Holocaust

What is the Holocaust? Why did it happen? What happened to people during the Holocaust? These are the questions everyone asks. Webster’s dictionary defines the Holocaust as, 1: a sacrifice consumed by fire, 2: a thorough destruction especially by fire (i. E. a nuclear Holocaust), 3 a often cap. :the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II –usually used with the b: a mass slaughter of people; especially genocide. The Holocaust is generally thought of as the massacre of about 11 million innocent people, wiped off the earth by the Nazis regime and its collaborators.

In 1919, the Nazi Party started as a gang of unemployed soldiers. In 1933 they became a legal government of Germany. In fourteen years, a once unknown corporal, Adolf Hitler, would become the chancellor of Germany. With Hitler’s controlling influence the Nazi Party quickly consolidated its power. He maintained legality throughout the Nazification process. Over the next six years, he transformed Germany into a police state. He began to rearm the military, in violation of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Hitler engaged in a “diplomatic revolution” by skillfully negotiating with other European countries and publi

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By the end of 1933, the SA recruited 450,000,000 men. Others struggled to survive by smuggling food, clothing, and medicine. The Nazi ghettos were different, they were set up to isolate and annihilate Jews from society.

In 1939 Hitler felt the need for more living space. These so-called death factories were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibór, Lublin, and Chelmno. In Poland, the Einsatzgruppen were to move Jews from the countryside to larger cities, where ghettos were established. The generation of Holocaust survivors is aging and passing away.

After the successful German invasion of Poland, the Nazis had more than two million Jews under their administration. Jews no longer were German citizens; they were subjects. At first communists, Socialists, labor leaders, and other political opponents were prisoners.

Those who attempted to rescue Jews and others from the Nazi death sentence did so at a large risk to themselves.

Resistance against the Nazis came in many forms, but was very hazardous. Perpetrators committed crimes against Jews and others for many reasons, but mostly for power.

Concentration camps were part of the systematic reign of terror.

Approximate Word count = 1642
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

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