Holocaust History

Hitler didn't give a shit about the US; he had a vision and would die to see it to fruition.
Hitler probably saw what happened to indigenous people in North America and thought it similar to what he proposed.
 
Hitler probably saw what happened to indigenous people in North America and thought it similar to what he proposed.
He was raised a Catholic. Learned to hate Jews from birth. Nothing to do with Indigenous people from anywhere else.
 
Hitler probably saw what happened to indigenous people in North America and thought it similar to what he proposed.
Hitler explicitly stated that Jews don't believe might makes rights and this must be exterminated.
 
Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust–even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine. The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious toleration, and in the 19th century Napoleon and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

The roots of Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. 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 imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “Mein Kampf”(My Struggle), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

(full article online)

 
Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust–even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine. The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious toleration, and in the 19th century Napoleon and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

The roots of Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. 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 imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “Mein Kampf”(My Struggle), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

(full article online)

Napoleon did eventually want Jews to convert to Christianity.
 
When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Jews were living in every country of Europe. A total of roughly nine million Jews lived in the countries that would be occupied by Germany during World War II. By the end of the war, two out of every three of these Jews would be dead, and European Jewish life would be changed forever. In 1933 the largest Jewish populations were concentrated in eastern Europe, including Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania. They spoke their own language, Yiddish, which combines elements of German and Hebrew. In comparison, the Jews in western Europe—Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium—made up much less of the population and tended to adopt the culture of their non-Jewish neighbors. They dressed and talked like their countrymen, and traditional religious practices and Yiddish culture played a less important part in their lives. They tended to have had more formal education than eastern European Jews and to live in towns or cities.



 
The Yellow Star


In September 1941, the Nazi regime ordered Germany's Jews over the age of 6 to sew on their clothing a yellow Star of David with the word Jude (Jew) in bold, Hebrew-like letters. The following year, the measure was introduced in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and other lands under German control.


 
When Germany occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, the Jewish population was approximately 7,500, accounting for 0.2% of the country's total population. About 6,000 of these Jews were Danish citizens. Unlike in other western European countries, the Danish government did not require Jews to register their property and assets, to identify themselves, or to give up apartments, homes, and businesses.

On September 8, 1943, SS General Werner Best, the German civilian administrator in Denmark, sent a telegram to Adolf Hitler to propose that the Germans make use of the martial law provisions to deport the Danish Jews. Hitler approved the measure nine days later. As preparations proceeded, Best, who had second thoughts about the political consequences of the deportations, informed Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a German naval attaché, of the impending deportation operation. Before the final order for deportation came to Copenhagen on September 28, Duckwitz, along with other German officials, warned non-Jewish Danes of the plan. In turn, these Danes alerted the local Jewish community.

In the intervening days, Danish authorities, Jewish community leaders, and countless private citizens facilitated a massive operation to get Jews into hiding or into temporary sanctuaries. When German police began the roundup on the night of October 1, 1943, they found few Jews. In general, the Danish police authorities refused to cooperate, denying German police the right to enter Jewish homes by force, or simply overlooking Jews they found in hiding. Popular protests quickly came from various quarters such as churches, the Danish royal family, and various social and economic organizations. The Danish resistance, assisted by many ordinary Danish citizens, organized a partly coordinated, partly spontaneous rescue operation.

Resistance workers and sympathizers initially helped Jews move into hiding places throughout the country and from there to the coast; fishermen then ferried them to neutral Sweden. The rescue operation expanded to include participation by the Danish police and the government. Over a period of about a month, some 7,200 Jews and 700 of their non-Jewish relatives traveled to safety in Sweden, which accepted the Danish refugees.



 
Timeline


Below are links to detailed timelines that discuss how the Holocaust unfolded.

The Holocaust and WWII TImeline from the Holocaust Encyclopedia at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum can be found HERE while a more detailed version can be found HERE

The Holocaust Timeline from Israel's Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem can be found HERE

The Chronology of Jewish Persecution in the Holocaust from the Jewish Virtual Library Online can be found HERE

The Teacher's Timeline Guide to the Holocaust from the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, College of Education at the University of South Florida can be found HERE

The Timeline of the Holocaust from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles can be found HERE

Timeline source: “The Holocaust and WWII Timeline” The Holocaust Encyclopedia information retrieved from: and timeline

An online version of the book The Holocaust Chronicle, published by Publications International LTD in April 2000 as a not-for-profit project can be found HERE



 
Much of the blame for the Holocaust goes to FDR. Back in 1935, Roosevelt made massive cuts in American military expenditures despite the warnings of General MacArthur, in order to fund his Raw Deal program.

