Synopsis & Timeline
The Holocaust was a massive genocide in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its combatants systematically murdered about 6 million Jews (as well as other types of people) simply because of their race. The Holocaust goes down as one of the deadliest genocides in history, because of the large amounts of cruelty and hatred shown. The killing of Jews was part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression/killing of various ethnics groups in Europe by the Nazi regime. Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, Romanis, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons Jehovah's Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled. The persecution was carried out in multiple stages, culminating to what the Nazis deemed "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question", which was an agenda to exterminate Jews from Europe.
- January 30, 1933 - Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany a nation with a Jewish population of 566,000.
- March 24, 1933 - German Parliament passes Enabling Act giving Hitler dictatorial powers.
- July 14, 1933 - Nazi Party is declared the only legal party in Germany; Also, Nazis pass Law to strip Jewish immigrants from Poland of their German citizenship.
- August 2, 1934 - German President von Hindenburg dies. Hitler becomes Führer.
- January 1937 - Jews are banned from many professional occupations including teaching Germans, and from being accountants or dentists. They are also denied tax reductions and child allowances.
- February 21, 1939 - Nazis force Jews to hand over all gold and silver items.
- October 6, 1939 - Proclamation by Hitler on the isolation of Jews.
- February 12, 1940 - First deportation of German Jews into occupied Poland.
- October 22, 1940 - Deportation of 29,000 German Jews from Baden, the Saar, and Alsace-Lorraine into Vichy France.
- December 10, 1942 - The first transport of Jews from Germany arrives at Auschwitz.
- In 1945 - As Allied troops advance, the Nazis conduct death marches of concentration camp inmates away from outlying areas.
- January 18, 1945 - Nazis evacuate 66,000 from Auschwitz.
- April 30, 1945 - Americans free 33,000 inmates from concentration camps.
Background & Causes
Jewish people had lived in Europe for over 2000 years before the Holocaust. Originally, they lived in Palestine but through burning their temple and other harsh actions, the Romans drove them out. Consequently, the Jews spread out in different places around the world, typically in harmony. However, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Germany was experiencing great hardships due to their loss in the first world war. They endured a lot of economic and social hardships, especially because of all the reparations they had to pay to the Allies. As a result, Germany suffered terrible inflation and mass unemployment. Throughout this, Hitler blamed the Jews for their hardship and "weighing down the country". Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. His ant semitic policies and views grew, and he eventually called for an extermination of all Jews in Europe.
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Impact & Effects
The holocaust was one of the most tragic events in world history. Millions of people were targeted and executed simply because of their race and the inconvenience they had on a more "superior" race. The toll on lives was probably one of the most detrimental effects of the genocide, seeing as figures were at an extraordinary rate. Six to seven million jews were killed, with 1.5 million being children. Some definitions of the Holocaust include the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to about 11 million. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany, German-occupied territories, and territories held by allies of Nazi Germany. By the end of 1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. Jewish armed resistance was limited, however it was not missing. The most famous encounter was Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when thousands of Jewish fighters held the Warren-SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20,000–30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought against the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe. An aftermath effect of the war was also the Nuremberg Trials, a series of military tribunals, held by the Allied forces after World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany, who planned or participated in any war crimes.
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