Assignment (Enivironmental Studies) : (Suryansh Lal) Bba 2 B

ASSIGNMENT(ENIVIRONMENTAL STUDIES)
(SURYANSH LAL)
BBA 2 B
HOLOCAUST
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic,
state-sponsored persecution and murder of
approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime
and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek
origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who
came to power in Germany in January 1933,
believed that Germans were "racially superior" and
that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien
threat to the so- called German racial community.
During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities
also targeted other groups because of their
perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the
disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles,
Russians, and others). Other groups were
persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral
grounds, among them Communists, Socialists,
Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.
In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe
stood at over nine million. Most European Jews
lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy
or influence during World War II. By 1945, the
Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two
out of every three European Jews as part of the
"Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews
of Europe. Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed
a priority danger to Germany, were the primary
victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some
200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally
or physically disabled patients, mainly Germans,
living in institutional settings, were murdered in the
so-called Euthanasia Program.
As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans
and their collaborators persecuted and murdered
millions of other people. Between two and three
million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or
died of starvation, disease, neglect, or
maltreatment. The Germans targeted the non-
Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing, and deported
millions of Polish and Soviet civilians for forced labor
in Germany or in occupied Poland, where these
individuals worked and often died under deplorable
conditions. From the earliest years of the Nazi
regime, German authorities persecuted
homosexuals and others whose behavior did not
match prescribed social norms. German police
officials targeted thousands of political opponents
(including Communists, Socialists, and trade
unionists) and religious dissidents (such as
Jehovah's Witnesses). Many of these individuals
died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.
In the early years of the Nazi regime, the
National Socialist government established
concentration camps to detain real and imagined
political and ideological opponents. Increasingly in
the years before the outbreak of war, SS and police
officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and other victims
of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps. To
concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as
well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews,
the Germans and their collaborators created
ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for
Jews during the war years. The German authorities
also established numerous forced-labor camps, both
in the so-called Greater German Reich and in
German-occupied territory, for non-Jews whose
labor the Germans sought to exploit.
Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June
1941, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and,
later, militarized battalions of Order Police officials,
moved behind German lines to carry out mass-
murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet
state and Communist Party officials. German SS and
police units, supported by units of the Wehrmacht
and the Waffen SS, murdered more than a million
Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of
thousands of others. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi
German authorities deported millions of Jews from
Germany, from occupied territories, and from the
countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to
killing centers, often called extermination camps,
where they were murdered in specially developed
gassing facilities.
THE END OF HOLOCAUST
In the final months of the war, SS guards moved

camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often
called “death marches,” in an attempt to prevent
the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners.
As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of
offensives against Germany, they began to
encounter and liberate concentration camp
prisoners, as well as prisoners en route by forced
march from one camp to another. The marches
continued until May 7, 1945, the day the German
armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the
Allies. For the western Allies, World War II officially
ended in Europe on the next day, May 8 (V-E Day),
while Soviet forces announced their “Victory Day”
on May 9, 1945.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the
survivors found shelter in displaced persons (DP)
camps administered by the Allied powers. Between
1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to
Israel, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons
from Europe. Other Jewish DPs emigrated to the
United States and other nations. The last DP camp
closed in 1957. The crimes committed during the
Holocaust devastated most European Jewish
communities and eliminated hundreds of Jewish
communities in occupied eastern Europe entirely.

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ASSIGNMENT(ENIVIRONMENTAL STUDIES)

In the final months of the war, SS guards moved

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