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World history
Course: World history > Unit 6
Lesson 12: Human rightsThe Holocaust
An overview of Holocaust including to an overview of the events that led up to it. Includes overviews of the Nazi Party, Mein Kampf, Nuremberg Laws, etc. Discussion of the term "genocide".
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- Why would so many people side with Hitler? If the people were not scared of him, they could have easily overthrown him.(27 votes)
- During the time he was rising to power, Germany (and most of the world) was going through a depression, money was worthless, people were starving, etc. Hitler was able to improve the economy, thus improving Germany. He was "improving" German life, providing more jobs, less tax, improved morale/sentiment. But, while he did this, he was also blaming the Jews and Russians, Bolsheviks, "undesirables," for all the troubles Germany went through post WWI. Kicking Jews out, taking away their rights, etc. People didn't really care about them anyways as there was still strong antisemitism during this time
edit: I also forgot to mention, people who were against Hitler also had visits from the Gestapo.(55 votes)
- why did hitler believe that the aryans were superior to all races.Also are'nt morden day aryans from Iran(persia) and india.(8 votes)
- There is no reason for anybody to believe that their race is the most superior. Aryans are a race from Central Asia. some of them migrated to Europe and others to Asia, particularly Persia and India.(11 votes)
- How can we keep the Holocaust from happening again?(3 votes)
- But it IS happening again today (May 2018) in Myanmar and Yemen. It was happening 15 years ago on Darfur (Western Sudan). It has happened as recently as 40 years ago in Cambodia.(15 votes)
- Why were the Romani, people with disabilities, and homosexuals killed too? Along withe Jews. I also didn't know that these groups were targeted also. I thought it was just Jews.(5 votes)
- A bit of a late response but the reason that these minority groups were killed was because they were not considered part of the Aryan race who were stereotyped as being superior than others with blonde hair and blue eyes. Even if people like the disabled were germans, they set a wrong example to the Aryan race and were a drain on the society's resources. In other words, other minority groups were a convenient scapegoat along with Jews, were of no use to the germans and were only detrimental to the economy.(7 votes)
- why did Hitler think blond hair and blue eyes was the ¨perfect person" if he, him self DID NOT have the requirements of the ¨perfect person¨?(3 votes)
- The man was crazy, and he was a racist. That's a bad combination in a national or political leader. When one does not see one's own internal contradictions, one is dangerous, whether in a nation, a party, a corporation, a church or a family.(4 votes)
- can u tell me how was life like for Jewish people before hiltelr came to power?(3 votes)
- They pretty much led normal lives. they spoke yiddish, worked as tailors doctors accountants etc., but there was a lot of anti semitism, and not just in Germany. Sadly, there was violence against Jews in Poland in 1936 where almost 80 Jews were killed and 200 wounded in the town of prystyk, Poland(6 votes)
- were children often targeted more than adults or was it both who got targeted the most. if you know what I am saying(3 votes)
- According to Wikipedia, estimates are around 1.5 million children died as a result of the Holocaust.(6 votes)
- hitler himself did not have blond hair and blue eyes, then how could he consider himself pure?(4 votes)
- The origin of Hitler's hatred of Jews is not clear. In Mein Kampf, he described his development into an antisemite as the result of a long, personal struggle. Supposedly, his aversion to everything Jewish came to fruition when he was living and working as a painter in Vienna (1908-1913). Most historians believe that Hitler came up with this explanation in hindsight. He would have used it to assure people who were not yet convinced of his ideas that they would eventually see the light.One way or another, it is clear that Hitler came into contact with antisemitic ideas at an early age. To what extent he shared them at that point, is not certain. If he was prejudiced against Jews while living in Vienna, his prejudice had not yet crystallised into a clear worldview. After all, one of the most loyal buyers of his paintings in Vienna was a Jew, Samuel Morgenstern.
