What Was the Holocaust?

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From the mid-1930s until the end of the Second World War, the Nazi regime carried out a campaign of sustained antisemitic persecution that developed into a coordinated programme of massmurder. This genocide is now known as the Holocaust. Millions of Jewish people were killed,many different communities were shattered – and not just people were destroyed but entire ways oflife. The scale of the Holocaust is such that it has become a foundational part of Western culture and is a fundamental part of the history of the Second World War. But how did this atrocity happen? What was happening in Germany in the 1930s that saw the rise of the Nazi Party?

The author, Gail Herman, did a good job of explaining and listing all the problems the Jews went through. He also made it clear on the important points. For example, when Hitler got into power, life got even worse for the Jews. "And they blamed Jews for all the country's problems"(18). However, Hitler only disliked the Jews that much because he thought "the Jews of Germany were not real Jews"(18). It started with dislike and then turned into hatred because he started believing that they were the only reasons for his failures. This is when the real story began.I could not agree more. Even though I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on the Holocaust, I still learned some new items such as the word holocaust itself means "sacrifice by fire" in Greek (7). If I had learned that, I sadly did not remember it. I also think Gail Herman, the author, did a great job explaining the history of anti-Semitism and Germany's economy and attitude after World War I. This will help explain to kids, to a certain extent, how Hitler came to rise and was granted so much power. As always, there were real pictures included, timelines with important dates at the end, and side bars with additional information (such as about important Holocaust museums) and illustrations and maps (such as a map of all the major concentration camps in Poland and a map of Germany's invasions across Europe). We’re in the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum in London.What we’re looking at here is a concrete tile that has recently gone on display. It’s a small object that tells one part of the devastating history of the Holocaust. The invasion of the Soviet Union was a turning point in the course of the war and the Holocaust. As the Nazis occupied Soviet countries in the East, they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of non-combatants that they considered ‘enemies’ within these territories.

Lauren Wilmott: "So this is a tile or part of a tile from one of the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp. It's most likely a wall tile and we know this from the limited survivor testimony that's in existence that describes the colour of the wall and the floor tiles in the gas chambers, and the reason that I say limited testimony is that there were very few survivors from the Treblinka death camp. It was a camp designed specifically for mass murder. Between July 1942 and September 1943 approximately nine hundred thousand Jews and two thousand Roma were murdered at the Treblinka death camp. To hide all traces of what had happened at Treblinka, the Nazis demolished the camp and turned it into a farm. Because of this it had been assumed that there was nothing left to find at Treblinka but in 2014 there was a large excavation. This tile was one of the artifacts found during this excavation so it's some of the only physical evidence in existence that was once witness to what happened in the gas chambers at Treblinka." Rudi Bamber: "What had been an undercurrent before then became very much public. The streets were full of marching storm troopers who were triumphant because of the electoral victory and a boycott was started against the Jewish shops. Stormtroopers stood outside the shops and wrote slogans on the windows of the shops with Star of David. So it was a very difficult and unpleasant atmosphere and the reaction of my family and Jews in general was to withdraw and to keep out of the streets and the town as much as possible." LW: "So what we have here is the wedding dress worn by Gena Goldfinger on her wedding day to Norman Turgel in October 1945, and what's so special about this dress, about this story, is that Gena and Norman met when Norman entered Belsen concentration camp upon its liberation, and thetwo met and were engaged within a week, and they got married a few months later, and this is thedress that Gena was wearing. It's made of British parachute silk and made into a dress by a localtailor. So Bergen-Belsen was liberated on 15 April 1945 and the conditions at that time werecatastrophic, it was in a state of absolute chaos. The British soldiers upon arrival found almost 60,000 prisoners so it's severely overcrowded, and typhus was running rampant throughout the camp.This wedding dress tells the story of Gena who survived the Holocaust. She was forced toface a future and rebuild her life, but it was a future that she had to face without her family, the majority of whom didn't survive, without a home to go to and without any possessions."JB: "The First World War left Germany in complete chaos. There was a lot of displaced anger because Germany didn't expect to lose theFirst World War, the people of Germany being encouraged to believe that this was a war that they were set to win, and when they didn't it left people feeling angry and frustrated and needing someone to blame, and a lot of these young men who'd been part of the military found that they had all this displaced anger and nowhere to direct it so politics became very volatile and very incendiary, and this was a landscape in which extreme politics and extremist politicians found some real ground to manoeuver." When Hitler Got out of jail, he made many many more rules for the Jews to follow. He wanted then to wear tags on their chests like an ID that said "Jude." He did this so that the others would know that this particular person is Jewish and not to respect them because of that. After you finish reading this book, you will know who planned the Holocaust, where and when it took place, and how it was carried out. But one thing you won't learn is why it happened. ...For a long time we thought about whether or not to publish a book about the Holocaust. ...But we decided it was such an important event that not including the Holocaust in the series would be wrong. The few survivors of the Holocaust are very old now. When they are no longer alive, it will be up to books to tell the painful story of what happened" (Connor, editor). From the beginning of 1942 these massacres were consolidated into a programme of co-ordinated annihilation. Millions of Jews were deported from ghettos or holding camps to be killed. Most were sent to a small number of purpose-built killing centres called death camps, but as the war developed, thousands more were sent to concentration camps to be worked to death in service of Germany’s deteriorating war effort. This Nazis were central to this process, but they did not act alone and relied on the support and complicity of hundreds of thousands of people across Europe. As well as their use of violence, intimidation and new laws propaganda wasessential to the Nazis’ consolidation of power and the spread of their dangerous ideologies.

The camps were liberated from July 1944, and footage of the scenes that Allied soldiers encountered were witnessed across the world. The conditions are so badthat many prisoners continued to die after liberation due to malnutrition and disease. For those prisoners that did survive, liberation was not the end of their suffering. This is a very tasteful yet honest way on how to inform children about the Holocaust. As non-biased as they usually are, they made sure to keep the same non-biased tone while not giving a trace of doubt that Hitler was any sort of decent man. You could tell the author was so badly wanting to throw vulgarity after vulgarity at him, just being shy of calling him a loser.Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Nazi persecution of Jewish people started from the very beginning of their regime.In the months and years that followed, laws were introduced that restricted opportunities for Jewish people. In 1935, a significant moment came with the introduction of the Nuremberg Lawsthat formally recognised who was and wasn’t a German citizen and what rights they had. The so-called Reinhard camps, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II, were the final destination of approximately 1.75 million men, women and children. Located within occupied Poland,they were designed to be discreet and efficient. People were told that they are being processed for work ’in the east’, but will need to be showered before this procedure. The showerswere actually gas chambers that pumped carbon monoxide into the sealed rooms.The process was brutal, barbaric, and routinely inefficient. JB: "Hitler's head of propaganda Joseph Goebbels created a whole ream of propaganda to support the ideology of their regime and this was manifest in all different types of media: in radio broadcasts and cinema broadcasts people were encouraged to believe that Hitler was leading a massive Germanrevival which would lead to a massively improved way of life for everybody within the Reich and foreverybody who was allowed to be part of it. This propaganda is really really important here and to Goebbels of course in shaping the way that people consider what the Nazis can do for them."