History Discussion Paper-The Holocaust

For this Discussion, we’re going to look at some material from the Holocaust.  You’ll be reading 4 out of thousands of surviving documents that illustrate the utter evil, wrongness, and misery when racism and bigotry triumph over love and compassion.

In Hitler’s Germany, Jews were the primary people to be singled out for persecution, although Romanis, Slavs, homosexuals, and people who were physically or intellectually disabled were also subject to eventual extermination under the Third Reich.  It’s hard to conceptualize how a modern power in the 20th century could allow something like that to happen, but happen it did.  And if it happened there, it could happen anywhere, even in the United States of America.

In order to better understand how this tragedy occurred, you’ll need to go to the following website:

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/item.asp?GATE=Z&list_type=1-4&TYPE_ID=9&TOTAL=N&pn=4&title=Isolation%20and%20Ghettoization (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Once there, go to Isolation and Ghettoization, which is on the LH side.  Click on that, and read the introduction.  Then go back, and from the selection of documents, look at the following 4 entries (none are very long):

1) Identification of Jews in the General government (pg. 1)

2) Eichmann Informs the Jews About Deporting Them From Austria and About the Theresienstadt Ghetto (pg. 3)

3) Order By Fischer on the Establishment of a Ghetto in Warsaw, Oct 2, 1940 (pg. 4)

Your question is this: What actions did the Nazi High Command take to alienate and isolate the Jews from their jobs and their communities?

Also, consider the origins of the Cold War.  How much responsibility does the US bear for not helping Stalin out when he requested $6 billion to help rebuild Russia?  They had nothing to rebuild with, and our refusal to help forced the USSR to take reparations out of what became the Iron Curtain countries.