“I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature”

“Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I also not have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiply like vermin.”

Who said this?

• "Kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need.”

• "The state is a means to an end. Its end lies in the preservation....of a community of physically and psychically homogeneous creatures.....”

Who said this?

The Rise and Rule of the Single-Party State in Germany (Hitler)

Establishment of authoritarian and single party states

Methods: Features of a Terror State: concentration camps

Agenda

• Quotes- 3 min• Starter- true stories- 5 min• Photos/Introduction- 5 min• Notes- 20 min• Virtual Tour & Discussion- 20 min• Past Paper Questions- 1 min• Example of related extended essays- 1 min

"Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews....If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed." - Anne Frank

Starter- True tales

• Listen to part of a short story read by the teacher

• Imagine the life of someone in a concentration camp

Terms• The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-

sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime.

• Concentration camps- a place where large numbers of people, such as political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labour or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45.

Gaining Loyalty

• At first concentration camps were used to jail those who opposed Hitler’s government or who were though to threaten it. Knowledge of life in the concentration camps and fear of ending up in one was sufficient for a great number of Germans to openly declare their loyalty to Hitler regardless of their beliefs.

Hitler’s ‘Enemies’

• Hitler was against trade union leaders, socials, communists, Roman Catholics, Protestants, and the physically and mentally disabled people and any of these people might find themselves arrested and put into camps

Introduction to the Holocaust & Concentration camps

• During the Holocaust the Nazis established concentration camps across Europe. At first these concentration camps were meant to hold political prisoners. By the beginning of WW II these concentration camps expanded to include non-political prisoners whom the Nazis exploited through forced labour. Many concentration camp prisoners died from the horrible living conditions or from literally being worked to death.

Mass murder & Morale Issues• It was noted that Nazi soldiers (SS) that that were

shooting unarmed civilians in cold blood were losing their morale so it was decided that a new method would have to be found

• The SS came up with two ideas for mass executions. One was to put prisoners in some form of house and blow it up thus killing all who were in it. This was seen as being too messy. Another method tried was to put the victims in a building, seal it up and pump car exhausts into it, thus suffocating those in there. This originally was seen as being too slow but was innovated upon…

Final Solution

• In 1941 the Nazis were considering exterminating all the Jews in Poland. (Minutes of meetings have been discovered).

• In 1942 it was decided that all Jews in Europe were to be worked to death and those who could not work would be dealt with ‘appropriately.’

Auschwitz

• Built by the Nazis as both a concentration and death camp, Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi's camps and the most streamlined mass killing center ever created. It was at Auschwitz that 1.1 million people were murdered, mostly Jews. Auschwitz has become a symbol of death, the Holocaust, and the destruction of European Jewry.

Auschwitz

• Auschwitz One (or "the Main Camp") was the original camp. This camp housed prisoners, was the location of medical experiments, and the site of Block 11 (a place of severe torture) and the Black Wall (a place of execution).

• The first camp at Auschwitz (Auschwitz One) was originally there to spread fear and to intimidate so that people in Poland would guard against doing anything that the Nazis would not wish. (Political prisoners)

Resources for the war effort• The area around Auschwitz One was rich in lime and

fresh water. Good quality coal was found just 20 miles from Auschwitz One. The production of artificial rubber and fuel were seen as being vital to the Nazi war effort and the natural ingredients they most needed for this research was lime, fresh water and good quality coal.

• Industrial development to serve to Nazi war effort and profit became the key motivators. The prisoners served no other purpose than to provide the ‘business’ with free labour. When labourers died, they would simply be replaced.

Auschwitz- A turn for the worse

• Auschwitz attracted the attention of SS men associated with the murder of the physically and mentally handicapped in Germany, the so-called Adult Euthanasia Programme (AEP)

• The Nazis wanted the work that the AEP had done, extended to the concentration camps as those unfit to work could not serve the Nazi cause.

Train to Auschwitz

• Jews, homosexuals, prostitutes, Gypsies (Roma) and thieves were gathered, stuffed into cattle cars on trains, and sent to Aushwitz. New arrivals were told to leave all their belongings.

Arrivals

• A select group of Auschwitz prisoners gathered up all the belongings that had been left on the train and sorted them into huge piles, which were then stored in warehouses. These items (including clothing, eye glasses, medicine, shoes, books, pictures, jewelry, and prayer shawls) would periodically be bundled and shipped back to Germany.

