Holocaust Upstanders: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Per Anger, and Oskar Schindler

To begin with, the holocaust took place in Germany, it lasted about two years and in these two years Adolf Hitler had killed over six million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and people that supported and/or defended these groups of people.

The Holocaust started in the 1933, when the Nazis and Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. The Holocaust from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned) cause chaos and tragedy for Jewish people. At this time Germany was a nation with a Jewish population of 566,000 people. Nazis thought that they were the most inferior race and no other race was better than the Aryan race. This cause a lot of discrimination and hate against other people based on their beliefs and looks. The Nazis provoked the outbreak of World War II, when they invaded Poland. The Holocaust lasted 12 years and it end it on May of 1945.

Oskar Schindler represents human goodness with his actions during the Holocaust. Oskar starts as a man who only acts for

The Holocaust was a tragic event that happened during WW2. Behind all of this was one man known to be one of the scariest,most evil person ever to live , Adolf Hitler. Hitler came into power

They saved Jews from the Nazis Concentration Camps, and death. One example was Varian Fry. Fry was in France during the time the holocaust began. He dislike Hitler and the holocaust. He decided to form the ERC (Emergency Rescue Plan) which was saved 200 refugees (Price 11). Later he made the American Relief Center, which gave refugees money and travel papers. However, the group would be a cover and gave people who were persucated by the nazi’s shelter, false travel papers, and it would help them get out of the country (Price 13). Another was Albert Hirschman who gave people false identity papers who didn’t want to be persecuted and wanted to stay in Europe (Price 14).These are few examples of the many heroes who helped save

The Holocaust was the murder and persecution of approximately 6 million Jews and many others by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis came to power in Germany in January of 1933. The Nazis thought that the “inferior” Jews were a threat to the “racially superior” German racial community. The death camps were operated from 1941 to 1945, and many people lost their lives or were forced to work in concentration camps during these years. The story leading up to the Holocaust, how the terrible event affected people’s lives, and how it came to and end are all topics that make this historic event worth learning about.

This statement depicts a glimpse of what the Jewish people had to endure during the holocaust. The holocaust was an extreme form of massacre. It is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. The duration of the holocaust was from January 30th, 1933 to May 8th, 1945. The holocaust began in the year of 1933 when the Nazi party came to power, the leader Adolf Hitler believed that the Jewish people belonged to a 'low' and 'evil' race, and they were affecting the lives of the Germans pessimistically. Hitler's motto was to punish, alienate, and torture anyone who differed from him, with religion being a main factor. The Nazi’s blamed the Jews for all the social and economic problems

With an outspoken anti-Jewish mayor, Karl Lueger, and many anti-Jewish newspapers and magazines there was no restriction on antisemitism, and Hitler was strongly influenced by this (“Why Adolf Hitler Hated Jews”). The First World War affected Hitler’s point of view on the world drastically. He was a soldier at the time and like the other soldiers, he was devastated about the German Empire being overthrown. Later, after the

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity quotes Elie Wielsel’s, “Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and human sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place- at that moment- become the center of the universe.” Many people suffered and had to give up their lives during the holocaust. The days of horror and torture during this time is to be told by many different writers. Elie Wiesel, Corrie Ten Boom, and Anne Frank, three writers I chose, all wrote books about the holocaust to make it a little bit easier to understand the real life situations they had to go through while in hiding. If it wasn’t for them, people today wouldn’t know the pain and hardships people had to face at that time. The holocaust was a life changing event that shaped the world to how it now is today.

You wake up from your crowded bunk. You drink some watered down coffee. As you work, you smell the scent of burning flesh. You work hard but your stomach aches from hunger. You work some more, get very little lunch, then go back to work. You then eat dinner, get tallied that you survived another day, then go back to work. Finally, after a long day of work you go to bed to repeat this whole day tomorrow. A-7713 permanently printed on his arm as his name. Eliezer, more commonly named Elie Wiesel is a proud survivor of the Holocaust. He was taken from a ghetto as a child to go to a concentration camp named Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel was greatly influenced as a person from the concentration camp.

One of the many important and most memorable incidents of World War Two would be the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, the Germans who were known as the Nazis, considered the Jews to be “enemy aliens”. As part of this, the Nazis thought that “Aryans” were a master race. Therefore, they decided to destroy the Jewish race, and created genocide. The Jews were put into unbearable torture at many concentration and death camps. In fact, 6 million Jews were killed in this incident; however, there were many victims who survived this anguish. One of the many survivors was Simon Wiesenthal, who survived the Nazi death camps and began his career as a Nazi hunter.

According to Elie Wiesel, an American Jewish writer and holocaust survivor, “It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.” Wiesel was describing how the future was questionable, and how they did so much to affect how we live today. In the holocaust, lives of many were put to waste, and innocent people were tortured. Though most non-Jews supported the holocaust, there was a select group of people who worked hard to end it. This group was known as the resistance. During the Holocaust, many groups contributed to the freedom of Jews. First, Jewish partisans fought for freedom of Jews. Secondly,

helped so many Jewish people. Schindler definitely was not a man of many morals, but his

Also, the actions of Oskar Schindler determined the fate of the Jewish. He set up his own enamel factory and employed a little under one thousand Jews. Schindler again pulled some strings and opened a new factory in a new location making defective bullets for German guns. “Beyond this day, no thinking person could fail to see what would happen,” Schindler said. “I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.” That is exactly what Schindler did too. Though many Jews died because of the holocaust, Schindler did save over one thousand Jews from death, which practically saved an entire race from becoming extinct.

[War] brings out the worst in people. Never the good, always the bad. Even in the midst the devastation of a national genocide, where one race turned against another in hate, good people existed and worked to counteract the hate through love and compassion. Oskar Schindler was one of these people. World War II provided him the means to become a very wealthy and powerful man, yet he did not exploit the Jews like many other businessmen during his time. He used his money and power to save thousands. Much can be learned from what happened during the holocaust and what Schindler did to save thousands of Jews.