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The Persecution Of Jews During The Holocaust

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According to The United States Holocaust Museum Memorial, the Holocaust was the systematic, state sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi regimes and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community (ushmm.org). To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years” (ushmm.org). Nazis deported more than a million …show more content…
Hitler wanted to banish Jews from Society. According to the Nazis, the ‘Aryan race’ was the best and strongest race. Jews were of another inferior race. In fact, so inferior that they were not considered to be ‘people’ by the Nazis (annefrank.org). In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws racially defined Jews by “blood” and ordered the total separation of so-called "Aryans" and "non-Aryans,” thereby legalizing a racist hierarchy. The Nuremberg Laws were two laws which excluded the Jews from German life, as well as took away some of their natural rights (ushmm.org). Hitler didn’t invent the hatred of Jews, but he did build on to it and used the anti-Semitism that already existed (annefrank.org). Anti-Semitism is the prejudice against or hatred of Jews (ushmm.org). Hitler was Austrian and grew up in Vienna where the mayor was extremely anti-Semitism and where hatred of Jews was widespread. His hatred of Jews cannot be tied down to a specific event in his life. Many Jews simply could not believe that Hitler really meant to kill them all. But once the Nazis had complete control and the Jews were being relocated to ghettos, rations were reduced, conditions were horrible and the Jews did not have the strength, physically, emotionally, or militarily, to resist. There were uprisings in the camps, but it was incredibly difficult and rarely successful (ushmm.org). The Holocaust was the most …show more content…
Six million is the round figure accepted by most authorities. About 1.5 million of these were children (ushmm.org). They were killed in several different facilities including: killing centers, extermination camps, and ghettos. All of these were death camps designed for mass murder (ushmm.org). These victims were regularly transported to these camps by freight trains. Most of the people that would survive the ride would be sent to be killed in the gassing facilities. In these camps they were also killed by starvation or they were even shot (ushmm.org). When they war begin, Jews were not allowed to own land, go to school or talk to anyone non-Jewish (brightkite.com). Jews weren’t the only people killed during the Holocaust. There were all types of people including: gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled. They were killed in the same way that Jews were. All of them were tortured in ways that we could never

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