For this extra credit assignment I chose to do a story on the persecution of people in today's world. I went back about sixty years but it still happened in this day and age, not in biblical time. I chose to do a short report about the Holocaust. The Jews being persecuted by the Nazi-Germans.
The word holocaust was originally used to mean a burnt offering or sacrifice, but in the period of 1938-1945 this term was used to mean the liquidation of all the Jews from Germany and other parts of Europe.
The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 and they immediately began taking action against the Jews. All of the Nazi banks, stores, shops, and businesses made great efforts to eliminate Jews from economic life and regular life all together. In 1938 all Jewish synagogues were burned to the ground. Their sacred place of worship had been destroyed and they could nothing about it. Also in 1938 Jewish shops� windows were smashed, and thousands of Jews were arrested. The night that these events happened is called Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass." This night was a warning to all Jews who hadn�t been attacked yet to leave as soon as possible.
World War II began in 1939 and at that time the Germans occupied the western half of Poland, controlling almost 2 million more Jews. All the Jews in Poland were forced into ghettos while Nazis occupied their houses. Many diseases spread because of the malnutrition and crowded conditions.
In June of 1944(?), the Germans invaded the USSR and special units were sent out to kill all of the soviet Jews as soon as possible. About a month after operations had started on the USSR project, Hermann Goring, 2nd in command of the Nazi-Germany army, sent a command to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, telling him to organize a "final solution" for the Jewish problem. Heydrich started the Jews wearing of the yellow stars.
Death camps, or concentration camps, which had gas chambers, were started in Poland. People were taken from the ghettos, and the Nazis wouldn't tell them where they were going. Eventually word spread back to the ghettos of what they were doing and panic and fear was widespread as each day of wait passed. The information of these camps also reached Britain and the United States.
Auschwitz was the largest and most feared concentration camp. The gas chambers there killed many people from all over Europe. Then the gigantic crematoriums incinerated the bodies and caused a never-ending snowfall of ashes. The Nazis, along with gassing inmates, shot thousands and did medical experiments on others. They made the Jews haul their own �brothers� corpses to the crematorium. What a horrible thing to do, and while the Jews were doing that they knew that they were soon to come. It�s hard to even comprehend how these people must have felt as they were in these camps. When the war ended in 1945, after the United States and Britains' involvement, millions of Jews, along with Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, and others, had been killed or died during the Holocaust.
Museums have been erected in remembrance of this wretched event. One of the more famous is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which was opened in 1993. I visited that very museum in January during the March for Life and it is very heart moving to see the kind of experiences these people had to go through and the way they were treated.
Death camps, or concentration camps, which had gas chambers, were started in Poland. People were taken from the ghettos, and the Nazis wouldn't tell them where they were going. Eventually word spread back to the ghettos of what they were doing and panic and fear was widespread as each day of wait passed. The information of these camps also reached Britain and the United States.