There are countless imaginative explanations for the reasons for Hitler's antisemitism. Hitler is said to be have been ashamed of his partly Jewish roots. Another explanation links his hatred of Jews to trauma caused by a poison gas attack in the First World War. Yet other theories suggest that Hitler had contracted a venereal disease from a Jewish prostitute. There are, however, no facts to support these explanations.
- https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/why-did-hitler-hate-jews/(2 votes)
- Why does Hitler think that blonde hair and blue eyes was the perfect person? (This wasn't in there)
Why was Hitler so against Jews?
And why would so many people just side with him instead of over throwing?
Also why did he kill himself and his wife?
(Sorry for so many questions.)(3 votes)- On the perfect person: see https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/human-rights-issues-during-and-after-world-war-ii-focus-nazi-germany-grade-12-0
On hatred of Jews: see https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/why-did-hitler-hate-jews/
On Nazi persistence: see https://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/timeline/nazirise.htm
On suicide: see https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1942-1945/hitler-commits-suicide
No need to apologize for many questions. There are many good websites, and searching is easy when you know how.(3 votes)
- What human rights were violated from the holocaust?(2 votes)
- A better question is what human rights weren't violated in the holocaust.(2 votes)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] In this
video we're going to talk about what is one of the darkest chapters in human history, the Holocaust, which involved the massacre
of roughly 6 million Jews and as many as 11 million
civilians in total. In order to understand the Holocaust, we're going to start at World War I. Even prior to World War
I, there were massacres, especially of Jews, in places
like the Russian empire. The term pogrom is a Russian word meaning these violent riots or attacks on people for their ethnicity. There were several
through the 19th century. But they go back even
before that word was coined as early as the first crusades. Famously in the Rhineland,
many of the Jewish people were killed and attacked. You had a solid thread of antisemitism throughout much of Europe, including Germany and Eastern Europe as we get up to and through World War I. As we've talked about in other videos, the central powers lose World War I and the Treaty of Versailles places a lot of the blame on Germany. The national pride of
Germany has been shattered. They have lost this war. They have lost territory. Their economy is in shambles. They're paying reparations. It is in that context that the National Socialist Party forms officially in 1920, coming out
of the German Workers Party. They focused on ideas of national identity and from the start were
against ethnic groups, blaming their problems,
including the loss of World War I often on these ethnic groups. In 1921, Hitler, who had
fought during World War I and based on some of his writings seemed to have found a lot
of meaning during the war, he becomes the National
Socialist Party leader. National Socialist, it gets abbreviated as Nazi, National Socialist
Party, Nazi Party. In 1923, Hitler tries
to begin an overthrow of the government. But his putsch, his coup, is unsuccessful and he is imprisoned. It is while in prison that he writes down his belief system that
eventually gets published upon his release in 1925
under the title Mein Kampf, which can be translated as
my struggle or my battle. This is just an excerpt from Mein Kampf. "If we pass all the causes of
the German collapse in review, "the ultimate and most
decisive remains the failure "to recognize the racial problem "and especially the Jewish menace. "The defeats on the
battlefield in August, 1918," so he's referring the end of World War I, "Would have been child's play to bear. "They stood in no
proportion to the victories "of our people. "It was not they that
caused our downfall, no. "It was brought about by
that power which prepared "these defeats by systematically,
over many decades, "robbing our people of the
political and moral instincts "and forces which alone
make nations capable "and hence worthy of existence." He's blaming Germany's
defeat in World War I on a relatively small ethnic group. So, as you can see, a very twisted mind, very twisted thinking. "The lost purity of the blood alone "destroys inner happiness forever," so he's very caught up
with these ideas of purity, "Plunges man into the abyss for all time, "and the consequences can
never more be eliminated "from body and spirit." Over time, what starts
off as this fringe leader of a fringe party, as we go into the 20s and as the German economy gets even worse and there's hyperinflation, more and more people start
to throw their support behind these extremists. And as we go into the 30s,
the National Socialist Party is actually able to get
