The Holocaust: The Persecution Of The Jews

Genocide is the destruction of an ethnic, racial, or religious group. The most famous genocide, conducted by the Germans, is the extermination of the Jewish population known as the Holocaust. There are other genocides such as the Armenian or Darfur genocide, but the Holocaust is the one talked about and studied the most around the world today. Museums exist in Washington D.C, Los Angeles, and parts of Europe that focus primarily on this dark time in history. Vast amounts of books, movies, and documents concentrate on the Holocaust. Why is this chapter, between 1939 and 1945, discussed and examined? The answer lies within people who experienced the Holocaust such as Elie Wiesel, Jay Frankston, and Franks Shatz. These men have gone through hell and back, but they believe in one thing. That is, the notion of never again. The goal is to educate future generations on what really happened, so history does not repeat itself. Never again should people of any race, religion, or ethnicity, go through the horrific past of the Holocaust. In their writing, Wiesel, Frankston, and Shatz do a great job using pathos, logos, and ethos to convey their message of never again for future generations.

Horror struck on January 30, 1933, when Germany assigned Adolf Hitler as their chancellor. Once Hitler had finally reached power he set out to complete one goal, create a Greater Germany free from the Jews (“The reasons for the Holocaust,” 2009). This tragedy is known today as, “The Holocaust,” that explains the terrors of our histories past. The face of the Holocaust, master of death, and leader of Germany; Adolf Hitler the most deceitful, powerful, well spoken, and intelligent person that acted as the key to this mass murder. According to a research study at the University of South Florida, nearly eleven million people were targeted and killed. This disaster is a genocide that was meant to ethnically cleanse Germany of the Jews. Although Jewish people were the main target they were not the only ones targeted; gypsies, African Americans, homosexuals, socialists, political enemies, communists, and the mentally disabled were killed (Simpson, 2012, p. 113). The word to describe this hatred for Jewish people is known as antisemitism. It was brought about when German philosophers denounced that “Jewish spirit is alien to Germandom” (“Antisemitism”) which states that a Jew is non-German. Many people notice the horrible things the Germans did, but most don’t truly understand why the Holocaust occurred. To truly understand the Holocaust, you must first know the Nazis motivations. Their motivations fell into two categories including cultural explanations that focused on ideology and

Treated like dirt through a majority of his life is all Shep Zitler knew, he was born into a religious family and a tough culture surrounding him, the Holocaust effected his life to the extreme but along with all his suffering and the tragedies in his life the Holocaust did not take him. He stuck by his believes and made it out alive.

There are many important dates throughout the history of the Holocaust, spanning the time line of January 30,1933 through May 8,1945.This report covers some of the tragic events, from the beginning

In his novel, Night, Elie Wiesel recounts the horrific experiences that he faced as a survivor of the Holocaust during World War II. The following passage presents the impossible struggle to maintain a decent quality of life in the face of war:

As Elie Wiesel was taken through the Holocaust as a result of being a Jew, he began to ask himself this: “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because he caused thousands of children to burn in his mass graves...Praise be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar,” (45). As many enter into wars and horrific events stemming from wars, they begin with strong and unwavering faith. As the war continues and nothing is relieved, people begin to question their faith as they lose sight of all hope. This loss of faith results in a shift in one’s mindset and point of view. As danger and violence seem to increase in wars, so does the struggle to maintain faith. As people continue on in horrible conditions for so long, they eventually reach a breaking point, causing them to abandon all hope, pride, or spirituality they have; because if their world is falling apart, being shattered, and becoming what seems to be unamendable, why has a leadership or a higher being not intervened? As wars continue to be waged throughout history, is has become apparent that the struggle to maintain faith is a theme seen universally as a result of dancing with violence, unsafety, and death.

