The Warsaw Ghetto.

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History Assignment

The Warsaw Ghetto

 The Final Solution was the planned culmination of Hitler’s attempts to rid German -occupied Europe of the Jewish peoples during the Second World War- plans that he  set in motion back in 1933, when he was appointed chancellor.  Hitler began passing laws preventing Jews from gaining employment - Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, (April) and owning farms – Entailed farm Law (Sept.). There were also a series of attacks and official boycotts on Jewish shops and business, with the Nazis also organizing the burning of books by Jewish authors, and in 1935 the Nuremberg laws stripped the German Jews of their citizenship.

The basis for this systematic alienation of one percent of the population came from Hitler’s own opinion of the Jews. He believed them to be inferior, almost sub-human, and seen it as his mission, to save the”master race” from their pestilence.  As well as the overt discrimination shown in the new laws being passed, the more insidious work of indoctrinating the German people into accepting his extreme views began. A task made easier by the national feeling of ante-Semitism that was rife after WW1.

The Nazis propaganda machine headed by Goebbels depicted the Jewish people as grasping, evil and untrustworthy. They began to take over every type of national media, and in doing so controlled all public information.  The German people were subjected to a daily diet of subliminal and overt propaganda- reinforcing their growing hatred of the Jews. And the Nazis didn’t stop there, German children were also targeted; their history books were rewritten; new text books teaching Nazi ideology appeared in schools, and children at the age of ten where ‘encouraged’ to join Hitler’s youth.

Between 1933 and 1939, the Nazis policy concerning their ‘Jewish problem’ centered on voluntary emigration. But with the outbreak of war in 1939 this option closed; and because Germany’s invasion of Poland had dramatically increased the numbers of Jews trapped inside their territory; another way of solving their ‘problem’ had to be found.  So the Nazis began executing thousands of people in random mass shootings.

A more systematic approach was initiated when Germany invaded Russia in June1941, as again, millions more were added to the Jewish population. These included the setting up of Ghettos, building of concentration camps, and the organized slaughter of millions by SS Action groups. Although huge numbers of Jews were being murdered in towns and villages across Europe; with thousands more being starved to death in ghettos; the sheer numbers to be ‘dealt with’, meant a quicker way had to be found - and so the Wannsee Conference met in January 1942 to officially plan, in detail, The Final Solution.

.Question 2

Source, A which is a video clip of original footage from the Warsaw ghetto, depicts in graphic detail what life was like inside the ghettos. Two hundred and fifty thousand Jews were packed into a small area of the city that before the war held 40,000.  And when alleged epidemics threatened to break out, walls were erected to contain them within it - an experience described by a Polish Jew as, “…a feeling of being caught in a trap, with no way out – we were completely helpless.”

 The inhabitants of the ghettos were denied the basics of survival, adequate shelter, heat, food - and the clip shows the results; squalid living conditions, the emaciated bodies of ‘living’ Jews; the skeletal remains of those who succumbed being loaded onto open carts; and starving children reduced to begging in the crowded streets; as the Jewish people tried, against all the odds to survive in what must have been, a living hell.  Before a single person was transferred to Auschwitz, tens of thousands of innocent people died a death, which is summed up best in the words of a ‘Warsaw Jew’ survivor; “Now death from hunger is terrible, it takes a long time for somebody to die from starvation - a very long time.  It is a very painful death.”

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Hitler is also shown, voicing his reasons for the setting up of the ghettos.

“I must get rid of the Jews.

They are the element of revolt”.

“We will annihilate, and exterminate the enemy, root and branch

Systematically and mercilessly.”

The ghettos were established by the Nazis as a first ‘stage’ towards the complete annihilation of all Jews inside German-occupied Europe – as evidenced in source B, where leading Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, denotes the distinction between the ‘ultimate aim’, and its prerequisite ‘stages’. At a conference held in Berlin to discuss the long-term future of Polish ...

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