Essay, Research Paper: The Holocaust

The Holocaust is defined as "The deliberate killing of millions of Jewish people by Nazis during World War II" (Macmillan pg. 636 "Holocaust").

It was started by Adolph Hitler because he wanted to create a "super race" of only healthy Germans. Jews, Slavs, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, Czechs, Poles and Communists were killed. Even sick, crippled, or old Germans were killed.

When World War II began in September 1939, the German army was in the western half of Poland, and that added almost 2 million Jews to the German death camps. The Polish Jews were moved into the ghettos (the slum part of a city), surrounded by walls and barbed wire. The ghettos were like "Jewish Prisons". Each ghetto had a Jewish council that was responsible for housing, sanitation, and production. Food and coal were to be shipped in and manufactured products were sent out. The food supply allowed by the Germans, was made up of mostly of grains and vegetables like turnips, carrots, and beets. In the Warsaw ghetto, the official ration provided barely 1,200 calories to each Jew, recommended is 2,000 calories. Some black-market food, which was illegally smuggled into the ghettos, was sold at high prices, but unemployment and poverty were everywhere in the ghettos. Housing was overcrowded, with six or seven people to a room, and typhus was common.


From 1933 to 1939, concerted efforts were made by the Nazi Party, agencies of the government, banks, and business enterprises to eliminate Jews from economic life. Non-Aryans were dismissed from civil service positions, and Jewish lawyers and doctors lost their Aryan clients. Jewish firms were either liquidated and their inventory disposed of, or they were purchased for much less than their full value by companies that were not owned or operated by Jews. The contractual transfer of Jewish enterprises to new German owners was called "Aryanization." The proceeds of any sales, as well as Jewish savings, were subjected to special property taxes. The Jewish employees of liquidated or Aryanized firms lost their jobs (Encarta "The Aryanization of Business").


The arrival points in Poland were Kulmhof (Chelmno), Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Lublin (Majdanek), and Auschwitz (O?wiecim). Kulmhof, northwest of the Lodz ghetto, was supplied with gas vans, and its death toll was 150,000. Belzec had carbon monoxide gas chambers in which 600,000 Jews, mostly from the populous Galician area, were killed. Sobibor's gas chambers accounted for 250,000 dead and Treblinka's for 700,000 to 800,000. At Lublin, some 50,000 were gassed or shot; in Auschwitz, the Jewish dead totaled more than 1 million (Encarta "The Death Camps").

Auschwitz, near Krakow, was the largest death camp. Unlike the others, it used quick-working hydrogen cyanide for the gassings. The victims of Auschwitz came from all over Europe: Norway, France, the Low Countries, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Greece. A large inmate population, Jewish and non-Jewish, was employed by industry; some prisoners were subjected to medical experiments. Although only Jews and Roma (Gypsies) were gassed routinely, several hundred thousand other Auschwitz inmates died from starvation, disease, or shooting. To erase the traces of destruction, large crematories were constructed so that the bodies of the gassed could be incinerated. In 1944 the camp was photographed by Allied reconnaissance aircraft in search of industrial targets; its factories, but not its gas chambers, were bombed (Encarta "The Death Camps").

Most of the Jews, three million, died from carbon monoxide or hydrogen cyanide gas chambers. Almost 1.4 million Jews were lined up and shot. Nearly 600,000 died in ghettos, mainly from disease or starvation.

I wrote this paper 2 years ago, when I was in 7th grade, and it shows it.