Holocaust

The Holocaust

The holocaust was the system in which 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazi Germans. The Nazis came to power in Germany by January 1933.   The Nazi Party was led by a charismatic leader know as Adolf Hilter.   Adolf Hilter had an extreme hatred of Jews and moved quickly to remove Jews from political, financial, schools, and ownership of property.   The Nazi   believed they were the ultimate beings “the Arian Race” and that the Jews were an alien threat to the German community.

The Nazi’s didn’t just target Jewish people they went after the disabled, Gypsies, Slavic people, Russians and others.   By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe.   The German authorities also established numerous forced-labor camps, both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in German-occupied territory, for non-Jews whose labor the Germans sought to exploit.

To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years.   Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing centers.   Ghettos such as the Warsaw Ghetto were 4.5 % the original size of the city of Warsaw packed with half a million Jews.   Killing Centres or concentration camps such as Belzed, Majdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau killed approximately 3 million Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet prisoners of war.   The Nazi perfected their methods, using Zyklon-B which is a form of cyanide gas ushering people into what they thought were showers to be deloused.   Zyklon-B was pumped into these shower rooms until all the people were dead.   The bodies were then removed and burned in...