America and the Holocaust

January 30, 1933 was the day when many lives were changed in Europe. It marked the beginning of a horrible massacre known as the Holocaust. The Holocaust was and still is a very traumatic event for many people. Jews were evacuated from their homes, tortured, lost many loved ones, and were also scarred for life. Countries either tried to stop this massacre or in some way helped Germany. Jews had to wait and suffer about 12 years of torture and abuse until they were finally set free. Even though we only know of Germany being part of the Holocaust during World War II, many other countries were involved, either supporting Germany or fighting against the inhuman acts of violence.

Nine years after Dachau opened, the crematorium area was located beside the main camp. The old crematorium and the new crematorium was included. There was also a gas chamber, however there isn’t any credible evidence that the gas chamber in Barrack X was used to murder human beings. The gas chambers were actually for something called “selection”. Selection was when all of the Jews at the camp would go to the gas chambers to be evaluated. If a Jew was marked down as not strong enough to do work or too sick then they were sent to the Hartheim "euthanasia" killing center near Linz, Austria. Many Jewish people were killed this way. The crematoria are was also where the SS camp guards would kill prisoners; they would also kill the prisoners at the firing range. Another way that the Jewish People and prisoners were killed at Dachau was when German physicians would do medical experiment on the prisoners “including high-altitude experiments using a decompression chamber, malaria and tuberculosis experiments, hypothermia experiments, and experiments testing new medications. Prisoners were also forced to test methods of making seawater potable and of halting excessive bleeding” ("Dachau"). During this process there were hundreds of prisoners left dead, or with permanent disabilities. During World War II all of the Jews were forced to do work “Prisoners were forced to do this work, starting with the

World War II was a terrible, chaotic war with many deaths. Innocent people were killed, only because they were a different race. During World War II, the Germans/Nazis absolutely hated the Jews for no good reason. There were prisons built to torture and use Jews for forced labor. Those prisons were called concentration camps. In World War II, three of these concentration camps were same of the largest ones created and were called the Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and the Dachau. The Auschwitz had three main camps and was located 37 miles of Krakow, the Buchenwald was constructed in 1937 about five miles northwest of Weimar, and the Dachau was one of the first camps created and has an incident that leads to many deaths.

On November 25, 1942, approximately three years after Hitler started World War II The New York Times ran their first report that the Nazis had created a policy to eradicate the Jews of Europe. This story, confirmed by the State Department, did not run on the front page. It appeared on page 10 (Ostrow). President Franklin Roosevelt could have made this a major issue, but he said and did nothing. Other popular magazines such as Time, Life, and Newsweek reported virtually nothing on this topic (Ostrow). The people of the United States preferred not to know. If the United States had not practiced an isolationist foreign policy rooted in anti-Semitism, the Holocaust death toll could have been reduced because the killing would have been limited.

The history of the State of Israel and the Holocaust strongly correlate with each other. For one to understand the State of Israel, one must look at in it relation to the Holocaust because Israel uses defence techniques that it would not feel necessary if not for the Holocaust, the Holocaust has changed the Jewish faith, and the Holocaust has caused issues with the overall view of the Jews.

People are never evil just for the sake of being evil. They always justify to themselves in some way that all of their actions are for the greater good and that the actions they have committed are not atrocities. This has to be done since normal individuals cannot justify to themselves that they are immoral. Both western imperialism and the Holocaust had their atrocities justified by the illusion of progress. Even though numerous millions of people were slaughtered in these campaigns, many of the people doing the killing, believed that it was for the greater good. Western imperialism used the notion of bettering the native population and expansion in order to justify their mass killings. On the other hand, the Holocaust rationalized its

