The Holocaust- George Little

As I researched the Holocaust, I learned a great deal that I did not know before. Of course, I originally knew the basic facts of the Holocaust; such as the Nazis committing the terrible crime of killing millions of Jews, and the fact that there was transition from ghettos to concentration camps for the Jews. However, what I did not realize entirely was that gypsies, homosexuals, and prisoners of war were also put in concentration camps, and that the death camps weren’t officially put into use until around late 1941.

According to one of the resources titled “What is Genocide?”, the word genocide was first used in 1933 by the League of Nations in response to the atrocities against the Armenian population of the Ottoman empire from 1915 to 1918. Little did the world know, but the worst genocide in history would occur slightly more than fifteen years later. This resource later went into the Atrocities against the Armenians in more depth.

The recourse that I found the most interesting information from was the “Insightful conclusive website on the Holocaust from USF”. The resource provides several important stages throughout the Nazi Party’s rule in Germany including Hitler’s rise to power, ghettos, concentration camps, resistance, aftermath, etc. According to the source, there were 356 ghettos established by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945 in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Romania, the Baltic states, and Hungary. I find it staggering that the ghettos were actually established as late as they were. The living conditions in the ghettos were absolutely terrible. There was extremely poor sanitation, little food, and many people would often share a room, leading to the spreading of diseases. It’s interesting that the ghettos in some of the big cities were fenced in while others in smaller towns weren’t. The ghettos held an immense amount of people; the largest ghetto held about 400,000 people. Jews were given a band that had the star of David on it and were recognized by members of the Nazi party by it. According to the resource, the death camps proved to be a better, faster, and less personal way for exterminating the Jews. The total amount of Jews killed in shootings or in death camps totalled to around 5.2-5.8 million Jews (roughly half of Europe’s total Jewish population), which is a heartbreaking statistic. The Nazis closed the death camps in 1943 and began dismantling the camps. They wanted to try to cover up the horrific crimes.

Resources “Liberation of Buchenwald Nazi Concentration Camp” and “Exploration of Eugenics Program by Nazis” give excellent visual presentations to how terrible and graphic the Nazi death camps really were. One resource is an older video showing actual footage and briefly talking about how the Jews were killed. The other resource is a scene from Band of Brothers that gives an awesome representation of American soldiers first discovering a Nazi death camp. Both resources provide horrifying images of starved, bald Jewish people that are hard to forget and remind us to never commit terrible acts like the Holocaust ever again.