How can holocaust happen

The Jewish population was in jeopardy, therefore other races in the world are at risk of genocide as well and must take this event as a warning of what could happen. In the Auschwitz concentration camp, there was a room filled with shoes. Afraid of what might happen to them and their families if they did.

On the other hand it was over 10, Germans involved in orchestrating the massive genocide against the Jews, which was a very large amount. Hitler used very untrue things about the Jews to get people to agree and follow along. Most of the things Hitler accused the Jews of were very false. The Holocaust spanned 12 years starting in and lasted until Hitler gathered a force called the SS or Nazis; together they killed around 6 million people.

Adolf Hitler impacted Germany by passing Nuremberg laws, murdering 11 million people, and setting up concentration camps. First of all, Hitler passed the Nuremberg laws in at the annual party rally. These laws institutionalized the racial theories associated with the Nazi groups. The first law was made to protect German honor, this law made it so that a Germans and Jewish people could.

To achieve his goal, Hitler set up vast systems of concentration camps. The objective of these camps was to humiliate Jews, force vigorous labor on the Jews, and to eventually eliminate them. The Nazi Party wanted to separate the Jews from the non-Jewish population, so they established ghettos.

The ghettos allowed the Nazis to organize the Jews so deportation was easier, quicker, and allowed more Jews to be deported quicker U. Holocaust 3. Once Germany invaded and occupied Poland, millions of Jews were suddenly living under Nazi occupation.

The war made travel very difficult, and other countries—including the United States—were still unwilling to change their immigration laws, now fearing that the new immigrants could be Nazi spies. In October , Germany made it illegal for Jews to emigrate from any territory under its control; by then, Nazi policy had changed from forced emigration to mass murder.

Visit the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition and the Challenges to Escape lesson plan for more information. The idea that Jews did not fight back against the Germans and their allies is false. Against impossible odds, they resisted in ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers.

There were many factors that made resistance difficult, however, including a lack of weapons and resources, deception, fear, and the overwhelming power of the Germans and their collaborators. Read a Holocaust Encyclopedia article about Jewish resistance for more information. In Europe, the Holocaust was not a secret. Even though the Nazi government controlled the German press and did not publicize mass shooting operations or the existence of killing centers, many Europeans knew that Jews were being rounded up and shot, or deported and murdered.

Many individuals—in Germany and collaborators in the countries that Germany occupied or that were aligned with Germany during World War II—actively participated in the stigmatization, isolation, impoverishment, and violence culminating in the mass murder of six million European Jews.

People helped in their roles as clerks and confiscators of property; as railway and other transportation employees; as managers or participants in round-ups and deportations; as informants; sometimes as perpetrators of violence against Jews on their own initiative; and sometimes as hand-on killers in killing operations, notably in the mass shootings of Jews and others in occupied Soviet territories in which thousands of eastern Europeans participated as auxiliaries and many more witnessed.

Many more people—the onlookers who witnessed persecution or violence against Jews in Nazi Germany and elsewhere—failed to speak out as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers were isolated and impoverished—socially and legally, then physically.

Only a small minority publicly expressed their disapproval. Other individuals actively assisted the victims by purchasing food or other supplies for households to whom shops were closed; providing false identity papers or warnings about upcoming roundups; storing belongings for those in hiding that could be sold off little by little for food; and sheltering those who evaded capture, a form of help that, if discovered, especially in Nazi Germany and occupied eastern Europe, was punished by arrest and often execution.

Although Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, they were not the only group persecuted. American newspapers reported frequently on Hitler and Nazi Germany throughout the s. Americans read headlines about book burning, about Jews being attacked on the street, and about the Nuremberg Race laws in , when German Jews were stripped of their German citizenship.

The Kristallnacht attacks in November were front-page news in the United States for weeks. Americans staged protests and rallies in support of German Jews, and sent petitions to the US government calling for action. But these protests never became a sustained movement, and most Americans were still not in favor of allowing more immigrants into the United States, particularly if the immigrants were Jewish. It was very difficult to immigrate to the United States.

In , the US Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act in order to set limits on the maximum number of immigrant visas that could be issued per year to people born in each country.

Unlike today, the United States had no refugee policy, and Jews could not come as asylum seekers or migrants. Approximately ,, European Jews immigrated to the United States between , most of them between The US Government learned about the systematic killing of Jews almost as soon as it began in the Soviet Union in Yet saving Jews and others targeted for murder by the Nazi regime and its collaborators never became a priority.

As more information about Nazi mass murder reached the United States, public protests and protests within the Roosevelt administration led President Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in January The establishment of the War Refugee Board marked the first time the US government adopted a policy of trying to rescue victims of Nazi persecution.

The War Refugee Board coordinated the work of both US and international refugee aid organizations, sending millions of dollars into German-occupied Europe for relief and rescue.

The American people—soldiers and civilians alike—made enormous sacrifices to free Europe from Nazi oppression. The United States could have done more to publicize information about Nazi atrocities, to pressure the other Allies and neutral nations to help endangered Jews, and to support resistance groups against the Nazis. Prior to the war, the US government could have enlarged or filled its immigration quotas to allow more Jewish refugees to enter the country.

These acts together might have reduced the death toll, but they would not have prevented the Holocaust. Visit the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition for more information. Although the liberation of Nazi camps was not a primary objective of the Allied military campaign, Soviet, US, British, and Canadian troops freed prisoners from their SS guards, provided them with food and badly needed medical support, and collected evidence for war crimes trials.

The Holocaust is the best documented case of genocide. Despite this, calculating the exact numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is an impossible task. There is no single wartime document that spells out how many people were killed. Historians estimate that approximately six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, including approximately 2.

Although the Holocaust specifically refers to the murder of European Jews, Nazi Germany and its collaborators also killed non-Jews, including seven million Soviet citizens, three million Soviet prisoners of war, 1. Beginning in the winter of , the governments of the Allied powers announced their intent to punish Nazi war criminals. After much debate, 24 defendants were chosen to represent a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military leadership.

Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels could not be tried because they committed suicide at the end of the war or soon afterwards. In June , Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The army command was notified that war crimes would not be punished and that they had permission to execute all criminal suspects without trial. By expelling, killing, or starving the population of the Soviet Union, the Germans want to create Lebensraum : a colony for Germans.

Behind the German military lines, the Einsatzgruppen sprang into action. These were special killing units charged with the task of killing communist officials, partisans, and Jewish men between the ages of 15 and Their actions were officially intended to prevent resistance. From August onwards, however, the Einsatzgruppen frequently also killed old people, women, and children.

Their murders could hardly be considered 'retaliations'. The Jews in the Occupied Territories were usually ordered to report to a central point, often on the pretext of deportation, or they were rounded up during raids. Then the Nazis would then take them to a remote place where they were executed. In alone, close to , Soviet Jews were murdered in this way. Historians disagree about the moment when Hitler decided that all European Jews should be killed.

A signed order to do so does not exist. However, based on other sources and events, there is a strong likelihood that the decision was made somewhere in the second half of Mass murder seems an extreme alternative to the previous plans for deportation.

The war made it impossible to deport Jews to Madagascar, and the plan to push the Jews back further to the east could not be carried out because the victory over the Soviet Union was not forthcoming. During the Wannsee Conference, on 20 January , Nazi officials discussed the execution of the planned murder of the eleven million Jews living in Europe.

In late , the Nazis began preparing for the murder of more than two million Jews living in the General Government, the occupied part of Poland. The Nazis also experimented with mass murder in other occupied and annexed areas of Eastern Europe. In Chelmno, they introduced the use of gas to kill Polish Jews. Here, the victims were murdered in gas chambers with diesel engine exhaust fumes immediately upon arrival.

The only purpose of the extermination camps was to kill people. Only a small number of Jews were kept alive to help with the killing process. In November , Aktion Reinhard was terminated. The camps were disassembled and the bodies of the victims were excavated and burned. The Nazis then planted trees on the grounds to wipe out their crimes. At least 1. In the middle of , the Germans began deporting Jews from the occupied territories in Western Europe.

The decision-making process and dynamics differed from one country to the next, as did the numbers of victims. There are several reasons for this difference. The Jews were crammed in overcrowded cattle wagons and transported to Eastern Europe. Most of them ended up at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but there were other concentration or extermination camps. Out of the , Dutch Jews who were murdered, 34, were killed in Sobibor. Auschwitz-Birkenau was both a labour camp and an extermination camp.

And so, upon arrival, the Jews were selected according to their age, health, and ability to work. They also aimed to start revolutions all over the world, especially Germany. Its leaders were unable to control street violence waged by armed groups of Germans on both the extreme left and right. Leaders of the republic were forced to put down coup attempts, while no political party was able to win a majority after The country also faced severe economic crises.

The worldwide economic Depression, starting in , hit Germany particularly hard. The inability of the old political parties to give the unemployed, hungry, and desperate Germans hope gave the Nazi Party its chance.

The leader of this young, extremist, and openly anti-democratic party, Adolf Hitler, skillfully played on the fears and grievances of Germans to win popular support. They wrongly assumed they could control him. Having lost faith in the ability of democratic institutions to improve their lives, many Germans went along when the Nazis suspended the constitution, replaced the German republic with a dictatorship, and allowed Hitler alone to become the highest law of the land.

In exchange for a loss of individual rights and freedoms, they hoped that Hitler would improve the economy, put an end to the Communist threat, and make Germany a powerful and proud nation again.

When Adolf Hitler took power in January , Germany was a republic with democratic institutions. Its constitution recognized and protected the equal rights of all individuals, including Jews. The Nazis established a dictatorship that limited basic rights and freedoms. Excluded from this community and viewed as threats to it were Jews, Roma, individuals with physical and mental disabilities, and others seen as racially inferior or whose beliefs or behavior were not tolerated by the Nazis. Active Nazis, including Hitler Youth, used intimidation against Jews and non-Jews to enforce the new social and cultural norms.

Members of Nazi professional organizations participated in excluding Jews from most professions. Government employees, lawyers, and judges drafted and enforced laws and decrees that deprived German Jews of their citizenship, rights, businesses, livelihoods, and property, and excluded them from public life. Many Jews looked for safe havens abroad, including the United States. But emigration was difficult, costly, and complicated, and few countries even offered chances to relocate. However, World War II all but cut off the possibility of flight.