Holocaust Persecution

The Holocaust was the persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime. The total amount of people murdered during this time was 11 million, with six million of those being Jews. Not only were adults murdered but approximately 1.5 million children were murdered as well. The destruction of 5,000 Jewish communities also occurred during this time. The word “Holocaust” comes from the Greek origin meaning, “sacrifice by fire”. Another word for this mass murder of six million Jews is “Shoah”. “Shoah” means devastation, ruin, or waste. The Nazis who led this persecution came to power in Germany in January of 1933. The Nazis saw the Jews as evil or cowardly and saw the Germans as hardworking, honest, and courageous. The Germans were destined to rule and the Jews were doomed to extinction. Not only were the Jews a target but Gypsies, the disabled, and some of the Slavic people were as well. The Holocaust began in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and it ended in 1945 when the Allies defeated the Nazis.

On April 1, 1933, the Nazis started their first action against the Jews by announcing a boycott of all Jewish- run businesses. About five months later, the Nuremberg Laws were issued on September 15, 1935. These excluded Jews from public life and also took away their citizenship as well. On November 9-10, 1938; burning of synagogues and destroying of Jewish business took place. Jews were physically attacked and about 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. This night was also known as “Kristallnacht” or “Night of Broken Glass”. Also on November 9th Hershel Grynszpan, a 17 year old Jewish boy, shot Ernest vom Rath because he was departed from his family. Rath was the third secretary in the Ger...

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...their neighbors, the Allies create Israel in 1948. Israel was created for a homeland for the Jewish survivors.

A survivor of the Holocaust, named Mr. Greenbaum, tells his experience to visitors of the Holocaust Museum. “Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940 to the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown of Poland when he was only 12. Next he was transported to a slave labor camp where he and his sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. By the age of 17 he had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945”. Researchers have recorded about 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe. “We knew before how horrible life in the campus and ghettos was” said Hartmut Bergoff, director of the German Historical Institute, “but the numbers are unbelievable.