The Holocaust

The Holocaust

The Holocaust was one of the most terrible actions that has ever occurred in the world. The world Holocaust itself means “sacrifice by fire.” It all began in January of 1933 in Germany. The Nazis believed that they were “racially superior” to the Jews, who they considered completely inferior to themselves. They were alienated from the German community. However, it was not just the Jewish people that underwent this horrible treatment and abuse, but other outsiders, such as the Russians, Gypsies, and disabled people. The Nazi Party was led by a charismatic leader know as Adolf Hitler.   Adolf Hitler had an extreme hatred of Jews and moved quickly to remove Jews from political, financial, schools, and ownership of property.   The Nazi believed they were the ultimate beings “the Arian Race” and that the Jews were an alien threat to the German community.

To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years.   Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing centers.   Ghettos such as the Warsaw Ghetto were 4.5 % the original size of the city of Warsaw packed with half a million Jews.   Killing Centers or concentration camps such as Belzed, Majdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau killed approximately 3 million Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet prisoners of war.   The Nazi perfected their methods, using Zyklon-B, which is a form of cyanide gas ushering people into what they thought were showers to be deloused.   Zyklon-B was pumped into these shower rooms until all the people were dead.   The bodies were then removed and burned in crematoriums which ran 24 hours a day 365 days a year.
In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train...