The Holocaust (OCR GCSE History B (Schools History Project)): Revision Note

Summary

The Nazi mistreatment of Jewish people evolved from prejudice and discrimination to mass murder on an unimaginable scale. Initially, the Jewish people of Germany were bullied and harrassed into leaving the country. After World War 2 began and the Nazis invaded Poland, millions more Jewish people came under Nazi control.

At first, the Jewish populations were forced to live in overcrowded ghettos. As the Nazi armies travelled east into the Soviet Union, specialist murder squads known as Einsatzgruppen were created to kill Jewish people as they found them. This became known as the Holocaust by bullets.

After the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, a plan was put into place to murder all of Europe's Jewish people in specialist death camps that were to be opened in Poland. By using the rail network, poison gas chambers and enormous ovens in camps such as Auschwitz, thousands of Jewish people could be murdered and cremated in a single day.

By the time Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945, over a million people had been murdered in that camp alone.

What was the Holocaust?

• During World War 2, the Nazis attempted to murder all Jewish people in Europe

  • Nearly 6 million of Europe's 9.5 million Jewish people were systematically killed by the Nazis

  • This genocide of Europe's Jewish population is known as the Holocaust

Ghettos

• When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they immediately set about removing Germany's Jewish population

  • Boycotts of Jewish businesses and the Nuremberg Laws (opens in a new tab) convinced many German Jewish people to leave

  • Kristallnacht (opens in a new tab) made it clear that it was not safe for Jewish people to live in Nazi Germany

  • As a result, many Jewish people had left the country

The Nazi Invasion of Poland

• The Nazis conquered Poland in September 1939

• It had a population of 3.5 million Jewish people

  • The Nazis referred to this as the 'Jewish problem'

  • To begin with, the Nazis forced Poland's Jewish population into small walled-in areas called ghettos

• Ghettos separated the Jewish people from the rest of the Polish population and were created in towns all over Poland

  • The largest ghetto was in Warsaw

  • Over 445,000 people were held behind its barbed-wire-topped walls

  • Disease spread rapidly in the overcrowded and filthy conditions of the ghettos

    • In the Warsaw ghetto alone, over 140,000 Jewish people died of sickness, starvation and disease

Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union

• The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941

• The areas were home to many Jewish people

  • The Nazis wanted to avoid creating more ghettos, so they created mobile killing units known as the Einsatzgruppen

  • These units would closely follow the German Army as it advanced into the Soviet Union

  • They would then round up Jewish people as they found them, along with any communist officials

Holocaust by bullets

• The Einsatzgruppen included:

  • Members of the SS

  • Local people who helped identify Jewish families

• They took the people they captured to secluded areas

  • The captured people were then forced to dig large pits and kneel on the edge of them

  • Men, women and children were then shot and thrown into the pit

  • They were lined up so that a single shot would kill multiple people

    • This was to reduce the cost and number of bullets fired

• It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen murdered around 1 million people in the autumn and winter of 1941

  • Over 90 per cent of them are thought to be Jewish

The Wannsee Conference, 1942

• In January 1942, senior Nazi leaders met at Wannsee outside Berlin

  • Led by Reinhard Heydrich, they held a 90-minute meeting in which they decided on their 'final solution' to the 'Jewish problem'

  • The plan was to move all of the Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe by train to the General Government region of Poland

  • Once there, they would be sent to specially constructed camps where they would be murdered by gassing

• The precise numbers of Jewish people in each country were recorded

• Timetables set out for their murder

  • A senior SS officer named Adolf Eichmann was given the responsibility of organising and carrying out this genocide

Concentration camps

• The first concentration camp was opened by the Nazis in Dachau in 1933

  • Concentration camps were large prisons used by the Nazis to imprison all those people they considered 'undesirable'

  • This included:

    • Political opponents

    • Alcoholics

    • Homosexuals

    • Jehovah's Witnesses

    • Jewish people

• Conditions in concentration camps were brutal

• Prisoners were forced to work in overcrowded conditions and were poorly fed

  • Death from disease and mistreatment in concentration camps was common

Death camps

• Death camps or extermination camps were different from concentration camps

• They were specifically designed to murder and dispose of the bodies of enormous numbers of people

• At Auschwitz II-Birkenau, four gas chambers were built to poison people to death

  • These chambers led directly to large crematoria where the bodies were incinerated

• Jewish people were transported from across Europe on trains that travelled directly to the Auschwitz camp

  • As they were taken off the train, some people who were fit and healthy were taken away to work as slave labour in the on-site factories

  • The other people were undressed and sent into what they were told were showers

  • Once they were inside, the doors were locked and Zyklon B poison gas was dropped through vents in the roof

• It is estimated that 12,000 people were murdered each day using this process

  • It is believed that 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz alone

How did the Holocaust end?

• The defeat of Germany's armed forces led to the end of the Holocaust

• As Soviet troops advanced into Poland from the east, the Nazis abandoned the camps

  • Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945

  • Other camps, such as Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen were liberated by American and British troops as they advanced from the west