reasonable representation in the German parliament. In 1933, the president of Germany appoints Hitler to be chancellor, which is the equivalent
of being prime minister despite the Nazis not having
a majority in parliament. This is the official
beginning of what the Nazis will call the Third Reich. Reich translates as realm. They considered the First Reich to be the holy Roman Empire. They refer to the Second
Reich as the German Empire after the holy Roman Empire up and through World War I. They don't consider the Weimar Republic, which they hate, the Third Reich. They consider that the interim Reich. And they consider
themselves the Third Reich, the heir to the German Empire
and the holy Roman Empire. Once Hitler and the Nazis get power, they really get a strangle hold on it. They start persecuting
their political opponents both, outside the party,
and inside the party. They also start to take
action on these twisted ideas Hitler expressed in Mein Kampf. In 1935, they're able to
pass the Nuremberg Laws, which strips German Jews
of their citizenship. It forbids intermarrying
between non-Jewish Germans and Jews. This is only one of many
steps that will continue to demean the rights of
Jews inside of Germany. In 1938, you have what is
known as Kristallnacht, or the night of broken glass. Hundred of synagogues are burned. Thousands of Jewish
businesses are destroyed and many Jews are killed in that night. Then as we get into 1939, Hitlers' armies famously invade Poland beginning what many historians consider to be the start of World War II. What would eventually be
known as the Holocaust goes into full effect in 1941. Jews are sometimes
executed in the streets, in their homes, many of them are captured and sent to concentration camps. To get a sense of the
scale of this operation, we have this excerpt from
Michael Berenbaum's book, The World Must Know. "The policy of extermination
involved every level "of German society and
marshaled the entire apparatus "of the German bureaucracy. "Parish churches and the
Interior Ministry supplied "the birth records that
defined and isolated Jews. "The post office delivered
the notifications "of definition, expropriation,
denaturalization, "and deportation. "The Finance Ministry
confiscated Jewish wealth "and property. "German industrial and commercial firms "fired Jewish workers,
officers, and board members, "even disenfranchising
Jewish stockholders. "The universities refused
to admit Jewish students, "denied degrees to those already enrolled, "and dismissed Jewish faculty. "government transportation bureaus handled "the billing arrangements
with the railroads "for the trains that carried
Jews to their death." The point that's being
made here is this could not be done just with Hitler and
some of his close associates. To kill millions of people on this scale, you needed and entire apparatus. And hundreds of thousands,
if not millions of people were involved in some way. At least several hundreds
of thousands of people within Germany must have been
aware of what was happening. Needless to say, the death
toll was considerable. This here is a visual depiction of the percentage of the Jewish population that was killed in various regions. As you can see, 80 to 90
percent of the Jewish population in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, was killed during the Holocaust. In the territories occupied
by Germany in Russia during World War II, almost
as many had been killed. In France, Italy, 1/5 to 1/4
of the population was killed. To put things more in human terms, this is a picture of children
who were in Auschwitz, one of the most infamous
concentration camps. You can see their names, their ages, and then when they were killed. Historians believe five
to six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust including a million and a half children. This was 2/3 of the Jewish
population of Europe. But the Holocaust went further. It's believed that over
10 million civilians were killed during the Holocaust. Over three million prisoners
of war were killed. And other people including
several hundred thousand Romani, often referred to as Gypsies. Several hundred thousand
people with disabilities, many thousands of homosexuals were all put to death
during the Holocaust. We've covered a lot of world history. A lot of it, unfortunately,
has a lot of death, a lot of destruction and
sometimes targeting people for their ethnicity. But never, in world history,
have we seen something at this scale. Because it seemed to be
a relatively new concept, a term was coined, genocide. It was coined by Raphael Lemkin who, as a Holocaust survivor, had
49 members of his family killed during the Holocaust. It means killing of a people. Geno, coming from a people or a family, and cide, killing. But maybe even more interesting than the word definition itself, is thinking about why
this actually happened. Maybe even more importantly,
how society can avoid it. I'll leave you with that question. What do you think was the
reason why this happened? And do you think we have a risk of that happening in the future? And how can we prevent it?