The United States’ response to the Holocaust is a much-discussed and very sensitive subject for a variety of groups close to or related to the situation. The opinions on the subject are diverse and far-reaching, and the analyzations and comparison of some of these can lead to a greater understanding of not only the happenings of the Holocaust itself but also the social reactions to the event by the many groups involved. Four sources I intend to compare include Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies, David Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945, W.D. Rubinstein’s The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved the Jews from the Nazis, and Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life, because I believe that these four sources make up a diverse and widespread selection from which nearly all opinions, or the most conflicting ones, can be observed and interpreted. The first work uses an investigatory style that proposes pieces of evidence from the period shortly before the Holocaust that could have allowed the allies further and more prudent action. Similarly, the second work argues that there is substantial evidence that the United States and the rest of the allies could certainly have saved thousands of lives with earlier and more aggressive action, but argues from a more opinion and theoretical style that focuses less on

Although it was not the only concentration camp it was a place where they did experiments with a lot of the prisoners. For example they tried out medication to see the reactions, to see if salt water was drinkable. They also used gas chambers which they crowded as many inmates as they could fit in there tricking them they were going to be free as soon as they took a shower, but what it really did was intoxicate them with Zyklon-B and they died. Afterward there was not many to speak of what had happened so the rest really believed that they were going to become free. So many orders from a solder at one point a man jumped onto the electric fence to take away his life instead letting the solder humiliate him. When it had started to know what was happening in the camps they stopped it immediately the US liberated the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945 . They sent some death trains, Dachau had 141 trains that held 3,000 dead

When one looks through the history of the last century, many great atrocities can come to mind. However, the one that is the most common is that of the Holocaust during World War II. People often wonder how something like this could have been allowed to happen. These same people wonder this without realizing that something similar has happened, right within their own shores. Not only this, but they do not realize how previously close we could become to having this happen again.

“What exactly was the difference? He wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms” a quote from The Boy with the Striped Pajamas. The Holocaust was a genocide, the intentional killing of certain group or ethnicity, that affected the Jewish community worldwide through sorrow and sympathy of their people; and kibitzers who chose to watch until under pressure. A perfect example was the United States who stood on the sidelines, while the horrific events of the Holocaust were occurring. The United States had played a negative role in the Holocaust due to a lack of aid, immigration, and publication.

In the years of the Second World War, American leaders were aware of the plan of the Germans to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, yet they did not act to save them. The attitude in society and the state of the economy in the years leading up to the war made for conditions that did not make saving them likely.

The United States did not get too involved in the Holocaust at the beginning, but began to fight against the dictator, Adolf Hitler, after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Anything made a difference, from storming the beaches of Normandy, to doing small attacks on the Japanese. Although we were worried about the wellbeing of our country, we should have intervened earlier than we did. Because of the lack of interference from outside countries, millions of Jewish people, and some others, were killed.

During the holocaust there were many concentration camps set up and these concentration camps were horrible, people suffered and died everyday. They were treated like animals and slowly started losing their humanity and hope of ever being free again. Concentration Camps were first established in Germany soon after Hitler was appointed, and between 1933 and 1945 Nazis and it allies had established over 40,000 concentration camps all over europe. By 1939 7 major concentration camps had been established

Dachau was the name of a town just outside of Munich, Germany, it was the first concentration camp and was established in March 22, 1933 and it was closed April 29, 1945. Hilmar Wäckler was the first officer in charge of Dachau. After Wäckler, Theodor Eicke took over in June of 1933. After gaining control of the camp, Eicke let out a set of strict rules. If one of the prisoners were thought to of broken rules they were to be severely beaten. If they overheard people talking about escaping or going against their political views, they would be executed on the spot.

Humanity displayed its darkest colors with the two main and most vile genocides, the Western Imperialism and Holocaust. They became milestones in human history for their mass amounts of manslaughter, enslavement, and overall cruelty towards millions of people. The Holocaust was a direct act of racism as the Jews were considered the root of Nazi Germany’s problems.In contrast, the Western Imperialists’ acts of genocide against the Native Americans were a combination of the need for conquest and religious propaganda. They both utilized the rationalizations of colonization and a strong sense of superiority for their genocide and enslavement of other civilizations, although the Western Imperialism considered progress as instilling culture and structure unto the Native Americans, while the Holocaust defined progress as eradicating the source of evil, that being the Jews.