I hope you enjoyed last week's assignment - the response was much better than usual. Hopefully that foreshadows good things for the final assignments of the year! As we discuss World War II in which tens of millions of people died, one of the most memorable (and world-changing) events was the Holocaust. For your assignment this week I want you to visit the web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. You'll find some excellent articles at the page for Student Research . Please choose one and read it thoroughly then report back with your findings. Make sure that your essay fully shares the details of the events and includes your personal feelings in response to what you've read.
The requirements for this assignment are exactly the same as all those that preceded it.
In the story I’ve chosen, anti Jewish legislation in pre war Germany, and during the 1930s people in Germany were very much against the Jews being a part of the social system of Germany of that time. Personally I find this to be an almost identical picture of what’s going on in America how we have different classes of race of how many people have their reasons for hating the other social class I think if we all look deep enough I’m sure we can even find it in our own households. And we must also look at the religious side of our culture we have atheist against everyone that believes in any form of god, are we going to enter into a religious/social holocaust in the near future because of this? I personally believe, no! our nation known as America is a world of many races, religions, and social classes sure we may not agree on everything but I do not personally do not believe that we will enter a religious or social class based holocaust any time in our lives. Of course if we look in the book of revelation in the bible we can see an almost holocaustic place our world turns to with the mark of the beast, and the whole world following the antichrist, of course we can tell that that’s going to happen irrigardless. Its actually quite funny my great grandpa, before passing away, thought when she say Hitler on a pre movie showing she thought he was surely the antichrist
ReplyDeletegreat job on your assignment on the Holocaust this week, logan! you had some very key points and imformation that i did't really pick up on when i was reading through this site!
DeleteGood essay Logie! There were some really excellent facts in it!
DeleteFor this week’s assignment I chose to write on the killing centers. Unlike concentration camps, killing centers were used specifically for killing the Jews by suffocating them with poisonous gas or shooting them. There were only a few who weren’t put to death immediately and those were a select few who were chosen to work for a special team called the Sonderkommandos. The people who were chosen to work in this group had to collect the belongings and dispose of the bodies who had been killed. In 1941 the first killing center, named Chelmno, was opened in Warthegau. The largest killing center was Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Up to 6,000 Jews were killed daily and by November of 1944 over a million Jews had been killed there. Another main killing center was Majdanek. This camp was mainly used to kill those who the Germans had spared temporarily to work. It also contained a storage depot for the valuable things taken from the Jews before they had been killed. These killing centers were considered top secret and to destroy all traces of the gas chambers the Sonderkommandos had to remove the bodies from the chambers and cremate them. Some of the camps even camouflaged or landscaped the grounds to disguise the murder of the Jews. It’s so hard to wrap my mind around the fact that by the end of the war, over 6 million Jews had been killed. The Holocaust was one of the greatest tragedies in history, and is still something that people find absolutely heart breaking today.
ReplyDeleteGood essay Summer! I learned a lot!
DeleteIt is really tragic to think of all the Jewish people who were killed during the Holocaust. Millions of innocent lives were taken. These people were tortured and killed just because of their ethnic origin. Evil men were guilty of these unthinkable acts. But wherever there is evil there is also good. It is really touching to read of those who risk their lives to save as many Jews as they could. Many Jewish people were hidden in homes of people who did not want to see them destroyed. One couple, Bert and Anne Bochove, of the Netherlands saved the lives of 37 Jews by hiding them in their pharmacy. If it was discovered by the Germans that this family was hiding Jews the Bochoves would have probably faced death. It took so much courage to save so many Jewish people. A wonderful and very successful rescue operation occurred in Denmark during the September-October of 1943. Almost all Jews in the Danish country went into hiding after it was discovered that the German Security Police were planning to deport the Jewish people in a few days. The terrible things that the Jews would have faced in the hands of the Germans did not happen. After the Jewish people went into hiding, groups of them were then taken out of the country by Danish fishermen. Using small fishing boats, the Jews were transported to safety in Sweden. Of the 7,800 Jews in Denmark at the time 7,200 were taken out of the country by these fishing boats. God was surely protecting both the Jews and those who saved them. I am so glad that despite the millions of Jews that were killed during the war, some lives were spared because good people cared and took great risks. I hope that if I had lived at that time, I would have had the courage to help the Jewish people.
ReplyDeleteGood Job Sarah!! your essay is outstanding! I can't believe how there were so many innocent peoples lives taken, your essay has helped me understand what was happening during the Holocaust Thanks!
DeleteFor this weeks assignment I have chosen to talk about the killing centers, the killing centers were established by the Nazis. These killing camps were not like concentration camps, concentration camps are where they make the people who attend these camps work and have detention like you would if you were to do something wrong at school. The killing centers are horrid, German SS and police murdered almost 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting. The first killing center was at Chelmno in December 1941. There are several other killing camps as well, I can not believe that there were such things as killing camps back in the 1940's. I think its horrid that such camps are aloud to kill human beings, the way they kill the people is very unpleasing as well. I think that there should have never been aloud to be killing camps. I know that the human beings that are in the killing camps are there for something that they have done wrong but still it is not us human beings who are not perfect job to determine and kill another human being. I think it is God's job to judge the ungodly and determine who lives and who doesn't. So in my opinion killing centers are wrong because even thou you are punishing someone for doing something wrong my taking there life, your doing something wrong as well and to wrongs don't make a right.
ReplyDeleteGood Essay, Elizabeth. I enjoyed reading your essay very much. I like how you compared concentration camps to detention at school. I agree that the killing centers were awful places and that it is wrong to do what they did to other human beings.
DeleteExcellent job on your essay Elizabeth! It really helped to inform me about these killing centers, how they worked, and how they were very different from concentration camps during as early as the 1940s. 2.7 million lives is an unthinkable amount of people killed and tortured simple because of their ethnicity and faith. I cannot even imagine how awful it world have been to live during that time in history and see what terrible things were happening to the Jews day by day. Again, Great job!
DeleteFor this week’s assignment I have chosen to write about the German killing centers. Killing centers in Germany were first created by the Nazis, Killing centers and concentration camps are not to be confused. In December of 1941 a camp named Chelmno was established, this was the first ever killing center. These killing centers were created specifically for killing, and killing only. Only some were selected and saved from being killed these individuals were called Sonderkommandos. A Sonderkommandos job was to collect the personal items of those killed, and then dispose of the bodies. The largest killing center during world war two was Auschwitz-Birkenau, this center was in Poland. By November of 1944 six million Jews were being killed daily. Hitler completely astonishes me. How could one single man be so awful and cruel? I I can’t even begin to wrap my head around what all of his followers were thinking. How could anyone possibly justify what Adolf Hitler was doing was right? I feel like it is God's job only to decide who gets to live and for how long they live and who doesn’t get to live. These people brought to these killing centers were so completely unfairly treated, these people weren’t even given a chance. Hilter was such an unfair evil man. My heart goes out to all of those people hurt, killed or associated with in the holocaust. WE can all truly learn a great lesson from Hitler in world war two.
ReplyDeleteThank you
Kiersten davis
This weeks assignment I am going to talk about one of the most horrible things that the nazis could have done during the World War II, the concentration camps.
ReplyDeleteConcentration Camps were camps in which people were confined, under harsh and without regard to legal norms of arrest.
In Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 concentration camps were used all the time.
The first concentration camp was built in January 1933. They were built as a place for people that had been arrested, however the number of people was so great that they started killing almost all of them.
Many times people would starve to death because was not enough food for everybody and also the sickeness was a huge problem that caused the death of hundreds of people in the camps. Many times some of those people that had been arrested would become a soldier and kill his on people, so he would receive food and other things.
After reading the article about the concentration camps I was surprised how bad those people suffered. It`s just another example of how bad the human beans can be. I think it will be very hard for us to stop being in wars so we would finally have the world peace.
For this weeks assignment, I chose to write about the concentration champs that were created during the Holocaust. The Germans established these between 1933 and 1945. The prisoners were placed in these concentration camps until the people could be executed by mass murder. Most prisoners were Jews, communists, socialists, democrats, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witness, homosexuals, or accused of crime. A lot of people died from starvation, exhaustion and sun exposure. Sometimes, the doctors even preformed strange medical experiments on the people. The Nazis made big gas chambers and put the people in the rooms to kill many people in less time. Up to 6,000 Jews were gassed each day in these chambers. Most of the prisoners wore overalls with badges according to whatever category they were from. The Jews wore yellow triangles, the gaay people wore pink, the Gypsies wore black, and the criminals wore green triangles. It was miserable. A lot of people died from dehydration because it was so hot in the summer. In the winter, many died from freezing to death. There were several different types of camps. POW camps were for the Prisoners of War. The Nazi’s captured them and held them here. Labor camps were when the inmates had to do really hard physical labor. Extermination camps were where most of the people died. The gas that I was talking about earlier was used in these camps to kill a bunch of people very easily. I think it is very sad that people were tortured like this.
ReplyDeleteFor my essay this week I have chosen the article "Euthanasia Program" to report back on. Euthanasia was a fairly new concept when the euthanasia program was explored by Hitler through the spring and summer months of 1939. The idea of euthanasia was to rid the German race of the mentally and physically handicapped. Hitler believed that if the German race could rid themselves of all imperfections they could be physically and financially superior to the rest of the world. "Child euthanasia" was put into act April 18, 1939. Hitler decided that the murdering of children three and under because of their mental or physical sicknesses would be a good place to start. The euthanasia process would start with the physicians and nurses. They would examen the children to see if they had any "defects," then if they determined that they were "defected" they would send the children to gas chambers, starve them to death, or overdose them. After a while Hitler decided to bump up child euthanasia to age seventeen. During the war years they estimated over five thousand child deaths due to euthanasia. September 1, 1939 Hitler decided that if his euthanasia program was questioned then he would say that the effort was a war time measure. January 1940, "T4" was created. T4 was created to secretly choose victims out of private institutions to be euthanized.
ReplyDeleteIn conclusion, euthanasia was a program of Hitler's that was the first mass murder of his career even before the genocide of the European Jews. My personal emotions on this subject are-horrified.
Good essay, Lydia. I really enjoyed reading your essay because I thought it was very interesting and I really learned a lot. I think it is awful how one man could be so evil as to do what Hitler did to these innocent children just because they were not normal. I agree that Euthanasia is a horrifying thing to think about.
DeleteNice work on your essay Lydia! I didn’t know anything about the “Euthanasia Program” until I read your essay which helped to inform me about it. To think that Hitler was in charge of killing several thousands of innocent children and teens because of sicknesses they were born with is absolutely horrific. Just think not only about the suffering the children had to go through, but also their parents that they were taken from. I can’t even begin to imagine
DeleteI chose to do my article on concentration camps. These camps are usually referred to as a camp in which people are confined to and usually has harsh conditions. the first concentration camps were established soon after the appointment to chancellor in January of 1933. Soon after they were built the SS or hitters “storm troopers” were in charge of rounding up anyone Hitler wanted put in these camps. In this assignment I have picked the concentration camps to write about. The word concentration camp These camps were established all over Germany but the SS made larger camps in places like, north berlin, near Hamburg and in berlin itself. In 1934 after only a year after these camps were completed they were an organized administration led by lieutenant general Theodor Eicke. There were many different of levels of staff in the camps all in which was controlled by Eicke. Nazi Germany expanded the system every time they moved forward in the war. Before the official start of the war there were only six concentration camps in Germany. The people in the camps were mainly used as laborers to do things for the army of build more camps. But the SS soon realized that they could use some of these prisoners as “special projects” in which the prisoners were miss treated badly and experimented on. As the wars went on more camps were built and more people especially the Jews were taken prisoner and executed. Late in the war the SS realized that they need these people for their work force but continued to murder them. This shows that they were truly evil.
ReplyDeleteOne of the huge factors that make World War II and The Holocaust so fascinating to me is the pointless and unreasonable mass murders that took place all throughout a war. I enjoyed this assignment because it gave me an opportunity to go in depth into one of the lesser known mass murder programs and learn about some of their ‘logic’ behind it. In 1939 Hitler authorized a program known as the “Child Euthanasia Program” or code name T4. Child euthanasia was just the first step in the mass murder programs and genocide that took place in Germany and German occupied states meant to kill those “unfit” or a “life not worth life”. 5,000 German children seventeen and younger were murdered via starvation, lethal injections, medicinal overdoses, gas chambers, or even shot in their own bed due to physical and/or mental defects. Though it started out as a program directed toward children it spread to the chronically ill and the elderly by autumn of 1939. They were killed in all the same ways performed and perfected on the children of the program. Personally I feel as much fascination as I do disgust by the euthanasia program. It always has and always will boggle my mind that people could find logic in killing someone else due to a defect they were born with and had no control over. There are several mental ‘defects’ that undoubtedly live-with-able and with the right help from the right people and occasionally medicine someone can live a normal life without ever letting on that they’re a little different and I wonder if the Nazis knew this and didn’t care or just plain didn’t care. Though there was nothing remotely pretty about World War II all the pointless murders are without a doubt the ugliest part of the whole war.
ReplyDeleteWow, great job on this weeks assignment this week mckenzie! I think the Holocust is something all high schoolers should learn about. I learned so much in your article and found it absolutely facinating! Great job. I especially liked your thoughts on the Nazi tyranny in 1945.
ReplyDeleteFor this week’s assignment I chose to write about the killing centers. It is always interesting but very sad on how cruel people were. The Nazi’s killed approximately 2,700,000 Jews by the gas that they inhaled and it killed them or they were shot. These killing centers wasn’t a concentration camp although it was similar, but it was specifically were you went and was killed. Imagine what they felt on the way to these centers. How would you react? These killings at the killing centers were started at one country and then of course went from that country to another country and so on. The article said that between March of 1942 until November 1943 they killed 1,526,500 Jews! That’s a lot of people in a very short amount of time. When people were sent to the killing centers, they almost always went into the gas chambers immediately. Auschwitz-Birkenau, by 1943 had four gas chambers and 6,000 Jews were killed a day! That is a lot of people and a lot of gas! These killing centers had so many people to kill and so much products and fumes to killed them that they had to just take all the bodies and burn them so get rid of diseases and the stench. They also burned the bodies because they tried to make these killing camps “top-secret,” but everyone knew about them. Lastly, they leaders or whoever was in charge of these camps had them remodeled to disguise that they killed millions of people.
ReplyDeleteThis week’s assignment about the Holocaust is very moving and eye-opening. I chose to write on the Nazi killing centers. These horrific killing centers were used by the Nazis to execute many people at one time. According to the website (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005145) these killing centers differed from the concentration camps because they were literally “death factories” as the website called them as opposed to just a horrible holding chamber for the Jews. These killing centers were responsible for approximately 2,700,000 people, around the same population of the Chicago metro area, by mass shootings and the use of poisonous gas. The first killing center was in December of 1941 in Chelmno, Austria where many Jews and gypsies (or Roma) were killed by poisonous gas in mobile gas vans. Soon after the Nazis established several more killing centers: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka or together known as Operation Reinhard. However, the largest killing camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau (spring 1943). By the mid-forties up to 6,000 Jews were being killed a day and by 1944 nearly 1million Jews, Pols, and Roma were killed. This absolutely sickens me to think of the level of cruelty and evilness that these poor people had to endure. I had the opportunity to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, a few years ago. When you go through the tour, you are given the name card of a person who was in the holocaust and you learn about their time there and whether they were able to survive the camps. It really made a huge impact on my life and it truly makes your heart break for these innocent people who lost their lives for one evil man’s atrocious plan.
ReplyDeleteLydia Ramsey- I really enjoyed reading your essay for this week’s assignment. It truly sickens me to think that someone could be so evil to not only mindlessly execute millions of innocent people, but to implement the horrifying idea of child euthanasia. Hitler “justified” his actions by saying it was a “war time measure” but there is no justification for it. How can you justify killing millions and executing thousands of children? Overall, I learned a lot from your essay and it was clear and concise as usual, but it truly horrified me to think of the desperate and evil measures this man went to to create his “perfect genetically and financially superior” race. But, great job on your essay for this week’s assignment as usual.
ReplyDeleteBethany Cox- I also really enjoyed reading your essay for this week’s assignment. It was clear and concise and I learned a lot about the killing centers. Overall, great job!
Great job on your essay, Rebecca! Your essay was written well and full of good information. It is terrible to think about what they did in the Nazi camps. Again, great job on your essay!
ReplyDeleteGreat job on your essay, Bobby! Your essay was full of information and written very well. It is terrible to think about what they did in the Nazi camps. I can't believe he killed six million Jew and countless others across Europe. Again, great job on your essay!
Great job on your essay, Sara! Your essay was full of information and written well. It is terrible to think about what they did in the Nazi Camps. Again, great job on your essay!
Great job on your essay, Bethany! It was full of good information and written well. It is terrible to think about what they did in the Nazi camps. Again, great job on your essay!
I have always heard the word ghetto used for areas in a city that were for the poor and often for African American people. This past year I learned that the original ghettos were similar, because they were a place for segregating people that others thought of as less important or deficient in some way.
ReplyDeleteThe article about the ghettos said that the word was first used in the 1500’s for the Jews in Venice. Austrian Emperor Charles V ordered other cities to create ghettos to separate the Jewish people in Frankfurt, Rome, Prague, and other European cities.
The Germans viewed the ghettos as a place to separate the Jews from others. They wanted them all in one area so they would be able to access them easily. The “Final Solution,” the removal and murder of all the European Jews, was the goal and the ghettos were the holding areas the Germans used until they were removed to the concentration camps.
Life in the ghetto was crowded and unsanitary. Too many people were in confined spaces, making it easy for sickness to spread. The Jews were forced to labor for the Third Reich and to wear armbands identifying them as Jews. Public gatherings were not allowed, because the Germans thought the Jews would gather to plan a revolt. Because of this, Jews could not gather for worship and children were not gathered to be educated. In fact, education was almost not allowed for Jewish children.
Ghettos were the first step in the dehumanization and murder of the Jewish people during the Holocaust.