The Holocaust started with Kristallnacht, which is “the Night of Broken Glass.” This occurred on November 7th, 1938. Over 7,000 Jewish shops were vandalized, synagogues were destroyed, and at least 91 people died. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps, but were released eventually. From 1933 to 1945, Jews were sent to concentration camps, these were used as a way to exterminate the Jewish population. In the beginning of the Holocaust, many people were sent to labor camps but died of infections or from working so much.
At this time there were 9 million Jews in Europe. The Nazis killed 6 million of them. That is 2/3 of the Jewish population gone. They were people just like you and me. And they were senselessly murdered just because they were different.
Concentration Camps In the early 1940s, probably was the most brutal events ever committed toward people in our world’s history. It was World War II. The Nazi led by Adolf Hitler, was waging war across Europe. Poland became the place where those prisoners and captives held by the Nazis were sent to be eliminated. From 1941 through 1945 a total of some 3.5 million Jews were killed in Nazi extermination camps.
This caused the Germans to go on a murderous spree, they burned down one-hundred-ninety-one synagogues and one-hundred-ninety-one house and apartments. By the end of their spree they killed ninety-one Jews, seriously injured thirty-six, and sent thirty-thousand Jews to concentration camps ( Byers 30 ). There were many concentration camps in Europe one of which ,Auschwitz's, had three main camps; Auschwitz I was known as a concentration camp, Auschwitz II was known as Birkenau the extermination camp, and Auschwitz III was known as Monowitz the slave camp ( Blohm 51). Sadly many Jewish men and women were worked to death, and later on they would be known as death camps. These women and men were not given clothes to keep them warm or heat during winter.
Night by Elie Wiesel is a story based on his personal experiences during the holocaust controlled by the Nazi army in the concentration camps. Towards the end of 1941 all the Jewish people were taken away from their homes by the Nazi army. When they arrived in Auschwitz they Nazi army separated families by their strength, weakness, and gender. All the men and the women were separated. Then the weak and old ones were separated from the young and strong.
The most notorious example of dehumanization of civilians has to be the killing of Jews in World War Two. Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis for the simple reason that they were Jewish. They were shipped to concentration camps in cattle cars where they were subjected to slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. There were numerous examples of dehumanization in the concentration camps. In memoirs of survivors, we learned that they were separated from their families, stripped of their possessions, clothing and cut off their hair.
Jews, Hitler, the Nazi party and other German’s were involved in the holocaust. The Nazi’s decided that the Jewish race needed to be exterminated for no other reason than their ancestry and chosen religion. It first started of with discrimination; then the Jews were separated from their communities and persecuted. During the Second World War the Nazi’s were planning on killing the entire Jewish population. Of the nine million Jews who had lived in Europe at the time before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were perished.
Hitler had already convinced Germany that Jews were a disgrace. He started the extermination by taking over Poland, a country with over three million Jews. Then, he continued taking over Belgium, Luxemburg, France, and Holland, placing every single Jew under Nazis control. Hitler and his people did not know what to do with the millions of Jews, so he proposed, and executed, the Final Solution. This means, kill them all!
In 1943, the Nazis decided to force the occupants into back-breaking labor. The Nazis made the prisoners make arms and supplies for the war. At this camp, they performed brutal medical experiments on the prisoners. Over 3,500 people had experiments performed on them and most all died. When the war was coming to an end, the United States liberated over 32,000 prisoners on April 29, 1945.
The glass left over from all the destruction is why it was called the Night of The Broken Glass. Cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were also destroyed as police and fire brigades stood aside. In November 15, All Jewish pupils expelled from German schools and finally on December 12, a one billion fine was placed against German Jews for the destruction of property during Kristallnacht. The pogroms marked an intensification of Nazi anti-Jewish policy that would culminate in the Holocaust—the systematic, state-sponsored murder of