Holocaust

Pure Aryans, meaning pure blood Germans without any defects such as physical or mental sicknesses, were aloud to live within the German country. Hitler, the leader of Germany of that time, believed that only people of “master race”- Aryans, could live, others were supposed to be eliminated. His hatred of all these people, which included Jewish, for the most part, Poles, Russians, people from other Slavic nations, gypsies and people with any physical or mental disorders, led to the Holocaust.

The hatred of Jews began earlier, after the World War I ended. Germans blamed Jewish that they were the cause of Germany’s defeat in World War I and all of the later economic problems Germany had after the end of it, such as rebuilding things, hunger, not enough products to trade and other things; they also blamed them as the cause of all their failures. Other people who were killed during the Holocaust were just simply not Aryan. Hitler and his movement, Nazism, called all these people sub humans.

When Hitler came to power in Germany, during 1930s, he passed away Nuremberg Laws. These laws were supposed to take away all the rights Jewish people had: they took away their rights as German citizens, took away rights for them to have a private business and/ or property, Jewish people also had to wear a bright yellow star attached to their clothing, so it would be easier for Germans to recognize a Jewish person walking on the street or selling products to them. Later on all Jewish shops there was a sign put on, telling Germans not to buy anything from Jewish to protect themselves.

In November 1938, the Nazi leaders heard the news about the assassination of a German Embassy employee, and that was the spark, which lead to the violent attack of Jews later, in two days. During this attack on Jewish people, Nazis burned synagogues, homes and businesses of Jewish people; they also managed to kill around a hundred of Jews. This violent movement was later called the Kristallnacht or “Night of Broken Glass” in English. About three days later a Nazi high ranked official announced- “Gentlemen! Today's meeting is of a decisive nature. I have received a letter written on the Fuehrer's orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another.”

( http://www.mtsu.edu/~baustin/knacht.html )

The Kristallnacht lead to a massive migration of Jewish people from Germany into other countries all over the world, among them were France, admitting 25,000 Jews, Britain, admitting 80,000, Latin America countries, admitting 40,000 Jewish in total, and a few other countries including U.S., which took in about 100,000 Jewish people, among them there was a famous German scientist, Albert Einstein.

When Hitler found out that a lot of Jews migrated to other countries trying to save their lives, he thought that this would be a good idea, to send Jewish out of Germany so he now forced all the Jews to emigrate from Germany even if they didn’t want to leave their homes, businesses, family. When he sent most of Jews out of the country, no other countries wanted to admit more, they feared anti- Semitism in their country. When sending Jews out of the country became a problem, Hitler made all the Jews to move into certain areas, called ghettos, which were later separated from the rest of the city with barbed wire and stone walls. Hitler created ghettos in all the countries that were under his control in order to isolate the Jews and make them starve or die form diseases.

When Hitler finally understood that no matter what the conditions in ghettos are (they were horrible), Jews still hung on, he decided to make a plan called “Final Solution. “ The main point of the “Final Solution” plan was to eliminate all the Jews and other people, listed above, in order to pure the German nation. The “Final Solution” was actually a program of genocide, or “the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group.”

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide ) against of all the “not pure” people When Jews were gathered and put into the concentration camps, people who tried to help them or helped them were also killed (these people helped Jews by hiding them in their houses, some even gave Jewish people their last names, which were German and so that the Nazis would think they are from their family, also these people helped Jewish to escape the country to some other one, mostly neutral ones, like Switzerland); as a reason of that murder Nazis would put things like- supported the sub humans, opposed Hitler’s ideas, against Nazi ideas about treating Jews… A quote of one of supporters of Jews, who survived- “For me was the Holocaust not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted