1. The Holocaust began in 1936 in Germany and lasted until 1945. Adolf Hitler rose to power as the leader of Germany's Nazi party in 1933 and instituted racist laws targeting Jews.
2. The Nazi regime created ghettos and concentration camps, where they imprisoned and starved Jewish people. They also conducted medical experiments on prisoners.
3. Over six million Jewish people were murdered in the Holocaust through mass executions, starvation, and gas chambers at concentration camps like Auschwitz. Allied forces liberated camps in 1945 and discovered the horrific atrocities.
44. Babies It did not matter that they were babies. They were future adult Jews. Babies were frequently killed by bashing their heads against a wall, by tossing them in the air for target practice, or, if a mother would not give her child up, they would shoot the baby and mother with one bullet.
69. On April 12, 1945, Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton visited Ohrdruf concentration camp. Eisenhower wrote to Chief of Staff General George Marshall, to report, “….the things I saw beggar description.” The evidence of starvation and bestiality was “so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.” Eisenhower visited “every nook and cranny.” It was his duty, he said, “to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief… ‘that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’” Eisenhower issued an order for every American unit in the area to visit the camp.
73. Eisenhower also issued a call to the press back home. Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., the dean of American journalists, viewed the camps. He initially had a “suspicious frame of mind,” and expected that many of the terrible reports were exaggerations and largely propaganda. However, he said the initial reports were understatements. Within days, congressional delegations visited the camps, along with journalists and photographers.
76. Edward R. Murrow of CBS gave a stunning, matter-of-fact description of the piles of emaciated bodies at Buchenwald concentration camp during his radio broadcast on April 15, 1945. He said, “I pray to you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it; for most of it I have no words.” He added, “If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry.”
80. “ First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade-unionists and I did not speak out-- because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.” Pastor Martin Niemoller
81. More than six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
82.
83.
Notes de l'éditeur
Jewish Migration.
Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and Hesse.
Books by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann (Nobel Prize winner,) and Stefan Zweig were burned. Also burned were books by Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Jon Dos Passos, Theodore Dreisler, Sinclair Lewis, Karl Marx, Lenin, Trotsky Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, and Magnus Hirschfeld.
Kristallnacht. The night of broken glass.
Burned synagogue.
Burning synagogue.
One of the most famous photos from the Holocaust, of the unidentified little boy holding his hands in the air while a guard points a gun at him. This was in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland.
Nazi shooting a prisoner over an open mass grave. Other prisoners are waiting to be killed.
Children being sent to their deaths. They are being loaded into cattle cars.
Roll call. Standing in formation for hours on end.
Prisoners being loaded into a lorry.
Women prisoners.
Starving prisoners.
Crematory oven.
These children were the victims of medical experimentation.
Prisoners celebrating liberation.
The Allies viewing the bodies of dead prisoners upon liberation.
The Allies discovering a train boxcar full of dead prisoners.
Allies making the residents from near the camp view the dead prisoners.
Living skeletons.
Elie Wiesel is in the 2 nd row, middle bunk. He is the furthest on the right in that bunk. The red arrow points to Wiesel.