Jemma Saunders - The Holocaust - History in an Hour

Title Page THE HOLOCAUSTHistory in an Hour JEMMA J. SAUNDERS

Introduction

The Jews of Europe

Assimilated Germans

Early Warnings

Hitler in Power: The Tide Turns

The Nuremberg Laws

Racial Propaganda

Kristallnacht

The Approach of War

Forced Resettlement

Ghettoization

West of Germany: Yellow Stars and Registration

Pit Killings

The Euthanasia Programme

Wannsee and the ‘Final Solution’

Deportation

Selection

The Will to Live

Arbeit Macht Frei

Killing Factories

Medical Experiments

Collaboration and Resistance

Death Marches

Liberation

Remembrance and Retribution

The Holocaust: Key Players

The Holocaust: Timeline

Got Another Hour?

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About the Publisher

The Holocaust is the most documented and infamous genocide in human history. It is the name given to the murder of an estimated 6 million Jews in Europe under the Nazi regime, the vast majority of whom were systematically exterminated during the Second World War. Anti-Semitism was by no means a new phenomenon in Germany – or, indeed, in wider Europe – but when the Nazis came to power in 1933, discrimination against the Jewish people gained an unprecedented, deadly momentum.

Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis during the Holocaust era: as the 1930s progressed and bigoted legislation against the Jewish population gradually developed into physical violence, so too did such persecution extend to other minority groups in German society, including Romani, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, Slavs and people with physical and mental disabilities. Hundreds of thousands of people from these groups, which in Nazi eyes threatened the purity of the German race, were murdered or perished in camps alongside Jewish prisoners.

How and why did a cultured European nation allow this methodical destruction of millions of lives? From the early roots of anti-Semitism to the inhumane horror of death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, this, in an hour, is the story of the Holocaust.

Since the first millennium, the Jews of Europe had faced periods of intense persecution. This was partly because they were widely considered responsible for the death of Jesus Christ in 33 CE and partly because they fulfilled moneylending roles in society, a practice known as usury. Early anti-Semitism manifested itself in property confiscation, expulsion and outright violence.

Martin Luther’s 1543 treatise On the Jews and their Lies

Jews were massacred on at least two occasions in thirteenth-century England, while under the Spanish Inquisition thousands were forced to convert to Christianity or to leave the country. Martin Luther, whose rhetoric fuelled the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, developed strong anti-Semitic leanings and wrote an influential treatise titled On the Jews and Their Lies . This treatise advocated, among other measures, slave labour for the Jews and the destruction of their synagogues. Luther’s sentiments were instrumental in laying the basis for anti-Semitism in Germany for the next 400 years.

Following the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century, Jews began to enjoy greater levels of tolerance in French-governed societies, but were still marginalized in much of Europe, particularly Russia. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, antagonism towards Russian Jews reached new levels as pogroms (organized persecutory actions) broke out with increasing frequency. Attacks on Jews were encouraged by the tsar and in 1903, fifty people were killed in a sustained outbreak of violence in Kishinev. Two years later The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in Russia. This fictional work incited anti-Semitic hatred, claiming there was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination.