United States History Student Edition

The Holocaust No aspect of the Nazi New Order was more terrifying than the deliberate attempt to annihilate the Jews. Racial struggle was key to Hitler’s worldview. He saw it as a conflict of opposites between the Aryans, who Hitler believed were the creators of human cultural development; and the Jews, whom Hitler blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I, the Depression, and for being a racial threat to the German people. In 1939 World War II in Europe began with Germany’s invasion of Poland. Within a year, several other countries in Western and Eastern Europe had fallen to Nazi occupation. As the war expanded, the Nazis gained more and more territory inhabited by Jews. In response, Nazi leaders decided to implement mass murder behind the smokescreen of war. Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, believed in dehumanizing, marginalizing, and eliminating the Jewish people. The SS was given primary responsibility for what the Nazis called the “Final Solution” to the Jewish “problem”: the genocide of the Jewish people.

Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS’s Security Service, administered the “Final Solution.” Heydrich created special strike forces, called Einsatzgruppen , to carry out Nazi plans. After the defeat of Poland, these forces gathered all Polish Jews and put them in ghettos set up in many Polish cities. Conditions in the ghettos were horrible. Families were crowded together in unsanitary housing. The Nazis tried to starve people by allowing only minimal amounts of food to enter the ghettos. In spite of their suffering, residents carried on, with some forming rings of organized resistance. In June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen were given the new job of acting as mobile killing units. These SS death squads followed the regular army’s advance into the Soviet Union. Their job was to round up Jews in their villages, execute them, and bury them in mass graves. The Einsatzgruppen killed more than 1.5 million Jews. As appalling as that was, the Nazis felt it was too slow and inefficient. They decided to kill the European Jews in specially built death camps.

Prisoners stand behind electrified barbed wire at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Oświęcim, Poland. This photograph was taken by their Soviet Army liberators in 1945. Analyzing Visuals What evidence of mistreatment and oppression is visible in this photo?

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