stages of the Holocaust

Stage 1. Definition: 
Jews are defined as the “other” through legalized discrimination.
Key question: How did the Nazis define Jews as different and inferior?
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Stage 1. Definition: 
Jews are defined as the “other” through legalized discrimination.
Key question: How did the Nazis define Jews as different and inferior?

Slide 1 - Slide

Possible answers:

• Through racism: categorizing people into fixed categories based on (supposed) bloodlines.
• Through laws: The Nuremberg laws defined who was a Jew and who was not a Jew.
• Through propaganda: Cartoons, books, movies, and posters portrayed Jews as different from (and inferior to) their Aryan neighbors.

Slide 2 - Slide

Stage 2. Isolation: 
Once individuals are labeled as Jews, they are separated from mainstream society
Key question: How did the Nazis isolate Jews?

Slide 3 - Slide

Possible answers:

• Through laws: Jews were not allowed to attend German schools or universities.
They could not go to public parks or movie theatres. All German youth were obliged to join the Hitler Youth Movement; Jewish youth were excluded from
membership.
• Through social practices: Many Germans stopped associating or “being friends”
with Jews. Jews and non-Jewish Germans were not allowed to join the same clubs.
• Through the economy: Jews were excluded from the civil service and Jewish businesses were taken over by Germans. Jewish doctors and lawyers had their licenses taken away. This made it less likely for Germans to interact with Jews in their daily life.

Slide 4 - Slide

Stage 3. Emigration: 
Jews are encouraged to leave Germany. With the beginning of World War II in 1939, the Nazis apply their racial laws to the countries they invade and occupy. Thus, Jews in these territories also tried to emigrate outside of the Third Reich.
Key question: How did the Nazis encourage the Jews to leave Germany and other occupied countries?

Slide 5 - Slide

Possible answers:

• Through discriminatory laws: Many Jews, especially artists and academics, left
Germany when they were no longer allowed to work in the universities.
• Through new immigration laws: Jews were allowed to obtain exit visas so long as
they left behind their valuables and property.
• Through fear: Kristallnacht encouraged many Jews to leave the area.

Slide 6 - Slide

Stage 4. Ghettoization: 
Jews are forcibly removed to segregated sections of Eastern European cities called ghettos
Key question: What are ghettos? What were the conditions like in these ghettos?

Slide 7 - Slide

Possible answers:


• Ghettos were walled-off areas of a city where Jews were forced to live. They were
not allowed to leave their ghetto without permission from Nazi officials. Likewise,
except for Nazi officials, non-Jews were not allowed to enter the ghetto.
• Conditions in the ghettos were crowded and filthy. Many families were forced to
share one small apartment. There was limited access to proper waste disposal. Jews
had to give up their property and valuables. There were very few jobs in a ghetto
and since everyone had to give up their property and valuables, most of the residents were extremely poor. Food was scarce. Forced, unpaid labor was common.

Slide 8 - Slide

Stage 5. Deportation:
 Jews are transported from ghettos to concentration camps and death camps.
Key questions: What is a concentration camp? What is a death camp? Who was affected by these camps?

Slide 9 - Slide

Possible answers:
 The Nazis built the first concentration camp in 1933 as a place to detain (place-byforce) communists and other opponents to the Nazi Party. At the beginning of
World War II, the Nazis began building more concentration camps where they
could imprison “enemies of the state,” including Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, as
well as prisoners or war. Many concentration camps functioned as labor camps,
where inmates worked until they either starved to death or died of disease.
• Death camps, also called extermination camps, were designed for the purpose of
killing large numbers of people in the most efficient manner possible.
• Because these camps were located away from major cities, victims had to be transported to them via train. Some rides lasted for several days. Thousands of prisoners
died en route to the camps.
• Many people were affected by these camps. Of course, there were the victims; millions of children, women, and men suffered as inmates in this camps. But there
were also bureaucrats—the train conductors, prison guards, cooks, secretaries,
etc.—that made sure that millions of victims were transported to camps throughout
Europe and who ran the camps once the victims arrived.

Slide 10 - Slide

Stage 6. Mass murder: 
It is estimated that the Nazis murdered approximately 11 million
innocent civilians during World War II. These are civilians killed not in the crossfire of
armed combat but murdered for being an “enemy of the state” or for belonging to an
undesirable group. The Nazis and those who worked for them killed children, women,
and men mostly through shooting, suffocation in gas chambers, and imprisonment in
labor and death camps. Conditions in the camps were such that many prisoners died
from disease, such as typhus, malnutrition, and exhaustion from overwork. Of those
killed, six million were Jews. Two-thirds of the entire European Jewish population was
killed by the Nazis. 

Slide 11 - Slide

Possible answers:
 The Nazis built the first concentration camp in 1933 as a place to detain (place-byforce) communists and other opponents to the Nazi Party. At the beginning of
World War II, the Nazis began building more concentration camps where they
could imprison “enemies of the state,” including Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, as
well as prisoners or war. Many concentration camps functioned as labor camps,
where inmates worked until they either starved to death or died of disease.
• Death camps, also called extermination camps, were designed for the purpose of
killing large numbers of people in the most efficient manner possible.
• Because these camps were located away from major cities, victims had to be transported to them via train. Some rides lasted for several days. Thousands of prisoners
died en route to the camps.
• Many people were affected by these camps. Of course, there were the victims; millions of children, women, and men suffered as inmates in this camps. But there
were also bureaucrats—the train conductors, prison guards, cooks, secretaries,
etc.—that made sure that millions of victims were transported to camps throughout
Europe and who ran the camps once the victims arrived.

Slide 12 - Slide