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The Holocaust
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Which of the following describe the conditions in the ghettos, where Jews were forced to live?
September 1, 1939. German tanks and soldiers roll in. Poland is being invaded. The Nazis want to gain control over the three million Jews who live in Poland, and to separate them from the non-Jewish population. They begin to gather the Jews into special districts — ghettos.
The ghettos are cramped. There are not enough toilets for everyone, or enough food, water, or medicine. Many people starve or die of disease. The Nazis also force all Jews in Poland and Germany to wear a special mark, the Star of David, the Jewish religious symbol. It makes Jewish people easy to identify.
When Germany later occupies France and the Netherlands, Jews there will be forced to wear the badge too. In June 1941, Germany invades the Soviet Union. In the western Soviet Union there are almost 4 million Jews, including several hundred thousand who have just fled Poland. Now Hitler and the Nazis aren’t content to identify and isolate the Jews. They want to - exterminate - the Jews.
The Nazis create four mobile task forces, Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D, whose job is to search for Jews and execute them. The task forces gather Jews in city after city. They force the Jews to march to the outskirts of the cities, then to take off all their clothes and line up. They shoot the Jews, and the bodies fall into pre-dug graves. Outside the city of Kiev in Ukraine, at Babi Yar, 33,700 Jews are executed in two days.
In one and a half years, the task forces murder more than a million Jews in Poland, the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. But the Nazis are still not satisfied. To shoot the Jews is too cumbersome, too uncomfortable - for the SS soldiers and too slow: there are too many Jews left. On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi officials meet in a luxury villa in Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin. They discuss how they can deport eleven million European Jews, force them to work, and then kill them quickly and efficiently.
The conference participants are looking for what they call “the final solution to the Jewish question”. The Nazis have already experimented with various techniques to mass murder people using gas. Over the last year, the task force Sonderkommando Lange has been using a specially made gas wagon to kill mentally ill people. Shortly after the Wannsee Conference, the Nazis develop gas chambers. They build six death camps - extermination camps - in Poland: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidanek and - Auschwitz.
All are close to railway lines so the Nazis can easily transport Jews from Germany and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, France and the Netherlands. But not all the Jews are killed immediately. German companies are allowed to ‘hire’ Jews from the concentration camps to work in factories often until they die of exhaustion and starvation. Those who survive the slave labour, but are too weak to work, are transported to the death camps where they are gassed to death and incinerated. More than half of the Jews who are murdered during the Holocaust are gassed to death.
A fifth are shot dead by the task forces. Others die of starvation, cold, exhaustion, or abuse. Many children, women and men also die after the Nazis perform medical experiments on them. From 1939 to 1945, the Nazis murdered a total of: At least 6 million Jews. between 130,000 and 500,000 Roma, 270,000 people with physical or mental disabilities, many of them children, between 5,000 and 15,000 gay people, between 1,250 and 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, At least 3 million civilian and military prisoners of war from German-occupied countries.
Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, socialists, trade unionists, Freemasons and foreign diplomats. The Nazis carried out the most industrial and systematic genocide in world history - the Holocaust.