•Some struggled for physical existence•Some escaped through legal or illegal

emigration•Some hid•Some smuggled food, clothing and medicine•Some became part of an underground war

movement

1942 Stalin called for underground guerrillamovement in Eastern Europe’s forests andswamps

A small group of partisans in the forests of Lublin, Poland about 100 miles southwest of Warsaw display their weapons.

1943 Warsaw Ghetto Revolt by the JewishFighter Organization (ZOB)Nazis destroyed the ghetto with fire and tanks, killing many of the last60,000 Jewish ghetto residents.

Jews captured during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising are marched off through a debris-covered street to the

Umschlagplatz for deportation. Photo credit: Poland National Archives

1943There were several armed uprisings at

ghettos and camps: •In August, 700 Jews torched parts of the Treblinka death camp. Most were killed within the camp. Of the 150-200 who escaped, only 12 survived.•Two weeks later, Jews in Bialystok attacked the German army. All resisters were captured and killed the same day.

•September 1, there was a revolt in the Vilna ghetto. Most were killed, but some escaped and joined partisan units.

1944•In October, prisoners forced to handle bodies of gas chamber victims blow up one of the crematoria at Auschwitz. They were all caught and killed.

Pre-war portrait of Ala Gertner. Gertner was one of the participants in the Sonderkommando uprising in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was born about the year 1912 in Bedzin. During the exhaustive investigation that followed the short-lived uprising, four women were directly implicated in the theft of the explosives: Ala Gertner, Roza Robota, Regina Safirsztajn and Ester Wajcblum. All four were arrested and tortured. On January 5, 1945, all four women were publicly hanged.Photo credit: Anna and Joshua Heilman Collection, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

Anyone found harboring a Jew was shot or publicly hanged as a warning to others.Nevertheless some people continued to try to help. In Denmark, 7,220 of its 8,000 Jews were saved by people who hid them, then ferried them to the safety of Sweden.

1945

Allied troops enter Nazi-occupied territories and rescue and liberate concentration camp survivors.

General Eisenhower insisted on photographing andDocumenting the horror so that future generations would not ignore history and repeat its mistakes.

Elie Weisel

Slave laborers in Buchenwald are liberated by the American Army in April, 1945. They survived in spite of miserable conditions: overcrowding, lack of food, hard labor, and psychological torture. Eli Weisel appears as the last full face on the second bunk from the bottom.Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

Young survivors behind a barbed wire fence in

Buchenwald concentration camp.

Photo credit: National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo

Archives

Emaciated Jewish survivors, who had been confined to the infirmary barracks at Ebensee, are gathered outside on the day after liberation. The survivor at center-left holding his metal name tag is Joachim Friedner, a twenty-one year-old Polish Jew from Krakow. Photo credit: National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

Women survivors in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp peel potatoes on April 28, 1945. Photo credit: National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

American soldiers of the U.S. 7th Army force boys, believed to be Hitler youth, to examine boxcars containing bodies of prisoners starved to death by the SS. Photo credit: National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

Sick survivors are evacuated from theWoebbeling concentration camp to an American

field hospital where they will receive medical attention.

Photo credit: Arnold Bauer Barach Collection, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

Three Ebensee survivors, too weak to eat solid food, suck on sugar cubes to give them strength.

Photo credit: Dr. Robert G. Waite Collection, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

General Dwight D. Eisenhower with other Army members view the bodies of executed prisoners while on a tour of Ohrdruf concentration

camp on April 12, 1945. Photo credit: National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

Alongside the concentration camp, 50 box cars sat with over 1500 prisoners who were shipped by train without food from Buchenwald to Dachau. American soldiers find one lone and thankful survivor in a train on the siding outside the Dachau

concentration camp. All of the others had perished. Photo credit: 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division : A Combat history of World War II, Lt. Hugh C.

Daly, editor, 1946.

These Jewish children are on their way to Palestine after having been released from Buchenwald concentration camp. The girl on the left is from Poland, the boy in the center is from Latvia, and the girl on the

right is from Hungary.

Photo Credit: National Archives and Records Administration, item 111-SC-204516. Lt. Moore, photographer, April 12, 1945.

War Crimes Trial in Nuremberg,

Photo credit: Nancy and Michael Krzyzanowski, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.

Ernst Kaltenbrummer pleading "not guilty" to the charges against him during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, 1945-

46.Photo credit: National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

International Military Tribunal Concludes:

A war of aggression is prohibited under international law. The individual is responsible for crimes carried out under superior orders.The Gestapo, Nazi Party, SS and SA were criminal organizations.The leaders and organizers of these criminal organizations were guilty of crimes carried out by others executing the criminal plan.

Bibliography

Much of the information is taken from:

A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocausthttp://fcit.coedu.sf.edu/holocaust/timeline