If America had stayed ready for war, the Germans wouldn't have risked pissing us off by starting the Holocaust. As a result, the event - as well as all of WW2- would have never happened.

Germans figured we were wusses- they figured wrong- but it still came at a tremendous loss of life which could have been avoided. America is still paying for FDR's mistake, plenty of people are still getting government paid VA benefits because of WW2 service which didn't need to happen.
Much of the blame for the Holocaust goes to FDR. Back in 1935, Roosevelt made massive cuts in American military expenditures despite the warnings of General MacArthur, in order to fund his Raw Deal program.

If America had stayed ready for war, the Germans wouldn't have risked pissing us off by starting the Holocaust. As a result, the event - as well as all of WW2- would have never happened.

Germans figured we were wusses- they figured wrong- but it still came at a tremendous loss of life which could have been avoided. America is still paying for FDR's mistake, plenty of people are still getting government paid VA benefits because of WW2 service which didn't need to happen.
PRINCE----you are confusing moral fault with
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE
 
The Nazis frequently used euphemistic language to disguise the true nature of their crimes. They used the term “Final Solution” to refer to their plan to annihilate the Jewish people. It is not known when the leaders of Nazi Germany definitively decided to implement the "Final Solution." The genocide, or mass destruction, of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of increasingly severe discriminatory measures.

USHMM "Final Solution" Overview and Encyclopedia Entry


 
The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. In Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime. Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of victims. These camps were used for a range of purposes including forced-labor camps, transit camps which served as temporary way stations, and killing centers built primarily or exclusively for mass murder. From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate so-called "enemies of the state."

The Nazis established killing centers for efficient mass murder. Unlike concentration camps, which served primarily as detention and labor centers, killing centers (also referred to as "extermination camps" or "death camps") were almost exclusively "death factories." German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting. The first killing center was Chelmno, which opened in December 1941. In 1942 the Nazis opened the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers to systematically murder the Jews. The largest killing center was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which by spring 1943 had four gas chambers (using Zyklon B poison gas) in operation. At the height of the deportations, up to 6,000 Jews were gassed each day at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

USHMM Nazi Concentration Camps

USHMM German Nazi Killing Centers

Yad Vashem Labor and Concentration Camps

USHMM German Concentration Camp System 1933-1939



 
Resistance


Above: The United Partisan Organization (refered to as FPO from the Yiddish initials for the group name "Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye") a Jewish resistance group organized in the Vilna Ghetto in what is today Lithuania. In the center of the photo, fourth from the left is the famous Hebrew poet Abba Kovner

The Final Solution was a planned, methodical process of mass murder by the German state.

The Jews were confined to ghettos where conditions were harsh and many subsequently starved. Underground groups were formed, initially engaging in resisting the Nazis by operating illegal schools, printing presses and other clandestine activities. Only as they became aware of the Nazi plans for extermination, which was already in progress, did these groups start to organize armed resistance. Between 1941 and 1943, underground resistance movements developed in approximately 100 ghettos in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe (about one-fourth of all ghettos), especially in Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia, and the Ukraine. Their main goals were to organize uprisings, break out of the ghettos, and join partisan units in the fight against the Germans. Despite numerous difficulties, uprisings against the German authorities broke out in several ghettos. The most famous of which was the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. Jewish resistance also existed in settings other than the ghettos. In some of the extermination camps, uprisings were organized and carried out; Jews fought the Germans as partisans in the forests, sometimes together with local resistance groups and sometimes in separate units; Jewish soldiers took part in the fighting in all the Allied armies that fought the Nazis.

Most Jewish armed resistance took place after 1942, as a desperate effort, after it became clear to those who resisted that the Nazis had murdered most of their families and their coreligionists. Despite great obstacles (such as lack of armaments and training, conducting operations in a hostile zone, reluctance to leave families behind, and the ever-present Nazi terror), many Jews throughout German-occupied Europe attempted armed resistance against the Germans. As individuals and in groups, Jews engaged in opposition to the Germans and their Axis partners. Jewish resistance units operated in France, Belgium, the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, and Poland. Jews also fought in general French, Italian, Yugoslav, Greek, and Soviet resistance organizations.


