Introduction:
Many people have heard of the Holocaust and may even have relatives or friends who lived through it. Some might even have gone to the Holocaust Memorial, but a lot of people, mainly the younger generations, haven't even heard of it. The Holocaust deals with hate, courage, loss, fear, terror, anguish, pain, suffering and remembrance and should not be passed over lightly for it has ended so many lives and changed others. In this report you will be informed about what the Holocaust was and hopefully we will help you to understand why it happened and why it shouldn't be allowed to happen again. We hope to answer all your questions about the Holocaust and we wish you enjoy our report.
When the both of us started on this report we all knew what the Holocaust was and a little about it but as the report continued on we realized that not as many people knew about it as we thought. Most adults do, in fact, know about the Holocaust and so do most of the young adults and some children. Some people, though, haven't even heard of it.
Before I write about the Holocaust and it's causes to the people it would be important to know where the word Holocaust originated and it's meaning. The word holo is Greek for "whole". The word caust came from caustos meaning "burned". Originally being a religious rite meaning to be completely consumed by fire. Currently the word's meaning is being referred to wide spread human disaster, but when written as Holocaust, with a capital h its meaning is the almost complete destruction of of Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany.
When the Nazi's began gaining power in Germany in January of 1933, they soon started to make systematic measures against the Jews first starting out small and then growing. Soon after a Jew was determined this way: Any person with three or four Jewish grandparents are automatically considered a Jew, regardless of whether that person was apart of a Jewish community. Individuals that were only half Jewish were considered Jewish only if they belonged to the Jewish religion or were married to a Jewish person. Other half-Jews, and others that only had one Jewish grandparent were
Mischlinge (half-breeds). Jews and Mischlinge were under the category "non-Aryans". The reasons for putting people in categories was for clear understanding whether or not to terminate certain people.
From 1933 to 1939 the Nazi party was putting all their efforts towards eliminating Jews from economic life. Non-Aryan were fired from civil service position and Jewish doctors and lawyers lost Aryan clients. Jewish firms were liquadated and their inventory disposed of, or bought for less than its value by another company owner that wasn't a Jew. Later on, the money from Jewish sales and savings were subjected to property taxes.
In this report we tried to cover as much as possible in an organized fashion. First we think that you should know about when the period of the Holocaust was. Next we have a page all about Hitler that tells of his early life, growing up, how he got into power, and what he did once in power. We also have a whole page discussing what it was like to live in a concentration camp and where in the world they were located. Our fourth page tells how the world reacted to the Holocaust and why their reaction was this way. Next we devoted a page to numbers of how many people died during the Holocaust. On this page is a chart about how many people died - you'll be amazed at the numbers! Also we have some poems written by children whose parents experienced the Holocaust. We also have a story about the Holocaust. We also have a page full of dictionary definitions of words that you might not understand the meaning of like Gestapo, Kripo, Etc. Last we have our bibliography page.
What you should know about the Holocaust:
Build up to World War II:
Dealing with the loss of Jewish jobs:
Links to our other pages: