Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 deprived German Jews of their rights of citizenship, giving them the status of “subjects” in Hitler’s Reich. The laws also made it forbidden for Jews to marry or have sexual relations with Aryans or to employ Aryan women as household help. (An Aryan being a person with blonde hair and blue eyes of Germanic heritage.)
The first two laws comprising the Nuremberg Race Laws were: “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour” (regarding Jewish marriage) and “The Reich Citizenship Law” (designated Jews as subjects.)
Here are some laws which were passed:
1) Denied Jews rights in many areas of life. 2) Jews were no longer known as German citizens. 3) No Sexual relationships between Jews and Germans. 4) Jews could no longer attend schools in the state. 5) Germans and Jews could not marry one another. 6) All Jews older than 6 had to wear a yellow star badge saying ‘Jew’. 7) Jews could not leave their homes after 8pm or 9pm in the summer. 8) During rush hours, Jews are advised not to use public transport. They could only sit down if no other passenger was standing. 9) Jews are not allowed telephones.
Kristallnatch “Night of the Broken Glass”
The Night of the Broken Glass took place on 9th-10th November 1938. During Kristallnatch around 7,500 shops were destroyed and about 400 synagogues were burnt down. 91 Jews were killed and around 20,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. “Night of the Broken Glass” refers to the shattered glass that remained after the nights of savage violence. After the Kristallnatch the number of Jews wanting to leave Germany increased quickly. The Germans went over the top with inflicting a lot of violence towards the Jews and murdering lots of them. They did many things, which included hurting them, arresting them and damaging their property (homes and shops).
The ‘Night of the Broken Glass’ was a signal to all the Jews in Germany and Austria and to leave the country as soon as they could. They threatened them and said that if they didn’t leave the countries, they would continue with what they were doing and cause a lot more damage.
Ghettos
Jews were expelled from their homes, and from towns and villages where their families had lived for generations. Carrying items of their past lives with them, they were marched or shipped in freight cars to the ghettos. Many died on the way from hunger, exhaustion, or murder. The first ghetto was set up in the city of Lodz, Poland. The order establishing it made it clear that this was only one step toward the Nazis' final goal. The order came from SS Brigadier General Friedrich Uebelhoer.
Ghettos were located in the oldest, most run-down sections of town. The buildings were in bad condition, often near collapse. Where running water and sanitary facilities existed, the overcrowding soon made them break down. The ghetto in Lodz was a little over 1.5 miles square, the size of about twenty city blocks. Approximately 150,000 Jews lived seven or eight to a room. The crowding was so intense that each person had about seven feet to call his or her own, a space "as narrow as the grave”.
Most of the ghettos were enclosed. Fences or barbed wire surrounded some. Others were enclosed by a wall, which the Jews had to pay a German firm to build.
Concentration Camps
Concentration Camps were first used by the British in South Africa in 1899. Hitler and the Nazis used this idea and made seven major camps which were:
Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and, for women only, Ravensbrück. These camps contained Jews, homosexuals, political opponents, gypsies, prostitutes and people with disabilities.
In concentration camps, many people died from malnutrition and they were working all day with no energy. They did a lot of hard labour for Germans and if they slacked off a little, they were punished badly and severely. They were shot, beaten or sent to Death Camps where they would be exterminated. It was very likely that the Jews would die in a Concentration Camp due to the bad conditions.
Lots of people who were sent to Concentration Camps were subjected to Medical Experiments and had many parts of their bodies mutilated.
Wannsee Conference
On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi party and German government leaders gathered for an important meeting. They met in a wealthy section of Berlin at a villa by a lake known as Wannsee. Reinhard Heydrich, who was SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s head deputy, held the meeting for the purpose of discussing the "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe. Everyone knew that Heydrich wanted to annihilate all the Jews and that he would go to extreme measures to make it happen.
Adolf Eichmann was put in charge of arranging the transport of Jews to the Gas Chambers. He had the responsibility to make sure all the trains arrived to take the Jews to the Gas Chambers and that the right amount of Jews turned up.
The Wannsee Conference was mainly made so the Nazis could discuss information about the Final Solution.
Final Solution
The ‘Final Solution’ was the Nazi term for the murder of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and many other minorities. It was the plan to wipe out all of these people using gas to suffocate them. It exterminated all of the Jews in Europe. No Jewish person would be left alive. Every Nazi was behind Hitler and his plans to exterminate the Jews. Germany did the best they could to wipe all the Jews out in Europe. What made it worse was that in October 1941, Heydrich banned all Jews from emigrating, so all the Jews were stuck in the country. The SS were with Hitler throughout the Holocaust and they helped Hitler exterminate all the Jews. The first set of people who were targeted were the Polish Jews. Thousands of them were sent to the extermination camp to Chelmno. Gas vans were used to kill the Jews and the exhaust was turned black and due to the Carbon Monoxide many more people died. The same procedure was used in many other Camps between 1941-1942. The Nazis then started to exterminate the Jews that were left in Europe. Their plan was working because many more Jews were dying. The Jews were also dying before they were gassed.
The Nazis kept the ‘Final Solution’ a secret and didn’t want anyone else knowing about it. They didn’t want anyone knowing what would happen to them if the were taken away. Even when they sent letters to one another, they never used words like ‘extermination’. They used words like the ‘Final Solution’ because no one knew what it meant. But lots of Jews were suspicious about where others were being taken but they could do nothing about it.
Death Camps
Death camps were concentration camps that were used to kill inmates as quickly and as economically as possible. After the Wannsee Conference death camps were built in the east of Germany and these camps had the capacity to kill large numbers of inmates efficiently. Just one of these camps were able to kill around 16,000 people a day and in some larger death camps such as Treblinka, around 25,000 deaths in a day could take place.
Around 18 million people were sent to death camps and historians estimate that up to 11 million people were exterminated. Death Camps contained Gas Chambers, which were used to kill many people. People were sent here if they were disliked or they slacked off in Concentration Camps. Before people went to Death Camps, they had no idea where they were going. They were told that were going to have showers.
Gas Chambers
Gas was one method that the Nazis used to exterminate people quickly. Many Jews were tricked into going into Gas Chambers. They were told that they were going to be bathed or showered. Once they were in the chambers, they thought that they would be having a shower but instead of water coming from the pipes, it was Carbon Monoxide gas, which is poisonous to the human body.
Auschwitz was the biggest extermination camp. Located in Southern Poland, it consisted of many gas chambers. People were ordered to take of their clothes. This made people feel that they were actually going into a shower room. But instead they were showered with Hydrogen Cyanide- this gas worked much quicker for killing people than Carbon Monoxide. Here is a table of how many Jews were killed in Extermination camps.