Arrivals• Families, who had disembarked together, were quickly and

brutally split up as an SS officer, usually a Nazi doctor, ordered each individual into one of two lines. Most women, children, older men, and those that looked unfit or unhealthy were sent to the left; while most young men and others that looked strong enough to do hard labor were sent to the right. Unbeknownst to the people in the two lines, the left line meant immediate death at the gas chambers and the right meant that they would become a prisoner of the camp. (Most of the prisoners would later die from starvation, exposure, forced labor, and/or torture.)

‘Showers’• The people who were sent to the left, which was the

majority of those who arrived at Auschwitz, were never told that they had been chosen for death. The entire mass murder system depended on keeping this secret from its victims. If the victims had known they were headed to their death, they would most definitely have fought back.

• Having been told that they were going to be sent to work, the masses of victims believed it when they were told they first needed to be disinfected and have showers.

Arrivals

• Auschwitz II: Birkenau's had four main gas chambers, each of these gas chambers could murder about 6,000 people a day.

• The bodies would be searched for gold and then placed into the crematoria.

Camp prisoners• Those that had been sent to the right:• All of their clothes and any remaining personal

belongings were taken from them and their hair was shorn completely off. They were given striped prison outfits and a pair of shoes, all of which were usually the wrong size. They were then registered, had their arms tattooed with a number, and transferred to one of Auschwitz's camps for forced labor.

• Within their first week at Auschwitz, most new prisoners had discovered the fate of their loved ones that had been sent to the left.

Conditions

• In the barracks, prisoners slept cramped together with three prisoners per wooden bunk. Toilets in the barracks consisted of a bucket, which had usually overflowed by morning. In the morning, all prisoners would be assembled outside for roll call. Standing outside for hours at roll call, whether in intense heat or below freezing temperatures, was itself a torture.

Food

• The limited amount of food and extremely hard labor was intentionally meant to work and starve the prisoners to death.

"A daily ration was: a piece of black bread, about as thick as your thumb; some margarine about the size of three sticks of chewing gum; and a small cup of something that was supposed to be soup." (Ellis and Silinsky).

• Nazi doctors would search among the new arrivals for anyone they might want to experiment upon. Their favorite choices were twins and dwarves, but also anyone who in any way looked physically unique, such as having different colored eyes, would be pulled from the line for experiments.

Towards the end of the war

• When the Nazis realized that the Russians were successfully pushing their way toward Germany in late 1944, they decided to start destroying evidence of their atrocities at Auschwitz. The crematoria were destroyed and the human ashes were buried in huge pits and covered with grass. Many of the warehouses were emptied, with their contents shipped back to Germany.

Death Marches• In the middle of January 1945, the Nazis removed

the last 58,000 prisoners from Auschwitz and sent them on death marches. The Nazis planned on marching the exhausted prisoners all the way to camps closer or within Germany.

• Some of these groups were marched hundreds of miles. The prisoners were given little to no food and little to no shelter. Any prisoner who lagged behind or who tried to escape was shot.

Rescue

• As the Allies advanced east and west in 1944 and 1945, camp guards did what they could to destroy any documentary evidence as to the crimes committed at these camps. However, they could not destroy all of the most obvious of evidence – the victims in the actual camps. When the Americans first entered and filmed the concentration camp at Dachau they were horrified at what they saw. The same occurred at Bergen-Belsen when the British relieved the camp.

Punishment

• Concentration camp commandants and the guards who could be traced were punished after the war, as were the doctors at Dachau who had performed inhuman operations on camp inmates.

Virtual Tour• Go to

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/index.html

• While exploring:Questions:• How were the people in concentration camps being

controlled?• What information did you find shocking or

surprising/shocking?• What would you summarize about human behaviour based

on your research?

Past paper questionsPaper 3• Compare and contrast the domestic policies of Hitler and

Mussolini. (May 2010)• Compare and contrast the repressive policies of Hitler and

Stalin. (May 2009)• Compare and contrast the social and economic policies of Hitler

and Mussolini. (Nov 2008)• Compare and contrast the domestic policies of Hitler and Stalin

up to the outbreak of the Second World War. (Nov 2006)• Compare and contrast totalitarian rule in Hitler’s Germany and

Mussolini’s Italy, up to 1939. (May 2005)

BBC Virtual timeline

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/animations/auschwitz_map/index_embed.shtml

If interested in this topic I would suggest checking out:

• London’s Imperial War Museum- Holocaust section

• Movies: The Piano, Schindler’s List

*This is a very important, sad and interesting topic with many primary resources which some of you may like to consider for your extended essay

Summary

• Hitler used concentration camps initially as a way to control those opposed to him and then to control and dispose of those he decided were ‘subhuman’