Holocaust Paper Essay, Research Paper

Holocaust

Prejudices: We all have them. They are part of every one. We all prejudge people. We all must over come them. The Nazi?s could not. With the help of Hitler, their prejudices swept over the world like a disease. They beat and hurt any Jews they could find. The most horrible event in mankind happened because of their prejudices. This, of coarse, was the Holocaust.

?A burnt sacrifice; an offering, the whole of which was consumed by fire, among the Jews and some pagan nations.? This bone chilling definition is a Holocaust. I am sure it seemed like a burning pit of fire to the Jews as they were burnt to a crisp in the incinerators. Their starving, empty stomachs must have been feeling as fire because of the acids eating away at them. Jew?s have gone through a lot. More so than any other race. They went through the Holocaust.

When someone says holocaust, people automatically think of a horrible event where Jews die. This is not what it is. Jews dying is only one Holocaust. There was more than one. There was one in China called the Nanking massacre. However the Jewish one, was the far worse. Over six million Jews died during the horrible event. This will go down in history forever ad never be forgotten. The others were not remembered and were disregarded, but they were bad also. Nanking was a small town in China. Japan bombed their hospitals and power plants in the town. Compared to the Jewish not many people died but over a thousand did. Obviously it is hard to compare this with he Jewish Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau, Austria, a small town across the Inn River from Germany. Soon after Hitler’s birth, his father, Alois Hitler, moved the family to Linz, Austria. Hitler attended school in Linz and at first was a good student. However in high school he was a very poor student. Hitler’s academic abilities angered his father, because his father hoped that Hitler would study to become a government worker as he had been. Hitler, however, wanted to become an artist. He tried to go to an art school. He was denied by a Jew. Some say this was why Hitler caused the Holocaust.

Hitler gained power over Germany using the all famous party, the Nazi?s or the national socialist organization. With this party, he ran sort of a mob. He pushed people around and beat people up until he eventually gained control. The Nazi party also gained control using gangster like tactics to over power Germany?s political department. Hitler gained power of the people through his speeches. Not only were they powerful, but there was something hypnotic about the way he spoke. He was a very sick man, and many people wish he had never been born.

Hitler became antagonistic with the Jews from his youth . He went to school and studied architecture. He then tried out for an art school. This art school rejected him and did not want to have anything to do with him. The art school was Jewish. From then on, Hitler hated Jews. Some even say this is what caused the Holocaust. Another unfortunate thing that happened is that his father was very abusive to him. Hitler hated his father who was half Jewish. Hitler thought that all Jews were like his father and had to kill them all. This was very unfair to the Jews, but so was everything about the Holocaust.

Hitler not only hated the Jews. He also hated the homosexuals, the Catholics, the pagans, minorities and basically anyone that was not of the Aryan race. The Aryan race was the basic blond haired blue eyed German. If you were not Aryan, you were destroyed. It is very ironic that Hitler was not Aryanic, yet he was the leader of them. Figure that one out. The main reason Hitler wanted the Jews was that there was a depression. Hitler said that the Jews were taking up all the money and choosing to let the Germans to be poor. Hitler was also insane, so no one can be totally sure why he was so blood thirsty for the Jews.

Herman Goering was Hitler’s right hand man. He was the founder of the Gestapo. The Gestapo was Hitler’s secret police that helped Hitler do his dirty deeds. Goering was used in the war for the head of military. Jodl was the head of the Chief of the Operations Staff. He had to report twice a day to Hitler about what was going on in war and any other important news that he had for Hitler. He also managed all operations that went on in war. Sudeten was the Nazi leader. He was the person who Hitler trusted to do all of his dirty work. He was like the secretary of state to Germany.

Two organizations that worked for Hitler to arrest innocent people were the Gestapo, and the SS. The Gestapo was the secret police. They did not wear uniforms. They did all the research into political opponents. They were kind of like the FBI to Americans. The SS was the elite uniformed guard. They wore the easily recognizable uniforms. These were black and silver uniforms. These were personal guards that were well trained in what they did. Of coarse what they did best was kill Jews.

