Adolf Hitler Biography

Concentration Camps, 1933–1939 Concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; abbreviated as KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. THE FIRST CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN GERMANY The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. In the weeks after the Nazis came to power, The SA (Sturmabteilungen; commonly known as Storm Troopers), the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons—the elite guard of the Nazi party), the police, and local civilian authorities organized numerous detention camps to incarcerate real and perceived political opponents of Nazi policy. Special “political units on alert” (Politische Bereitschaften) originally guarded the SS concentration camps.

Nazism Nazism, or National Socialism in full (German: Nationalsozialismus), is the ideology and practice associated with the 20th-century German Nazi Party and state as well as other related far-right groups. Usually characterised as a form of fascism that incorporates scientific racism and antisemitism, Nazism originally developed from the influences of pan-Germanism, the Völkisch German nationalist movement and the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary culture in post-First World War Germany, which many Germans felt had been left humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. German Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and social Darwinism, asserted the superiority of an Aryan master race, and criticised both capitalism and communism for being associated with Jewish materialism. The Nazi Party was founded as the pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party in January 1919. Etymology Position in the political spectrum Origins Völkisch nationalism

Escape of the Jewish People from Europe Even before the beginning of World War II, many Jews sought to escape from countries under Nazi control. Between 1933 and 1939, more than 90,000 German and Austrian Jews fled to neighboring countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland). After the war began on September 1, 1939, escape became much more difficult. Nazi Germany technically permitted emigration from the Reich until November 1941. However, there were few countries willing to accept Jewish refugees and wartime conditions hindered those trying to escape. Most non-Jews neither aided nor hindered the "Final Solution" and relatively few people helped Jews escape. ESCAPE TO SOVIET-OCCUPIED POLAND AND THE INTERIOR OF THE SOVIET UNION Between 1939 and 1941 nearly 300,000 Polish Jews, almost 10 percent of the Polish Jewish population, fled German-occupied areas of Poland and crossed into the Soviet zone.

Anne Frank Born on June 12, 1929, Anne Frank was a German-Jewish teenager who was forced to go into hiding during the Holocaust. She and her family, along with four others, spent over two years during World War II hiding in an annex of rooms above her father’s office in Amsterdam. Since it was first published in 1947, Anne Frank’s diary has become one of the most powerful memoirs of the Holocaust. After being betrayed to the Nazis, Anne, her family, and the others living with them were arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps. Her bravery and legacy live on, however, and she is frequently cited as a model for today.

History of the Jews during World War II Group of Jewish parachutists under British command, who was sent into Slovakia. Palestine, wartime World War II is the most tragic period in Jewish history. German Nazi occupied Europe[edit] By World War II, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi-German government as part of the "Aryanization" policy inaugurated in 1937. The first of these pogroms was Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, often called Pogromnacht, or "night of broken glass," in which Jewish homes were ransacked in numerous German cities along with 11,000 Jewish shops, towns and villages,[1] as civilians and SA stormtroopers destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in smashed windows — the origin of the name "Night of Broken Glass." By December 1941, Adolf Hitler decided to completely exterminate European Jews. Spain[edit] During the war, Spain became an unlikely haven for several thousand Jews.

The Holocaust The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt")[2] also known as Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "the catastrophe"; Yiddish: חורבן, Churben or Hurban, from the Hebrew for "destruction"), was the mass murder or genocide of approximately six million Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, throughout the German Reich and German-occupied territories.[3] Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed.[4] Over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men.[5] A network of over 40,000 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territory were used to concentrate, hold, and kill Jews and other victims.[6] The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Etymology and use of the term Distinctive features Origins

Diary Excerpts On Deportations"Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews....If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed." - October 9, 1942On Nazi Punishment of Resisters"Have you ever heard the term 'hostages'? That's the latest punishment for saboteurs. It's the most horrible thing you can imagine.

German Jews during the Holocaust, 1939–1945 1933-1939 In January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany. Over half of these individuals, approximately 304,000 Jews, emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship, leaving only approximately 214,000 Jews in Germany proper (1937 borders) on the eve of World War II. In the years between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime had brought radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community. Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation had marginalized and disenfranchised Germany's Jewish citizenry and had expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life. World War II Yet the most drastic changes for the German Jewish community came with World War II in Europe. Following the outbreak of war on September 1, 1939, the government imposed new restrictions on Jews remaining in Germany. Deportation Such “German ghettos” within a larger ghetto framework existed notably in Riga and in Minsk.

Introduction to the Holocaust The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). WHAT WAS THE HOLOCAUST? Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of other people. Further Reading Bergen, Doris. Dawidowicz, Lucy S.

Antisemitism Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is prejudice, hatred of, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish religion or heritage.[1] A person who holds such positions is called an "antisemite". As Jews are an ethnoreligious group, antisemitism is generally considered a form of racism. While the term's etymology might suggest that antisemitism is directed against all Semitic people, the term was coined in the late 19th century in Germany as a more scientific-sounding term for Judenhass ("Jew-hatred"),[2] and that has been its normal use since then.[3] For the purposes of a 2005 U.S. governmental report, antisemitism was considered "hatred toward Jews—individually and as a group—that can be attributed to the Jewish religion and/or ethnicity."[4] Xenophobia and usage Usage Despite the use of the prefix anti-, the terms "Semitic" and "antisemitic" are not directly opposed to each other, making the term a misnomer. Etymology Definition Forms