Several sources believe the photographer to have been Ernst Hoffmann or Bernhard Walter of the SS is in the public domain. Learning About the Holocaust by Michael A. Signal 2018 During World War II, six million European Jews were murdered in an event known as the Holocaust. In this informational text, Michael A. Signal discusses the background of the Holocaust and the importance of remembering this dark moment in history. As you read, take notes on how Jewish people were treated differently than other groups in Europe. “The purpose of Majdanek was an extermination camp, an extermination factory. So, the purpose, the existence of it was to kill people.” Estelle Laughlin, Holocaust survivor Hitler and the Nazis in the quote above, Laughlin describes Majdanek: a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Laughlin was sent to Majdanek when she was a child simply because she was Jewish. Millions of Jewish children and adults during World War II were forced into these camps to die. Laughlin survived to tell her story of being imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. The six million Jewish people who died during the Holocaust did not. Adolf Hitler was the engineer1 behind these concentration camps. Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany. He ruled the country from 1933 until 1945 and led the National Socialist German Workers Party, otherwise known as the Nazi party. Nazis believed that Germany should be a strong and powerful state. They also believed that one group of white Europeans, known as Aryans, were superior to all other people on Earth. One group of people that Hitler and the Nazis singled out as being inferior2 were Jewish people. Hitler had big plans for Germany, but he had dire3 plans for the Jews. Jewish Persecution Jewish people practice the religion of Judaism, one of the world’s oldest major religions. It predates Christianity by over 1,000 years. Jews have often been persecuted4 throughout history. For centuries, Jewish families were forced to live in only certain areas. They were only allowed to work in certain professions, and they were often turned into scapegoats, being wrongfully blamed for many social problems. In the Middle Ages, Jewish people were even expelled from entire countries in Europe, like England and France. [1] 1. a person who designs or builds something 2. Inferior (adjective): lower in rank, status, or quality 3. Dire (adjective): extremely serious, terrible 4. Persecuted (verb): to be subjected to poor treatment because of one’s race or political or religious in the 17th century, Jewish people were allowed back into the countries that had driven them away hundreds of years earlier. This does not mean that Jews were accepted across Europe. They were still treated poorly, shunned, and blamed for many problems in society. And there were lots of problems in 1930s Germany. Millions of Germans were jobless. Many of the people that had jobs still could not afford food or necessities. Of course, Jewish people did not cause Germany’s problems, but they became scapegoats once again. When Hitler came to power, he claimed to have the solutions to Germany’s problems. One of his solutions was to take land from other countries. He started by invading Poland in 1939. France and England declared war on Germany soon after. This marked the start of World War II. The United States entered the war two years later. The Final Solution Hitler saw the Jews as a major problem, not just in Germany but across Europe. This problem, Hitler thought, needed a “Final Solution.” His Final Solution was a plan to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. As the Nazis invaded more countries, they captured and imprisoned Jews in concentration camps. Many prisoners were forced to perform hard labor. They were held in brutal, unsanitary conditions. They would often starve or die from disease. Countless Jewish men, women, and children were killed in these camps, often with poison gas. This organized process of capturing, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering millions
