Nazi and The Holocaust

1321 Words3 Pages

The Holocaust was a devastating event in Europe. The Greek words ‘holos’(meaning whole) and ‘kaustos’(meaning burned) combined have come to mean a devastating slaughter of around 6 million Jews in Europe. Even though Anti-Semitism was around longer than Adolf Hitler, the term only seems to originate from the 1870s even though the meaning itself has evidence of being around since the times of ancient Rome. The thing about the Holocaust was that not only Jews were killed, gypsies and homosexuals were also slaughtered in the extermination and concentration camps. There were six extermination camps, four of which were ‘pure’ extermination camps, and there were at least 22 concentration camps. There were only 2 combined camps; the Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Majdanek. The Holocaust was the Nazi’s way of ‘purifying’ Germany, lead under the mad mind of Adolf Hitler. The ‘purification’ process was separating the ‘undesirables’ from the ‘pure German’ population, and leading them to concentration and/or extermination camps to get rid of the ‘undesirables’. Hitler decided to call this the ‘final solution’ to what he referred to as ‘the Jewish Question’. This ‘final solution’ was cruel and the Einsatzgruppen (meaning something along the lines of ‘special task force’ in English) would kill approximately 500,00 Jewish Soviets generally by shooting. In the August of 1941 experimental exterminations had been happening at the camp of Auschwitz for quite a while, and Zyklon-B was decided to be the pesticide that they would use to gas the ‘undesirables’ and Soviet prisoners of war. 500 officials killed 500 Soviets with the Zyklon-B. Afterwards, the SS soon ordered a huge amount of Zyklon-B which was an ominous warning to the oncoming Holocaust. Ma...

... middle of paper ...

... taking to Polish ghettos and soon led to extermination camps for the ‘purification’ to make the ‘Aryan race’ under Hitler’s atrocious rule. Many people today deny the existence of the Holocaust but it will never be forgotten as something caused by humans. Humans did the work, humans killed others simply because they were different. If we could teach people to fear and hate people because of their differences then maybe we could teach each other to love people for who they are; not for their appearance, ethnicity, race, or gender. The Holocaust may have been a devastating event but there is a lesson to be learned within the event; even though it was supposed to be about dividing and annihilating an entire ethnicity it teaches us to find hope in even the darkest of situations.

More about Nazi and The Holocaust

Open Document