Auschwitz was the worst concentration camp. It was where the most Jews were killed. Auschwitz was in Poland. This was equipped with all of the death tools that the Germans had available to them. Another one was Belzec. This was also in Poland. Docow was the first concentration camp. It was opened on March twenty-second. The killing started only once Germany attacked the soviet union. Another was Belzec. It had carbon monoxide chambers of gas.

The reason that the world did not do anything about the death camps is because in the beginning they did not know about them. Once they found out, there still was not much they could do about the Germans killing the Jews. They sort of held the Jew?s hostage.

Once the allies got a good plan together, they went in and invaded Germany with Great Britain. They brought in food for the Jews and clothes. The Germans were forced to bury all of the bodies. There were tons of them. They were forced to dispose of them as quickly as possible so the bodies would not rot. They buried them in massive trenches and also burned many of them. It was horrible.

This still was not a good enough punishment for the Germans though. Think of this as washing their hands like Pontius Pilate. They were definitely not absolved from their sins.

The first downfall in Hitler’s own regime was one of his men, named Rommel, turned against him and tried to assassinate him. He put a suitcase under Hitler?s chair with a bomb in it. It went off, but Hitler managed to survive. Hitler searched for who did it. He finally found out that it was Rommel. The next day Rommel was publicly executed. The attempt failed because Hitler did not die. However the person who planted the bomb did. He had many people who respected him.

One way some Jews survived the death camp was that they just roughed it out. They starved and endured endless torture and hardships until they were finally rescued by the allied forces. Some hid while the Holocaust was going on. One person hid in a potato cellar.

A couple of concentration camps were destroyed by the Jews defeating the Germans. They lead rebellions in the concentration camps. Before the holocaust, some Jews fled to other countries. Schindler, a German officer, helped some of the Jews and saved many lives . Some organizations that helped the Jews were the Jewish Agency of Palestine, the American Joint Distribution, and the League of Nations. All of these organizations helped the Jews all the way along.

The Ghetto Uprising of 1943 can only be described as amazing. By April of 1943, there were only 60,000 Jews left in the ghetto, spared from the death camps. They knew that with the rate that people were leaving, they too, would soon be off to the death camp. They experienced a spurt of courage and desperation and organized an uprising against ghetto officials. On April 19, 1943, the Jews attacked, nearly unarmed, with little ammunition, and sparse training. There was much fighting in the streets and everywhere. Battles raged from street to street, window to window, building to building. They remarkably held off the Germans for three weeks. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is now legendary as proof that there was resistance to Nazi forces by Jews. One of the previous brags that the Germans claimed was that they took all of Europe with no resistance except from outside forces. In the end, almost all of the 60,000 Jews remaining in the ghetto were killed by German forces after experienced SS soldiers came to the struggling ghetto officials’ aid and severely outnumbered the Jewish rebels. One leader who was not killed was Marek Edelman, dubbed “the last surviving leader? of Warsaw.

By 1945, everything was falling apart. Russia was pushing in from the east, while America had joined Britain. In Operation Overlord, on D-Day, the allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy. Within a few months, they had liberated France. In April, Russian troops attacked Hitler’s capital, and, in the Battle of Berlin, a few Panzer and SS units held the city against the Soviet army. But, on April 6, Hitler committed suicide, and by the end of the year, World War II was over.

Fifty-four years later the memories of this this tragedy still haunt the survivors. Visions of the camps and of the death of their family members haunt their dreams. Visions of starvations and endless work are always on their minds. The horrors of their treatment will never go away. Their lives have been forever changed. Some will never be able to forgive and forget. Knowing what happed, it is hard to see how anyone could ever forgive a person for such horrible deeds.

Today, there are many organizations dedicated to the destruction of all the survivors of the Nazi leadership. People like Simon Wiesenthal have dedicated their lives to bringing former Nazi?s to justice. Quite obviously there are reasons for their doing so.

Neither Simon Wiesenthal nor anyone else can go back in time. Nothing can be changed once it has happened. People should learn to control their prejudices. Only through learning the truth and remembering what happened can people learn from what happened. People must not be like the Nazis and let it take them over. People must analyze and learn from what happened to change the world in the future. Only then can they prevent another Holocaust.