IndexBefore the Holocaust: Historical Anti-Semitism and Hitler's Rise to PowerNazi Revolution in Germany, 1933-1939Beginning of the War, 1939-1940Towards the "Final Solution", 1940-1941Death in the Holocaust Camps concentration camp, 1941-1945 Nazi rule comes to an end as the Holocaust continues to claim victims, 1945 Consequences and lasting impact of the Holocaust The word "Holocaust", from the Greek words "holos" (whole) and "kaustos" ( burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. Since 1945, the word has taken on a new and horrific meaning: the state-sponsored, systematic, ideological persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews (as well as millions of others, including gypsies, intellectually disabled people, dissidents and homosexuals) by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay For anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to racial purity and the German community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were constantly persecuted, Hitler's "final solution" – now known as the Holocaust – came about under the cover of World War II, with mass extermination centers built in the Nazi camps. concentration in occupied Poland. . Approximately six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and millions of others were targeted for racial, political, ideological, and behavioral reasons. More than a million of those who died were children. Before the Holocaust: Historical Anti-Semitism and Hitler's Rise to PowerAnti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Although the use of the term itself dates back only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility towards Jews long before the Holocaust – even in the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and forced the Jews to leave Palestine. The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon and other European rulers enacted laws that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic sentiments persisted, however, in many cases taking on a racial rather than religious character. Did you know? Even at the beginning of the 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. In recent years, the Swiss government and banking institutions have acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and have established funds to help Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights violations, genocide or other disasters. The roots of Hitler's particularly virulent anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during the First World War. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country's defeat in 1918. Soon after the war ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers' Party. , which became the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While in prison for treason for his role in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler wrote the memoirs and propaganda treatise “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle), in which he predicted a general European war that would lead to the “extermination of Jewish race." in Germany." Hitler was obsessed with the idea of ​​the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade following his release from prison, Hitler took advantage of his rivals' weakness to improve his party's status and rise from obscurity to power. The 30thJanuary 1933 he was appointed Chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself “Fuhrer,” becoming Germany's supreme ruler. Nazi Revolution in Germany, 1933–1939 The dual goals of racial purity and spatial expansion were central to Hitler's worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force of his foreign and domestic policy. Initially the Nazis reserved the harshest persecution for political opponents such as communists or social democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were communists. Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing sites of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS), and later head of the German police. In July 1933, German concentration camps (Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held approximately 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi demonstrations and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals, and foreigners helped spread the desired message of party strength. In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered approximately 525,000, or only 1% of the total German population. . Over the next six years, the Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from the civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses, and depriving Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. According to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered Jewish, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breed). Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became regular targets of stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass,” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and the windows of Jewish shops were smashed; approximately 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested. From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews managed to leave Germany, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear. Beginning of the War, 1939-1940 In September 1939, the German army occupied the western half of Poland. German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews to leave their homes and take refuge in ghettos, giving their confiscated property to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as Germans), Reich Germans, or Polish Gentiles . Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, Jewish ghettos in Poland functioned as captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation made the ghettos fertile ground for diseases such as typhus. Meanwhile, starting in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected approximately 70,000 Germans interned for mental illness or disability to die in gas chambers. the so-called Euthanasia Program. After protests from prominent German religious leaders, Hitler ended the program in August 1941, although killings of disabled people continued in secret, and by 1945 some 275,000 people believed to be handicapped from across Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program served as a pilot for the Holocaust. Toward the “Final Solution,” 1940-1941 During the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler's empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Starting in 1941, Jews from across the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European gypsies,they were deported to Polish ghettos. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in the war. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen reportedly killed more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation. A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler's top commander, Hermann Goering, to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD (the SS security service), referred to the need for an Endlösung (final solution) to the "Jewish question". Starting in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-controlled territory was marked with a yellow star, making them an open target. Tens of thousands of people were soon deported to Polish ghettos and German-occupied cities in the USSR. Since June 1941, experiments with methods of mass killing had been underway in the Auschwitz concentration camp near Krakow. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet prisoners of war to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a large order for gas from a German pest control firm, an ominous indicator of the impending Holocaust. Holocaust death camps, 1941-1945 Starting in late 1941, the Germans began mass transportation from ghettos in Poland to camp centers, starting with those considered least useful: the sick, the old and weak, the very young. The first mass gassings began in the Belzec camp, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass extermination centers were built at the camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all , Auschwitz. Birkenau. From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territories and those allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and autumn of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone. Fed up with deportations, diseases and constant hunger, the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto rose up in armed revolt. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19 to May 16, 1943 ended with the deaths of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But resistance fighters had held the Nazis at bay for nearly a month, and their uprising inspired revolts in camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe. Although the Nazis tried to keep the operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killings made this virtually impossible. . Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to Allied governments, which were sharply criticized after the war for their failure to respond to or publicize news of the mass massacre. This lack of action was probably due primarily to the Allies' focus on winning the ongoing war, but was also the result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was received and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could occur on that scale. At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were killed in a process reminiscent of a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked there in the labor camp; although only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease. And in 1943, eugenicist Josef Mengele arrived at Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of ​​interest was conducting medical experiments on twins, injecting them with everything from gasoline to chloroform, under the guise of providing them with medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname "the angel of death". from Hitler and take power. In his will and..