David Nguyen 9/11/2011 World History The Judenrat’s Mistake During the holocaust, Jews were losing their jobs, rights, and property. In 1933, the Nazi leaders began assigning Jews to handle situations to help the jews in the Ghettos, these Jews were known as the Judenrat. The Judenrate weren’t Jewish volunteers, they were assigned and given tasks to perform: “Composed of 24 male jews … prescribed as 1) executing German orders, 2) taking an improvised census of the Jew in their area, 3) executing the Jew from rural to urban locations, 4) furnishing adequate maintenance for the evacuees en route to the cities, 5) providing quarters for the evacuees in the cities ghetto.” (Bernard 27). In many cases, the Judenrat were responsible …show more content…
The Judenrat led the resistance by assisting the rebels to escape from the ghettos. As a result to these resistances Nazi officers would just send attack dogs or perform search parties and eventually led to death. The Judenrat began to have negative attitudes towards the resistance and escapes from the ghettos. The Judenrat feared that the Germans are going to blame the Judenrat for not keeping their section under control. As a consequence: “mass escape would make it impossible for the council to negotiate with the germans in order to revoke measures of persecution, or, at least, to save some inmates; Coucil members who were responsible to the germans for the inmates’ behavior be the first to pay with their lives if a revolt took place. The inmates knew about these dangers as well.” (Trunk 462). Both the Jews and councils knew that having a mass escape would eventually cost their lives or be executed, but they lack food and water in order to have a successful, as evidence: “Of an estimated 300 inmates who escaped from Treblinka that day, about 100 survived the massive SS manhunt.” (www.ushmm.org). The quote is from the revolt of a death camp in Treblinka, where a mass escape take place and only a third of the escaped prisoners have successfully escaped. In many cases, Judenrat councilmen have stood to prosecute their own people on trial: “…the men who have betrayed everything was in the way to their claim to power.”(Arendt 102). The
“Those who had no choice but to flee for their survival and the survival of their families became refugees, seeking safe havens in other parts of Europe and beyond. At first, Jews were allowed to settle in neighboring countries such as Belgium, France, and Czechoslovakia, but as German occupation spread across the continent, these countries were no longer safe and refugees became increasingly desperate to escape. The life of Jewish refugees was described in this way: “[The refugees] were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they remained stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were right-less, the scum of the earth” (America, 2017).
In the camps, the prisoners were continuously being persecuted and there were always selections going on as well. The selections would determine whether you were valuable to them or not. If you weren’t, you were killed and if you were, you continued to work. All of these things caused the Jews to be in a state of hopelessness and apathy while always being quite anxious too (Gutman, 1). With
As I mentioned at the beginning, Jewish partisans are placed into two categories: Eastern and Western. There was no major resistance in Germany, due to the fact that everything was highly scrutinized by Hitler’s
Many Jewish prisoners thought that there would be no good that would come out of them fighting back, it would just result in hundreds and hundreds of deaths. By following the orders that were given to
Normally, people in the Jewish resistance would stand for themselves and their families. If those who were non Jewish got caught by the Nazis they would then get the same treatment as the Jews. There were many acts of resistance for the Jews, such as Warsaw ghetto, and various spiritual resistances. The Warsaw Ghetto inspired
Over 11 million people were killed during the holocaust with 6 million of them being Jewish (dosomething.org). The Holocaust was an important time in history because it impacted so many lives and hurt so many people. We should learn about this because if we do not then it is possible for history to repeat itself and obviously we do not want this to repeat.The groups that are the most responsible for the Holocaust are the Allied countries, Adolf Hitler, and the SS Officers.
There were many groups of people, other than the Jews, that were victims of persecution and murdered by the Nazis. The groups affected by the Holocaust were the Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other Slavs, political dissidents and dissenting clergy, people with physical or mental disabilities, Jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals. According to A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust, There is evidence as early as 1919 that Hitler had a strong hatred of Jews. As Chancellor and later Reichsfuhrer, Hitler translated these intense feelings into a series of policies and statutes which progressively eroded the rights of German Jews from 1933-1939 (“Victims”).
For the people that would resist, the Nazis did not care about them at all. The Nazis were such a brutal group they would just kill the Jews right on the spot in front of everybody that was there.
