Inhumanity During The Holocaust

The Holocaust began in January 1933 when Hitler came to power and technically ended on May 8, 1945 (VE Day). Over 1.1 million children died during the Holocaust. Young children were particularly targeted by the Nazis to be murdered during the Holocaust. They posed a unique threat because if they lived, they would grow up to parent a new generation of Jews. Many children suffocated in the crowded cattle cars on the way to the camps. Those who survived were immediately taken to the gas chambers. The most intensive Holocaust killing took place in September 1941 at the Babi Yar Ravine just outside of Kiev, Ukraine, where more than 33,000 Jews were killed in just two days. Jews were forced to undress and walk to the ravine’s edge. When German …show more content…
It also deprived Jews of their German citizenship and most of their civil rights. Hitler was able to build a network of over 1,000 concentration camps in several ways. First, he established a legal basis for acts of brutal inhumanity by creating the Enabling Act, which allowed him to do whatever he wanted. Second, he used propaganda and media to dehumanize Jewish people and, finally, he used a system of brutality to terrorize the people into submission. The first concentration camp was Dachau. The first arrivals to Dachau were political opponents of Hitler who were placed there in protective custody, including communists, socialists, and political Catholics. Later, it was used as an extermination camp for …show more content…
Representatives from Great Britain said it had no room to accommodate Jewish refugees. The Australians said, “We don’t have a racial problem and we don’t want to import one.” Canada said of the Jews that “none was too many.” Holland and Demark offered temporary asylum, but only for a few refugees. Only the Dominican Republic offered to take 100,000 Jews, but their relief agencies were so overwhelmed that only a few Jews could take advantage of the offer. A German foreign officer wrote a letter essentially saying that, in light of such responses, the world could not blame them [the Nazis] for not wanting the Jews. Soviet soldiers were the first to liberate the death camps. On July 23, 1944, they liberated Majdanek. Most of the world initially refused to believe the Soviet reports of the horrors they found there. Thousands of concentration camp prisoners died within their first week of freedom from malnutrition and disease. Einsatzgruppen (“task forces”) were mobile killing vans, which were regular trucks with the exhaust pipes redirected into the cargo area. Jews were herded into these trucks, sometimes 90 at a time. The Einsatzgruppen killed over 1.2 million Jews. During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany became a genocide state, a government dedicated to the annihilation of the Jews. Every arm of the government played a role

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