The Holocaust

Cards (11)

  • Lessons learned from the Holocaust
    • The importance of remembering or the dangers of forgetting
    • The responsibility to prevent or don't be a bystander
    • The responsibility to not turn a blind eye (to tell the people about the people who lost their voices for them)
    • Desire for mass problems to become simple solutions, blaming everything on a scapegoat
    • The danger of silence in the face of evil (if something bad is happening, stop it before it becomes terrible)
    • The responsibility to bring criminals to justice
    • To hold power accountable to truth (i.e betraying moral standards)
    • Reinforce human values
    • To give a voice to the voiceless
    • Highlights the potential of extreme violence and the abuse of power
    • Teaches what the human mind can do under pressure (the power of resistance vs the power of compliance)
  • Holocaust: “sho’ah” Originally meant a sacrifice totally buried by fire
    • Come to mean the annihilation of Jews and other groups of people of Europe under the Nazi regime during WW2
  • 11 million people were exterminated; between 1933-1945 6 million Jews and 5 million others)
    • The 5 Million others
    • Roma
    • Chosen because of their race
    • Jews and Roma were “degenerate”
    • Jehovah’s witnesses
    • Had to wear purple armbands
    • Courageous Resisters
    • Poland’s underground army
    • Women, men, and children
    • Priests
    • Influential leaders
    • Most died of starvation and disease
    • LGBT
    • Mostly gay men
    • Made to wear pink triangle armbands
    • Disabled
    • “Cleansing program” they were put to death like animals
    • Black children
    • Nazi’s set up a secret sterilization
    • Death / divorce
    • Forced to choose between going to the concentration camp or divorcing (if their partner was Jewish)
  • How did the Holocaust happen?
    • The power of words 
    • The stages of isolation
    • The stages of isolation
    • Stripping of rights (i.e the Nuremberg Laws)
    • Segregation: sending Jews to live in the ghettos
    • Densely populated
    • Less sanitation, crowded, less food, more disease
    • Concentration: construction of camps for continued systematic oppression (worked to death)
    • Extermination
    • Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units)
    • Death factories: Nazi extermination camps conducted mass murder
    • Euthanasia program: Nazi policy to eliminate anyone “unworthy of life” (mentally or physically challenged) to promote racial purity
    • The bystander vs the colaborator: some prisoners cooperated with the Nazis in carrying out the holocaust to preserve their own lives
    • Anti-semitism: deep rooted prejudice in the European psyche for many years and made it easy to blame everything on the Jews for Germany’s economic problems
  • How the Nazis got the Jews to leave the ghettos
    • Starvation (hungry people are easier to control)
    • Terror (people were shot for any act of resistance)
    • Deception (told they were going to “resettlement areas”)
  • Final Solution
    • The systematic, complete and mass annihilation and extermination of the Jews as well as other groups
    • Zyklon B gas became the agent in the mass extermination as prisoners were sent to gas chambers disguised and showers
  • Wannsee Conference (1942)
    • Shooting was viewed as too inefficient as bullets were needed for the war
    • Jews living in ghettos were used as cheap sources of labour
    • Conditions were made to be so bad that many die while rest would be leaving to search for better conditions
    • Remaining Jews were set off to “resettlement areas” areas in the East
    • Jews would go through selection
    • Women, children, old, the sick were to be sent for “special treatment”
    • Young and fit would go through a process called “destruction through work”