The best Jews to form a resistance were those who worked at the camps cleaning the gas chambers, cremating the dead, and sorting through belongings (“Resistance”). The Jews who worked in the camp were very familiar with the death process and knew it would eventually happen to them, this thought made some plan escapes (“Resistance”). “Under the most adverse conditions, Jewish prisoners succeeded in initiating resistance and uprisings in some Nazi camps,” (“Jewish
Preparing for the resistance brought up both feelings of terror, and excitement over the fact that the Nazis would not be able to get away with at least one of their plans so easily. Zivia Lubetkin, who was a resistance fighter in the ghetto, describes the feeling of the resistance organization on the 18th of April after getting the news of the final roundup that was to take place the next day. She says “[e]ven though we were prepared, and had even prayed for this hour, we turned pale. A tremor of joy mixed with a shudder of fear passed through all of us. But we suppressed our emotions and reached for our guns” (Gilbert 557). Resistance was a new idea to the Jews. Since the Nazis had taken over, the Jews had found themselves in a rather helpless situation. There was almost no way to escape the ghettos, and those who did manage to make it out knew they were costing the Jews they had left behind. This was the first real attempt at an actual organized armed resistance. Lubetkin tells how the Germans were determined, especially after being forced to retreat in January, but so were the Jews. Determination was certainly something
Jews developed a movement of armed and unarmed resistance to retain their humanity. Jews had enough of the germans and went on an uprising to fight against them using violence. They created organized resistance groups all across making sure the nazis knew they could not be stopped by killing one. Jews who believe violence was not the answer they resisted spiritually and mentally. Armed and unarmed resistance killed a lot of lives but at the same time saved a lot more lives because without the resistance movement who knows if the Jews would still be
Resistance is the act of refusing to accept something and fighting against the authority to make things right. Jewish resistance during World War II gave Jewish people hope that they will be free again. Jewish resistance took place in many concentration camps and ghettos. There were also many groups dedicated to fighting the German Nazis, some Jews chose to fight them armed and others chose the more peaceful way of resisting, like spirtual resistance. While the Nazis had more power than the resistance groups throughout the war, armed Jewish resistance had a major role fighting against the German Nazis because these Jewish resistance groups were formed dedicated to fighting the Nazis for their freedom, and people in the concentration camps and ghettos also resisted the Nazis in their own limited ways, but it still played a
Labor camps or also known as Forced Labor were for the Jews to be put under brutal condition. But even before the Holocaust started the Nazi already putted forced labor or also known as Human trafficking in this world generation right now onto Jews. But mostly only Jewish male only done Labor work as for some of the women were to be sent to death row for being weak. But towards the Nazi, Jews only way to survive is to
Resistance from inside the camp was not uncommon nor was it unknown; the definition of resistance is ‘the refusal to accept or comply with something.’ And you can be sure that there were many prisoners who refused to be dehumanized in such the way they were, but the obvious Nazi response to these uproars was extermination. However, there were certain prisoners inside the camp who did not fear the thought of extermination, because it was already coming their way, their resistance was in no way uncommon. These prisoners were called ‘Sonderkommando. The Sonderkommando were usually healthy, strong men; chosen straight from their arrival on the trains. Another important thing to note about the selection of Sonderkommando is
Their main goals were to organize uprisings, break out of the ghettos, and join partisan units in the fight against the Germans.The Jews knew that uprisings would not stop the Germans and that only a handful of fighters would succeed in escaping to join the partisans. Still, some Jews made the decision to resist. Weapons were smuggled into ghettos. Inhabitants in the ghettos of Vilna, Mir, Lachva , Kremenets, Częstochowa, Nesvizh, Sosnowiec, and Tarnow, among others, resisted with force when the Germans began to deport ghetto populations. In Bialystok, the underground staged an uprising just before the final destruction of the ghetto in September 1943. Most of the ghetto fighters, primarily young men and women, died during the fighting.The Warsaw ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943 was the largest single revolt by Jews. Hundreds of Jews fought the Germans and their auxiliaries in the streets of the ghetto. Thousands of Jews refused to obey German orders to report to an assembly point for deportation. In the end the Nazis burned the ghetto to the ground to force the Jews out. Although they knew defeat was certain, Jews in the ghetto fought desperately and