The Holocaust

Question 1

What was the Master race?

Answer 1

• The overriding ideology of the Nazis was the idea of racial supremacy.
• Hitler’s ambition was to create a ‘master race’ of the German people based upon their ‘superior’ bloodline.
• The blonde hair and blue eyes of the Nordic people was particularly favoured.
• Other races such as Jews, Gypsies and Slaves were considered to be inferior - comparing these groups to vermin.
• This ‘justified’ the Nazis’ systematic extermination of these races.
• Communists, homosexuals and the disabled were also to be purged.

Question 2

What were Hitler’s thoughts?

Answer 2

• Hitler embarked on a plan of expansion across Europe to provide lebensraum for ethnic Germans.
• The native inhabitants of these countries, mainly in Eastern Europe, were to be used as slave labour until no longer useful.
• An exception was made for some 200,000 Polish children with blonde hair and blue eyes who were kidnapped for Germanisation.
• Among all the people Hitler sought to destroy, his main efforts were directed against the 9.5 million Jews in Europe.

Question 3

What were the Nuremburg Laws?

Answer 3

Many fanatical Nazis were unhappy with the slow progress of measures against the Jews. They wanted harsher policies. In 1935, Hitler decided to give them what they wanted. The Nuremburg Laws:

• Banned marriages and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews.
• Stopped Jews from being German citizens.
• Stopped Jews from using public facilities such as swimming pools and restaurants.

Most Germans didn’t appear to be very concerned about what was happening to the Jews. In fact, many Gernans seened to welcome these laws. Most Jews simply hoped that things wouldn’t get worse and ‘kept their heads down’. But they didn’t get worse.

Question 4

What was Kristallnacht?

Answer 4

Jewish shops had signs telling people not to shop there. In 1938, the Nazis told people to go around and smash up Jewish shops. This was called Kristallnacht.

Kristallnacht turned out to be a crucial turning point in German policy regarding the Jews and may be considered as the actual beginning of what is now called the Holocaust.

Question 5

What happened to new arrivals?

Answer 5

• All new arrivals went through a process known as selection.
• Mothers, the children, the old and sick were sent to the showers which were realy the gas chambers.
• The able bodied were sent to work camp where they were killed through a process known as destruction through work.
• At Auschwitz, the new arrivals were calmed down by a Jewish orchestra playing classical music.
• At Auschwitz, the trains pulled into a mock up of a normal station.
• The Jews were helped off the cattle trucks by Jews who were specifically selected to help the Nazis.
• At some death camps, the Nazis would play records of classical music to help calm down the arrivals.

Question 6

What was the Wannsee conference?

Answer 6

• 20th January 1942.
• A meeting between senior civil servants and SS leaders where plans for the final solution of the Jewish problem were unveiled.

Question 7

What was decided at the conference?

Answer 7

• The conference agreed that 14 million Jews should be exterminated.
• This would be done through concentration and death camps.
• Discussed the idea of shooting Jews and the ammunition needed to do so.

Question 8

What happened at Auschwitz?

Answer 8

• Auschwitz was to solve the practical problems discussed at the Wansee Conference - namely the speedy destruction of some 14 million people.
• Auschwitz was unique among the Nazi concentration camps, surpassing its predecessors in terms of scale and barbarity.
• While concentration camps began as places of confinement, Auschwitz was erected for the main purpose of murder on an unprecedented scale.
• It is estimated that over four million people were murdered at Auschwitz by the time it was liberated in January 1945, the vast majority being Jews.

Question 9

Auschwitz 2

Answer 9

• The camp itself was set out like a factory, enhancing the Nazis’ industrial methods for murdering the Jews and ‘processing’ their bodies.
• Massive gas chambers were built, holding up to 2,000 people at a time.
• Designed to resemble showers, victims were herded naked into the chambers, the entrances sealed and gas pellets lobbed in.
• When the gassing was finished, Sonderkommandos - prisoners forced by the Nazis to help the process - went into the chambers to remove the bodies, removing any gold teeth before destroying them.

Question 10

Euthanasia.

Answer 10

One Nazi policy which did lead to protests inside Germany was euthanasia - the mass killing of physically and mentally handicapped Germans. The Nazis had already begun a policy of sterilising those people so they couldn’t have children, but euthanasia went a step further. Between the autumn of 1939 and August 1941, 70,000 men, women and children had been killed for these reasons.

Question 11

What did Emil Fackenheim say about the Holocaust?

Answer 11

• In the death camps, God showed his will that his chosen people survived.
• God revealed himself to Israel out of the furnaces and through the ashes of the victims out of Auschwitz.
• Through the Holocaust, God issued the 614th commandment: ‘Jews are forbidden to grant a posthumous victory to Hitler.
• Fackenheim believes that the commitment of faith is not called into question by any event of history.
• He urged Jews to hold onto the traditional covenant with God.

Question 12

Eliezer Berkovitz

Answer 12

• He is an orthodox scholar - very different understanding of the Holocaust to Fackenheim.
• Holocaust should be understood as part of God’s inscrutable plan.
• Faith after the Holocaust - modern Jewish response to the destruction of 6 million Jews should be modelled on Job’s example.

Question 13

Eliezer Berkovits 2

Answer 13

• He says the solution to the problem of the Holocaust can be solved by appealing to the free will argument.
• God must respect human freedom - if her didn’t then morality would be abolished and men and women would cease to be human.
• Therefore, the Holocaust must be seen as:
• an expression of human evil.
• A tragedy inflicted by the Nazis on the Jewish people.
• God had not intervened to save the Jewish people.