The Holocaust
Imagine waking up and being scared, cold and wanting to be home and not being able to know when you were going to die, having to starve and not being able to eat real food! These are only a few of the things that a Jewish person had to worry about during the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was a genocide (a killing of a large group of people) executed by a group called the Nazis and this group was led by a man named Adolf Hitler. By the end of the Holocaust, which was 1945, about six million Jews had been killed.
This persecution started on Nov. 9, 1938. This date was called the Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of the Broken Glass. On this horrid night, the Nazis started murdering Jews, burning their businesses, and looting them. This is where the devastating Holocaust had begun, and it lasted seven years! After the Kristallnacht, Jews were systematically killed in places we call concentration camps.
Concentration camps were run by the Nazis. Some of the camps were in: Auschwitz Birkenau, Belzec, Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald (boo-henwald), Chelmno, Dachau (da-how) Ebensee and Flossenburg.
Adolf Hitler hated the Jews for multiple reasons. One is that he thought they made Germany lose World War I. Adolf was also anti-Semitic, which means he was prejudiced against Jews just because of their beliefs. Hitler believed in racial purity and the superior race which, in his eyes, was the Germanic race that he called the Aryan (the master race). For Hitler, the ideal Aryan was tall, blue eyes, and blond hair. Hitler believed that the Aryan people and Germany were destined to rule the world.
Ok, so let’s go back a bit. Hitler used to be a powerful speaker and he persuaded the unemployed and war veterans to think that the Jews and communists were to blame for problems in Germany like unemployment. Hitler said he would make people in Germany have a better life by stating he would get jobs for people, this was especially good for the unemployed, young people and middle class like store workers who voted for him. Even though he believed that democracy and workers rights would disrupt society, they still voted for him and it led them to the horrors of the Holocaust.
This is a warning from History: Hitler won an election by saying he would make jobs for everyone and make Germany great again. Does this remind you of anyone in the political world today?