GCSES. Why are they so easy? And do you have any?

I was a boffin too, here's some coursework!

Describe how Jews were discriminated against in Germany in 1939:

By 1939, Goering had succeeded in his goal of removing any wealth from the Jews, and as a result handed over the practical responsibility of removing the Jews from Germany to Himmler and the SS. Before this, Himmler had already passed many restrictions and taken away numerous rights from the Jews. On the 13th of September 1935, Hitler had made a particularly violent and anti-Semitic speech at the Nuremberg rally, where he drafted out laws that were ‘For the Protection of German Blood and Honour’, and ordered them to be passed at once. These decrees basically removed many civil rights from the Jews, and extracts from the law are as follows:

Marriages between Jews and Citizens of German or kindred blood are forbidden. Marriages concluded in defiance of this law are void, even if, for the purpose of evading this law, they are concluded abroad.
Sexual relations outside marriage between Jews and nationals of German or kindred blood are forbidden.
Jews are forbidden to display the Reich and national flag or the national colours.

Some of the other laws passed against Jews included many against employment, citizenship, property and education. Many Jewish businesses were confiscated, asocial groups [work-shy, tramps, alcoholics, mentally retarded, people unable to work, etc.] were sent to the early concentration camps, and later on Gypsies. Jewish doctors were forbidden from treating Aryan’s, Jewish children forbidden from attending Aryan schools, Jews must all have the same first name - Sarah or Ishmael, and were encouraged to migrate. Eventually, the first mass arrests took place in Ghetto’s such as Warsaw, and many were sent to the concentration camps.

Despite the Jews being encouraged to migrate, the Nazi’s imposed a flight tax. This meant the fleeing Jews were forced to lose between thirty and fifty percent of their capital. In 1938, the Jews were now forbidden to export merchandise, tools of their trade, furniture, jewellery or furs. This was obviously to prevent any Jews starting up their own colonies abroad. Finally, nearly 120,000 Jews left Germany, which was approximately half of the total number of Jews in Germany. The Nazis were now happy for the Jews to leave.

Subsequent to these restrictions many more laws were passed by Himmler and were gradually phased in. Up until 1941 his aim was to purge anyone of Jewish blood from Germany, and previously this was enforced by forced emigration, which was put in place following Eichmann’s success with the Austrian Jews. At this point, it seemed as if the Nazi’s had not considered the genocide of the Jews, but simply wanted them out of Germany and for other countries to take them. On the 20th of January 1939, Hitler informed the world he was quite prepared to co-operate with other countries by finding a place in the world where they could put the Jews. Hitler made a direct challenge to the US and Britain by declaring; “Here they are: either they starve to death or you put your many speeches into practice”. The plan was supposed that the Jews were to be exiled to the French colony of Madagascar, but this never happened. Hitler’s anti-semitic rants continued, as he went on to say “with us the Jews would be destroyed; not for nothing had the Jews Caused the 9th of November 1918 [day of Kaiser’s abdication, Germany’s surrender and revolutionary change in government] this day will be avenged.” At this point, Hitler was beginning to appear more aggressive towards the Jews, and was using the Jews as a reason for Germany losing the first world war and their economy falling into depression.

When the war broke out in September 1939, the attitudes of Nazis were changed in two ways. Primarily, it allowed more extreme treatment of the Jews without concern for world opinion or interference. Secondarily, the invasion of Poland increased the number of Jews by 3.3 million, and the war had reduced the areas the Nazis had hoped to utilise for the forced emigration of Jews. However, gaining the territory of Poland made it possible for this to happen in the form of building the Ghettos. The Ghettos were built due to the sheer impossibility of moving the Jews anywhere such as Madagascar, so they relocated the Jews into parts of cities, which were surrounded by walls, wire fences, and guarded by SS troopers. The largest of these was in Warsaw, Poland. In these cramped conditions the Jews lived on minute starvation rations, and as a result life for them was abysmal. By 1942, 100,000 had died of starvation or by liquidation. Liquidation was the term the Nazi’s used for the mass killings of Jews in these Ghettos. Near the ghettos, the Nazis also built up labour camps in which the Jews were forced to do extremely hard physical labour such as digging ditches and road making. The death rate was immense.

