The Final Solution…

The purpose of this class is for you to become familiar with the idea of the Holocaust and the Final Solution. Both were premeditated attempts to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe – especially in Germany. Both are examples of genocide or a systematic attempt to kill off a people based on race or ethnicity.

the feet are flat; the hair is dark; there is a lot of coarse body hair. The face usually has dark, bulging eyes; a crooked or bent nose; hanging eyelids; a hanging underlip; a heavy beard.

Almost all the illustrations of Jewish figures have the following characteristics: The body is usually stocky, sometimes thin; the posture is crooked or bent;

The following pictures were taken in Eastern Europe during Operation Barbarossa. This was Hitler’s attempt to secure lebensraum or living space. Another goal was to try and exterminate as many Jews as possible. Portable gas vans followed after the main troops and units called einsatzgruppen carried out executions upon any Jews. Mass shootings were also used in which the victims dug their own graves.

The gas-van is a special product of the Third Reich, it is a van with a gas-tight cabin/container-box/superstructure mounted on its chassis and was used to kill people by the motor-exhausts which led into that cabin. The designation was coined only later: "Gaswagen [Gas-van] - that was the common word only afterwards/later".

Gassing Van used to liquidate Jews at the Kulmhof (Chelmno) extermination camp and near Konitz

(Archives of the Polish Ministry of Justice)

'During June, Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and the SD, and Steckenbach, head of Office I of the Reich Security Main Office [RSHA], lectured on the duties of the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos. At this time we were already being instructed about the tasks of exterminating the Jews. It was stated that Eastern Jewry was the intellectual reservoir of Bolshevism and, therefore, in the Fuhrer's opinion, must be exterminated.’

Reinhard Heydrich – Final Solution

Rudolf Hess – commandant at Auschwitz

This is a map made by the Germans showing the number of Jews executed by the portable death squads.

Then the Germans began shoving the Jews into new, narrower lines. They moved very slowly. After a long walk, they came to a passageway formed by German soldiers with truncheons and police dogs. The Jews were whipped through. The dogs went at those who fell but the pressure uof the surging lines behind was irresistible, and the weak and injured were trod underfoot.

Bruised and bloodied, numbed by the incomprehensibility of their fate, the Jews emerged onto a grassy clearing…..

They had arrived at Babi Yar; ahead of them lay the ravine. The ground was strewn with clothing. Ukrainian militiamen, supervised by Germans, ordered the Jews to undress. Those who balked, who resisted, were assaulted, their clothes ripped off. Naked bleeding people were everywhere. Screams and hysterical laughter filled the air.

After this brutal processing, the victims were lined up at edge of the ravine and gunned down by teams of machine gunners. By the time they were finished on September 30, 1941, 33,700 people had been killed.

The Jewish -Kindergarten class of Shaulia, -Lithuania

The boys in their tailored suits and the girls in their pretty dresses.

One hundred of them, some laughing, some shy, others moving, the restless ones on the edges, their bodies blurred in the image. All were four years old.

The girls wore flowers in their hair. The boys wore suspenders like their fathers. The children played in the kindergarten yard, with the coloured balls and shovels in the sandbox, with the toys.

Inside the kindergarten building, they painted and did what children do when they're four and at school for the first time. They became friends, sang songs and felt sad because they missed their moms. They fell down and they cried and then everything was made better with a hug and a giggle and they dreamed of what they might do in the days and weeks to come.

And then in 1941, the kinder- garten closed and all that was nor- mal and good was over. The kids were pushed into the ghettos in Shaulia. ln 1943, Nazis grabbed 823 of the children of Shaulia, many of the kindergarten class among them. The round-up was called a "kinder- aktion."

German soldiers led them into the woods, lined them up and shot them. As impossible as it sounds, the executions were as simple as that. Those who weren't shot were loaded on to trains and taken to camps, where they were gassed.

Of the 100 children in the picture, three are known to have survived.

mramsey@png.canwest.com

Only three of the one hundred survived…

The innocent children….

Dr. Josef Mengele – “the angel of death”

Josef Mengele, nicknamed The Angel Of Death, and the other Nazi doctors tortured men, women and children and did medical experiments of unspeakable horror during the Holocaust. Victims were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death. Children were exposed to experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli. The Nazi doctors made injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, removal of organs and limbs.

At Auschwitz Josef Mengele did a number of medical experiments, using twins. These twins as young as five years of age were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected. Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of the children in an attempt to change their eye color.

Eva later told how a set of Gypsy twins was brought back from Mengele's lab after they were sewn back to back. Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and organs. The twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after three days, they died ...

One twin recalls the death of his brother: "Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why - perhaps because he was the older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers - and now, my twin ..."

How could normal, everyday Germans allow this to happen? Not an easy answer.

They came first for the Communists.. but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.Then they came for the Jews... but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.Then they came for the Unionists... but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Unionist.Then they came for the Catholic... but I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.Then they came for me...and by that time... there was no-one left to speak up for me.

Rev. Martin Niemoller, commenting on events in Germany 1933-1939

Are we learning as a race or is genocide still occurring?

Rwanda, Serbia/Bosnia

Cambodia under Pol Pot

Darfur, Sudan