Remembering the Holocaust

Remembering the Holocaust

The holocaust is defined as the systematic persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews that was sponsored by the state if Germany and the Nazi party. The leader of the Nazi party was Adolf Hitler. Hitler felt that Jews were unworthy of life and were to blame for the war. That is why he and his party persecuted the Jews and other minorities throughout the Second World War.

The Nazi party came to power in 1933. From that day forward their main focus was the complete destruction of the Jewish population. By 1945 approximately two out of every three European Jews had been killed. The Nazis called the extermination of the Jews the Final Solution. Though their main focus was on the Jews, Nazis also persecuted other groups. Other groups they persecuted were gypsies, the mentally and physically disabled, Slavic people, communists, socialists, Jehovah's witnesses, and homosexuals. There are some groups around the world today that say that the holocaust never happened. I do not see how anybody could think that when there are videos and pictures from Nazi camps, but the important thing is that we do not let people forget about the holocaust. The reason we study history at all is to be prepared for the future because the past usually repeats itself. Well we cannot let anything like the holocaust ever happen again. People who know about the holocaust have to tell other people about it and how important it is to remember the horrors that happened to people. It was the worst period of time ever recorded for mankind and if we let people forget about it than it will happen again.

The specific hatred that the Nazis had for Jews came to be known as anti-Semitism. The singular focus for Nazi anti-Semitism soon became the genocide of the Jews. Genocide is any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnical, racial, or religious group. The main genocide of the Jews was done through killing, and causing bodily or mental harm to Jewish people, but there were also a couple of other things the Nazis did to Jews. Other things they did were, preventing the birth of Jewish children or forcibly transferring Jewish children into Nazis. If the Nazis captured a young Jew that was fairly healthy they would just put him to work for the Nazis, most likely in the army or concentration camps. Many times a Jewish person would have to help kill members of his own family or race to save his own life. (Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2005)

The first thing Nazis did to Jews once they started capturing and relocating them was to put them into ghettos. Ghettos were small districts of cities that were fenced in from the rest of the cities. The conditions in the ghettos were terrible. They were overcrowded, disease and sickness ran wild in the ghettos, and many Jews never made it out of the ghettos. The Nazis established over four hundred ghettos before the last one was destroyed in Lodz in 1945. (Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2005)

After they were in ghettos for a while, Jews got sent to Nazi camps. Usually if you got sent to a concentration camp you got one of two treatments. Either you were killed immediately or you were starved, separated from your family and forced to do hard labor. At forced labor camps thousands of Jews died from starvation and exhaustion. Extermination camps fulfilled the main goal of mass murder. Over three million Jews were killed at extermination camps by way of being gassed or shot. Almost all of