All about the Holocaust - Assignment Example

All about the Holocaust A. Terms Police Battalion 101 – One of the first German battalions sent to implement the Final Solution (or Jew extermination) in Poland in 1942, and comprised of middle-aged men from Hamburg. Major Trapp, was the commander of Police Battalion 101. Jozefow – A Polish village where the PB shot most of its 1,800 Jewish inhabitants, made up of women, children, and the elderly, while sparing healthy male Jews to work in labor camps. Lidice, is a Czech village where all 16 years old males and above were shot to death in 1942 by the Germans. Battle Of Stalingrad – The WW2 battle fought in Russian soil that finally turned the tide against Germany and where 2 million people, more or less, died. Operation Harvest Festival, was the 1943 SS operation to exterminate all remaining Jews in Lublin, a Polish district. Chelmno, is a Nazi concentration camp in Poland where Jewish prisoners were exterminated using deadly carbon monoxide. Danish Resistance 1943, is an underground movement against German occupation of Denmark. Sonderkommando, are work brigades of able-bodied Jewish men, chosen by the Nazis to dispose of corpses after they were gassed. Treblinka Revolt, August 1943, was an uprising in the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland in 1943, where Jewish prisoners killed some of the guards, set buildings on fire and eventually escaped although many were later caught and killed. Madjanek was a Nazi concentration camp that housed both Jewish and Russian labor prisoners. Rudolf Hoess was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the largest Nazi death camp. Albert Speer was the German Minister of Arms and Munitions in 1942 who succeeded in increasing German weapons and armaments during his entire term. Wolf’s Lair was Hitler’s headquarters in Poland during WW2 and the site of an assassination attempt against Hitler by some of his men. Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish national who helped Jews during WW2 by issuing passports to them and concealing them in Swedish buildings. Death Marches were the transfer of Jewish prisoners from concentration camps near German borders to death camps located in the interior parts of the country. Josef Mengele was a Nazi officer and physician who performed gruesome experiments on Jewish prisoners and for such earned the title ‘Angel of Death.’ Nuremberg Trials were a series of trials held in Nuremberg, Germany to prosecute Nazi leaders. White Rose was a group of students from Munich University that resisted Hitler in 1942, some of whom were beheaded. Colored Badge System was a system of identifying the classification of Jewish prisoners in camps by sewing specific colored triangle badges to their clothing. Partisans were Jewish people who fought in WW2 against the Nazis. General Plan East was the Nazi plan to Germanize Eastern Europe by removing a substantial portion of the Polish, Ukrainian and Belarus population by ejection or through diseases and malnutrition. Rosenstrasse Protest was a 1943 protest staged in Germany by non-Jewish wives of Jewish men who were taken by the Nazis for deportation. Elie Wiesel is an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor who authored various books about his experiences and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986. Operation Overlord was the invasion by the allies, led by Eisenhower, in 1944 on Eastern Europe that was then occupied by Germany. Helmuth James Von Moltke founder of German resistance group against Hitler and was executed as a consequence for treason by the Nazis. Claus Von Stauffenberg was the leader of an assassination plot against Hitler in Wolf’s Lair. Volkssturm was a hastily-assembled German militia in 1944 of men above 16 years old to fight alongside German soldiers. War Refugee Board was an agency created by President Roosevelt in January 1944 to provide relief to all those who were the subject of Nazi prosecution, particularly the Jews. Yalta Conference was an important meeting by the heads of state of the US, UK and the USSR in February 1945 where post-war problems, such as the Germany issue, were threshed out. Potsdam Conference was a conference subsequent to Yalta attended by the US, UK and the USSR to resolve post-war issues such as the prosecution of Nazi criminals, German war reparations to the USSR, and reversion of regions previously annexed by Germany. Berlin Airlift was a postwar effort by the Allies in 1948 to 1949 to supply food to West Berlin carried in planes after the USSR imposed the Berlin blockade to force control over it. Concordat Of 1933 was a treaty between the Holy See and Germany that guaranteed respect for Catholics and their religion in exchange for recognition of the Pope of the Reich’s legitimacy. U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was an agreement entered into by UN Member States in 1943 for relief operations of the victims of war. Intentionalist is a historiographical perspective that asserted that the extermination of the Jews had always been intended and planned all along by Hitler and company. Functionalist is a historiographical perspective that argued that the holocaust was not planned but rather was an ad hoc or improvised solution by the Germans to the ‘Jewish problem.’ NATO/Warsaw Pact. The NATO is a military alliance among several western European countries and the US in 1948 after the USSR imposed the Berlin Blockade; the WARSAW Pact is a mutual defense alliance of eastern European countries initiated by the USSR in 1955. Displaced Persons Act is a US law that allowed Europeans displaced by WW2 to enter the territory during a limited period primarily for residency purposes. Bermuda Conference was a meeting between the US and the UK in 1943 to discuss the issue of wartime refugees and to appease the growing clamor by the public to intervene in the Jewish extermination being undertaken by the Nazis. B. Essay Questions Q1: Browning’s thesis in Ordinary Men was that any ordinary man can be turned into ferocious killers by mere circumstances and events. His thesis was underpinned by the behavior of Police Battalion 101, the initial battalion sent to Poland in 1939 who conducted the first extermination of Jews. Most of the PB 101 were middle-aged male Germans that have not been subjected to extensive Nazi indoctrination and came from a small town with the least exposure to Nazi propaganda, yet, they did not only prove capable of the horrific task of exterminating the Jews but exceeded Nazi expectations. It is impossible to imagine an ordinary man sorting men from women and the able-bodied from the weak, and placing helpless and unsuspecting women, children and elderly, inside a gas chamber, and gassing them to death, an act not only done once but many times over. The turn of events and circumstances are not enough explanation to suddenly turn a group of ordinary men into beasts unprovoked and unthreatened, unless they are all suffering from some form of mental illness. On the other hand, it may be possible that a German soldier, with prior extreme anti-Semitic feelings legitimized by government propaganda and community consensus reducing Jews into less than human in his eyes to do what the members of PB 101 did. Goldhagen’s contrasting historiographical perspective of the issue is more credible. The ability of the PB 101 to exterminate Jews like they were not humans must have a deeper significance that entailed a state of mind that made the idea of killing justifiable, such as prior deep anti-Semitic feelings. Q2: Many prisoners in the camps and ghettos believed that if they cooperated with the Germans they would live, an illusion that was helped fostered by the Germans themselves. The conditions in the ghettos and forced-labor camps were bad with high death rates higher due to hunger, absence of medical care, hard labor, and diseases. In 1942 Jews began to be transported to the death camps where they were exterminated through gassing as part of Hitler’s implementation of the Final Solution and by 1944, the last of the ghettos had been shut down and only a few labor camps remained (Piotrowski 29). On the other hand, participants in various resistance movements bravely fought against their captors relentlessly perhaps because they already had an inkling of their faith after 1942. In early 1943, a group of poorly armed Jews, called the Jewish Combat Organization, in the Warsaw ghetto fought off a German ruse to transport Jews to a factory that was actually a death camp. After holding on for a few months, they were defeated when tanks and heavily-armed SS troops forced through the gates. In Sobibor, another camp, the prisoners executed a planned attack against guards in 1943 and escaped. The Germans hunted them down, recaptured some, and executed everyone left. Likewise in Treblinka, the Jewish prisoners, who were given tasks inside the camp, established an underground movement by filching gold, grenades and other useful items from their captors and developed escape plans. In August 1943, they burned the buildings and shot some of the guards and escaped (Crowe 243-250). Q3: The General Plan East was a comprehensive plan drawn by the Central Office for Reich Security in 1941 that called for the forced removal of a substantial number of eastern Europeans from their homeland - such as the Baltic States, the Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia and White Ruthenia - to make way for the settlement of Germans. About 40 to 45 million Slavic people were to be displaced, according to the plan, to resettle 3.8 million Germans who will be coming from Germany, 100,000 from the resettlement camps, 500,000 from ethnic communities that can be found all over Europe, 750,000 Lithuanians, Estonians and other eastern Europeans who were to be Germanized, and 150,000 more returning Germans settled in other parts of the globe. The plan was to be completed in 20 years and anticipated about 600,000 million Germans populating the Urals in the future (Housden 138). Q4: The defeat of Germany began in 1943 with the surrender of the Axis Powers in Tunisia in May. The Allies, meanwhile, became more aggressive and invaded Italy, took Rome in 1944, landed in Normandy, and brought in 2 million men in three months and in 1945, began to march into Germany meeting the Soviet forces in Elbe River. In that year, Hitler committed suicide after he blamed the Jews for the war in his final political speech. The SS evacuated the remaining prisoners from camps before the Soviets could reach them and set fires to clothes and other evidence. The sick were killed and when time deprived them of the opportunity, left some behind. They marched healthy prisoners to trains that would take them to Germany to be used as laborers. The Allies arrested the Nazi leaders they could find but there were many who escaped and changed their names and went to live in other parts of the world. Those that were arrested and found were prosecuted during the Nuremberg Trials (Duiker & Spielvogel 546). References: Bergen, Doris. War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Crowe, David. The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath. Colorado: Westview Press, 2008. Duiker, William & Spielvogel, Jackson. The Essential World History, 3rd Edition. CA: Cengage Learning, 2006. Housden, Martyn. Hitler: Study of a Revolutionary? New York: Taylor & Francis, 2000. Piotrowski, Tadeusz. Polands Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide In The Second Republic, 1918-1947. North Carolina: McFarland, 1998. Read More