From 1933-1945, it was a period of time when the Jews were targeted as an enemy. This period of time is called the “Holocaust.” This is when the Germans killed over 6 million Jews and it was a genocide. They also killed any Jew that they could recognize. The Germans during this time were called Nazis. Nazis were the people that controlled the concentration camps and liberated people. Concentration camps were the places where the Nazis took the Jews to be killed. In the concentration camps there were gas chambers. They were the places where they took the children and their moms for a “shower”. They thought it was a shower, but it was actually a place where they would end their lives. When all the jews went in the Nazis threw a chemical that burnt everything. The people who did that were the Holocaust war criminals. They were the Nazis that killed 1,000s of jews and didn’t care. The most dangerous war criminals were Alois Brunner,Beate Kunzel Klarsfeld, John Demjanjuk, Hans Lipschis, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg, and Gerhard Sommer.

Eleven million innocent people died and many did not know what they did or why it was happening to them (Rice 11). The Holocaust happened because of the Germans after World War 2 thought that the reason that their economy was falling down was because of Jewish people. The Holocaust followed the Ladder of Prejudice is a started with speech and moved its way up to “The Final Solution” also known as extermination. Hitler did not start with killing Jews. He killed Jews,Gypsies,homosexuals and many more religions or cultural people and Hitler also sent people to concentration camps if they spoke against the Government, then he moved to the Ladder of Prejudice, he used discrimination, physical attack and, extermination.

The Holocaust genocide lasted for approximately 4,482 days. There were nearly twelve years of planning and organizing the extermination of Jews in Europe. For most of those years, nearly all surrounding countries did not partake in assisting the survival of these Jews. Why? Why was there such insufficient help from countries around the world while the Holocaust had been occurring? Had other countries stepped in sooner to provide safety and rescue for the Jews, how different would history be?

Imagine the skin burning off of a human being, imagine an innocent child walking into a room thinking they are going to finally get to take a shower but die from gas, imagine being frozen almost to death, then being warmed up by a dead body, imagine being put into a burning hot bath repeatedly until you died from the shock, and imagine being torn from your family, home, and the people that you loved. Most all Jewish people in that time had to live through that. There were very few that were lucky enough to have escaped. They were even luckier if they were helped out of camps by other Jewish people and brought home to their families. Now just imagine if all of the Jewish people fought back.

Most everyone reflects on and thinks of the Holocaust as a horrifying, heartless slaughter of the Jews. The Holocaust can be a very hard, depressing issue to discuss but it is a major part of history and cannot be ignored. The Holocaust affected countless numbers of people in the past and it continues to affect many to this day. The Jewish population was the population that most affected the most through the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler had way too much power and he used that position of excessive power to nearly destroy the Jews.

The Holocaust was an event that took place from 1933 to 1945 in Germany. During this time, Adolf Hitler was in charge, resulting in the prejudice actions that are well written in history. Facing economic, social, and political oppression, thousands of German Jews wanted to flee, but found few countries wanting to take them in. Eventually, under Hitler’s leadership, some 6 million Jews were murdered during World War II. In this time period the Nazi’s waged a war against the Jews and other races that they considered to be unequal in race and superiority to the German race. The actions that took place during the Holocaust were seen as the “Final Solution”. The Holocaust was one of the darkest times in history, and can be traced to the rising of Hitler, “An egomaniac with delusions of grandeur, and power” (Steinberg 240). The Holocaust resulted in the deaths of many Jews and other non- Germans, until they were liberated by America.

“The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.” That’s how The American Heritage Dictionary describes the murder of 6 million European Jews during the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the horrible true story of how one group’s hate turned into one of the darkest periods in world history.

January 30, 1933. It was when the bad things happen called the Holocaust. The Nazi Germany judge Jewish people’s ways they are way so dissimilar from Germans and Jewish like they believe in different religions, Their way of life is different and some of Jews are wealthy and intellectual so they decided to put them in a prison and kill them took place in Poland, England.

At the beginning almost everything was terrible everything went downhill and no one could stop it. The committee was “Intended to be the expression of a memory that is committed to improving the world. Its function is to reassert the witness of those who were killed and those who went before us that life is meaningful and the world will yet be redeemed”. Numerous problems started to happen to innocent people.