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The Condemned
- After taking power in 1933, the Nazis had concentrated on silencing their political opponents- communists, socialists, liberals, and anyone else who spoke out against he government
- Gypsies- who the Nazis thought to be "inferior race"
- Freemasons- Nazis charged as supporters of the "Jewish conspiracy" to rule the world
- Jehovah's Witnesses- who refused to join the army or salute Hitler
- Hitler began implementing his final solution in Poland with special Nazi death squads.
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The Persecution Begins
- Shortly after Hitler took power in Germany, he ordered all "non Aryans" to be removed from government jobs.
- This order was one of the first moves in a campaign for racial purity that eventually led to the Holocaust.
- Holocaust- the systematic murder of 6 million Jews across Europe
- The Nazis also murdered 5 million other people
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Jews Targeted
- Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship, jobs, and property.
- To make it easier for the Nazis to identify them, Jews had to wear a bright yellow Star of David attached to their clothing
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Kristallnacht
-November 9-10 became know as Kristallnacht, or "Night of Broken Glass."
-Nazi storm troopers attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues across Germany and Austria.
-An American witnessed the violence and wrote- "Jewish shop windows by the hundreds were systematically and wantonly smashed. the main streets of he city were a positive litter of shattered plate glass."
-Around 100 Jews were killed, and hundreds more were injured.
-Many Jews were arrested and burned
-Nazis blamed Jews -
The Plight of the St. Louis
-Official indifference to the plight of Germany's Jews was in evidence in the case of the ship St. Louis
-This German Linear passed Miami
-Although 740 of the linear's 943 passengers had U.S immigration papers, the Coast Guard followed the ship to prevent anyone from disembarking in America
-The ship was forced to return to Europe
-"The cruise of the St. Louis," wrote the New York Times, "cries to high heaven of mans inhumanity to man."
-More than half of the passengers were later murdered -
Hitler's "Final Solution"
-By 1939 only about a quarter million Jews remained in Germany.
-Other nations that Hitler occupied had millions more.
-Hitler proposed a "Final Solution"- a policy of genocide, the deliberate and systematic murder of an entire population
-Hitler's Final Solution rested on the belief that Aryans were a superior people and that the strength and purity of this "master race" must be preserved.
-The Nazis condemned to slavery and death not only the Jews but other groups were viewed as inferior. -
Death Camps
-The Germans built 6 death camps in Poland.
-Each camp had several huge gas chambers in which as many as 12,000 people could be killed a day.
-When prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, the largest of the death camps , they had to parade by several SS doctors.
-Those destined to die were led into a room outside the gas chamber and were told to undress for a shower.
-To complete the deception, the prisoners were even given pieces of soap.
-Finally, they were led into the chambers and poisoned -
The Final Stage
The Final Solution reached its final stage in early 1942.
-At a meeting held in Wannsee, a lakeside suburb near Berlin, Hitler's top officials agreed to begin a new phase of the mass murder of Jews.
-To mass slaughter and starvation they would add a third method of killing-murder by poison gas.
