The Holocaust (1933-1945):

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

“Sometimes at night I lay …

…and I can’t believe what my eyes have seen. I really cannot believe it.”

- Helen K.

EUROPE, 1930s

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

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

The cover and an illustration from an anti-Semitic German children’s book called The Poisonous Mushroom (1938).

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 armbands—they 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, ‘I’m a filthy Jew. I’m 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.”

Anti-Semitic graffiti on wall of a Jewish cemetery: “The death of the Jews will end the Saarland’s distress.”

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 didn’t know where to...”

Map plotting concentrated areas of Nazi violence during Kristallnacht

Approximately 1,000 synagogues were burned or destroyed during Kristallnacht

Burning synagogue in Siegen, Germany during Kristallnacht

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

GHETTOS

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:

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 don’t know how many square blocks and they built walls around the Warsaw ghetto. You were trapped! I don’t know if anybody can feel this feeling. You know, with all the freedom we have today, nobody can feel this feeling of being trapped.”

Relocation to the Warsaw ghetto (late 1940)

Warsaw ghetto wall

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.

Forced labor in Warsaw Ghetto

Ghetto Ration Card (Oct. 1941) - officially entitled the holder to 300 calories daily.

A line of people wait to get a drink of water in the overcrowded Warsaw ghetto.

Renée G.Łosice, 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 didn’t have a pass, the Germans would just shoot them.”

Two German soldiers execute a Jewish man in the Lódz ghetto in 1941.

EINSATZGRUPPEN

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

Einsatzgruppe member kills a Jewish woman and her child near Ivangorod,

Ukraine, 1942

Einsatzgruppe A members shoot Jews

on the outskirts of Kovno, 1941-1942

Einsatzgruppe D executes Jews at

Vinnitsa, Ukraine, 1942

Part of a report detailing murder of Jews in the Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belorussia, by Einsatzgruppe A, submitted Feb. 1, 1942.

DEPORTATION

Deportation

(n.) transportation of Jews from across Europe to the camps

traveled in sealed cattle trains under miserable conditions

A group of men who have been rounded up for deportation march out of town

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.’ Everybody—sick, kids, it didn’t matter old, young—everybody 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 didn’t 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.”

A Jewish family that has been rounded-up for deportation waits outside the assembly center

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 boxcars—eighty of us in a boxcar. They didn’t 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 couldn’t get into the boxcars, the younger ones had to help them. And they couldn’t 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.”

Jews from the Warsaw ghetto board a deportation train

Jewish deportees are transferred from a closed passenger train to a train of

open cars

Helen K.19 years old when deported to Majdanek

“My brother died in my arms. My younger brother … [long silence] and my husband’s 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.”

CONCENTRATION CAMPS

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)

Arrival of a transport of men, women and children to one of the Jasenovac

camps

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 people—women on one side, men on the other side. And it’s well known, you know. The one side meant death, the other side maybe going to Hitler camp. But we didn’t know. We really did not know.”

Newly arrived prisoners lined up for registration at Buchenwald

A Jewish prisoner is forced to remove his ring upon his arrival in Jasenovac

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. That’s an excruciating pain. It just burns and some people didn’t even survive from that.”

Washing and shaving newly arrived prisoners in Buchenwald

Identification numbers tattooed on every camp prisoner’s arm upon arrival

Forced labor – prisoners from Buchenwald building the Weimar-

Buchenwald railroad line

Forced labor – female prisoners digging trenches at the Ravensbrueck

camp

Women’s bunks in Auschwitz

Women line up for their extremely small daily ration of thin soup

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.”

FINAL SOLUTION

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

DEATH CAMPS

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)

Concentration and Death Camps

A gas chamber

Crematoria ovens at Buchenwald

American soldiers view a pile of human remains outside the crematorium in

Buchenwald

Camp deaths

Using stretchers and carts, survivors of Ebensee remove bodies to the

crematorium for burning

LIBERATION

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

A death march from Dachau

Arnold C. Age 11, January 1945

“I got very tired of walking. I just wanted to go to sleep. I couldn’t 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…”

German civilians help evacuate survivors from the Schwandorf death train

Corpses lie in one of the open railcars of the Dachau death train

Soviet troops liberate Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945

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 wasn’t so bad.”

Dachau inmates are ecstatic upon their liberation by American soldiers in April 1945.

Colonel Edmund M.Participated in US army’s 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.”

The Survivors

Remember…

For the dead and the living, we

must bear witness