 
Liberation


High-ranking U.S. Army officers inspect the newly liberated Ohrdruf concentration camp.
Pictured are: Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, George Patton and Omar Bradley.
Also pictured is Jules Grad, correspondent for the U.S. Army newspaper, "Stars and Stripes" (at the far right).

As Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Nazi Germany, they began to encounter tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Many of these prisoners had survived forced death marches into the interior of Germany from camps in occupied Poland. These prisoners were suffering from starvation and disease. Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp, reaching Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. Surprised by the rapid Soviet advance, the Germans attempted to hide the evidence of mass murder by demolishing the camp. Camp staff set fire to the large crematorium used to burn bodies of murdered prisoners, but in the hasty evacuation the gas chambers were left standing. In the summer of 1944, the Soviets also overran the sites of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest killing center and concentration camp, in January 1945.

US forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945, a few days after the Nazis began evacuating the camp. On the day of liberation, an underground prisoner resistance organization seized control of Buchenwald to prevent atrocities by the retreating camp guards. American forces liberated more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald. They also liberated Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen. British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. They entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Celle, in mid-April 1945. Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were found alive. More than 10,000 of them died from the effects of malnutrition or disease within a few weeks of liberation.

Jewish Virtual Library: Allied Liberators

USHMM Liberation of Concentration Camps



 
Nuremberg Trials


After the war, some of those responsible for crimes committed during the Holocaust were brought to trial. Nuremberg, Germany, was chosen as a site for trials that took place in 1945 and 1946. Judges from the Allied powers -- Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States -- presided over the hearings of twenty-two major Nazi criminals.

Twelve prominent Nazis were sentenced to death. Most of the defendants admitted to the crimes of which they were accused, although most claimed that they were simply following the orders of a higher authority. Many more criminals were never tried. Some fled Germany to live abroad. After Nuremberg trials of Nazis continued to take place both in Germany and many other countries. Adolf Eichmann, who had helped plan and carry out the deportations of millions of Jews, was brought to trial in Israel in 1961. The testimony of hundreds of witnesses, many of them survivors, was followed all over the world. Eichmann was found guilty and executed in 1962



USHMM Nuremberg Trials

Yad Vashem Nuremberg Trials

Jewish Virtual Library Nuremberg Trials


 
Righteous Among the Nations


Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem Israel

Righteous Among the Nations is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews. When Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust museum and remembrance authority was established in 1953, one of its tasks was to commemorate the "Righteous among the Nations". The Righteous were defined as non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Most rescuers were ordinary people. Some acted out of political, ideological or religious convictions; others were not idealists, but merely human beings who cared about the people around them. In many cases they never planned to become rescuers and were totally unprepared for the moment in which they had to make such a far-reaching decision. The price that rescuers had to pay for their action differed from one country to another. In Eastern Europe, the Germans executed not only the people who sheltered Jews, but their entire family as well. Notices warning the population against helping the Jews were posted everywhere. Generally speaking punishment was less severe in Western Europe, although there too the consequences could be formidable and some of the Righteous Among the Nations were incarcerated in camps and killed.

Among the more well known righteous are Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg though they are far from the only rescuers known and honored today.

 
In Poland and Ukraine, the American troops had to escort Jews everywhere because the Poles and the Ukranians still wanted to kill off all the Jews.
Hitlers SS killed 4 million Jews in death camps in Poland, Austria and Germany and his einsatzgruppen killed another 2 million in the USSR and Czechoslovakia.
Some of the camp guards were Ukranians.

 
The term “genocide” did not exist prior to 1944. It is a very specific term, referring to violent crimes committed against groups with the intent to destroy the existence of the group. In 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin sought to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder, including the destruction of the European Jews. He formed the word “genocide” by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing. In proposing this new term, Lemkin had in mind “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”"

There are several books available in the John Jay Library collection about Raphael Lemkin and his struggle to have the word "genocide" adopted. In particular there is "Raphael Lemkin and the struggle for the Genocide Convention" by John Cooper (Call Number Stacks - HV6322.7 .C67 2008) and "Lemkin on genocide" by Raphael Lemkin himself (Call Number Stacks - HV6322.7 .L46 2011).

USHMM Definition of Genocide



 

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