In June 1941, Operation Barbarossa was underway. Operation Barbarossa was the codename for the invasion of Russia, of which the Nazis were convinced they would succeed. The invasion started off perfectly well, but once Winter had struck, the German troops became bogged down from cold, lack of supplies, and were generally unprepared for the extreme weather of winter in Russia. As a result of this they fought for years on the same front, barely gaining any ground. This was a major turning point in the war. Whilst Operation Barbarossa was underway, Hitler had begun his planning of a mass Jewish genocide. It had also brought another 2 million Jews under Nazi rule. In a speech during 1941, he announced that “Normal rules of war do not apply”, by which he meant that due to the unusual nature the war was being fought, that he could get away with anything. Subsequently, one of Hitler’s field marshals - von Reichenau - said “for this reason, the [German] solider must show full understanding of the necessity of the severe but just atonement being required by the Jewish subhumans.” This was one of the earliest occasions that Hitler started to imply the supposed necessity of mass-murdering the Jews, as the impossibility of continuing with his policy of forced migration became evident. Soon after Hitler’s speech the Einsatzgruppen was formed. These were four mobile killing units who followed the German army and were primarily involved with killing any Jews, inciting the locals to help with killing the Jews and to form temporary ghettos, the population of which would then be liquidated.

The Einsatzgruppen were monumentally cruel in their methods, and their mass killings usually involved marching the Jews to the outskirts of the village, with the men first, and women/children behind - this was most likely an attempt to stop any family units rebelling against the troops. The Jews were then forced to dig a huge grave and hand over any valuables to the Commanding Officer. They then removed their outer clothing - or in the summer simply stripped bare - and were shot on the edge of the graves by a single shot or a massed fire. This was the very first real mass killing, and they took place in the Baltic States [Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania] where the Einsatzgruppen were fanatically and enthusiastically aided by locals, Lithuanians particularly. The locals were then rewarded for their help with the pick of property from the dead Jews. Other places where the Einsatzgruppen continued their mass murdering were Lvov in the Ukraine, where Ukranian nationalists were very willing to assist in the killings. In the soviet city of Odessa, the Romanian troops - allies of Nazi Germany - shot or burned around 40,000 Jews. Probably the worst massacres took place just outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, at Babi Yar. In a total of two days more than 50,000 Jews had been slaughtered by the Nazis and buried in the local ravine. However, Himmler became concerned about the psychological toll it may have had on his men as the killings were too personal and many men were becoming reluctant to do it. It was also of common consensus between Nazi officials that this was too messy and inefficient and it was decided that this method was wholly inappropriate for dealing with the huge number of Jews.
During the summer of 1941, the decision was taken by senior Nazi leaders to seek a permanent and final solution to the Jewish problem. The variety of methods developed to try and solve this became more extreme over time and the first of which were Mobile Gas Vans which were originally used at Chelmno in Austria. The vans had a sealed load space which held up to 40 people at a time and carbon monoxide from the vans’ exhaust pipes was pumped into this space, slowly suffocating the occupants. The vans were designed for a typical trip of about ten miles, which meant the drivers had to drive at a maximum of 20 mph to allow time for the Jews to be gassed. The drivers were given plenty of alcohol but most found the job too upsetting and drove faster to get it over with which meant that in many cases when they arrived at the mass graves, many of the Jews were still alive. During the period between December 1941 and Spring 1943, over 20,000 Jews were killed this way.

The method of killing that followed this were the early versions of the gas chambers. These were originally built at the death camp previously established in Treblinka, East Poland. The Jews were rounded up en masse, and led into a purpose built chamber which could hold up to 200 people at a time. Carbon Monoxide was then pumped from an engine into the chamber, killing most in 20-30 minutes. This was more effective, and no one was directly involved in the killing, which meant there was much less of a psychological toll on the guards. The bodies were then removed by other Jews and buried in layers in large trenches.

In January 1942, the Wannsee Conference took place. The aim of the meeting was “to coordinate the work of the various agencies that would be involved in the operation of the final solution”. There were fifteen people in attendance, and most were party officials, SS officers and civil servants. Originally, the conference was planned for December 1941, but it was postponed and took place into January 1942 instead. The common consensus on this is that it was postponed due to the Japanese attack on Pearl harbour and the USA entering the war as a result of it. However, this doesn’t fully explain why Heydrich - the man overseeing the conference - would have postponed a conference so important to the matter of the ‘Jewish problem’ and the way in which it would be dealth with. Although, with the increasing pressure on the German army who were struggling in Russia, combined with the fact that Hitler had prophesied that the war had now become a full-scale World War may well have influenced Heydrich in his decision to reschedule the conference. The main points that were established at the conference were that the Emigration policy was to be replaced with ‘evacuation’ to the east - emigration for European Jews had been forbidden by Himmler a few months earlier. Also presented were the figures and the locations of the 11 million Jews in Europe. This list was split into two parts, one of which consisted of Nazi occupied territories, and the other of the rest of Europe. 4.5 million were in German occupied territories, and another 5 million were in the USSR, of which Hitler was sure was going to become German territory. Jews were to be utilised as hard labour in the east; “during which a large proportion will no doubt drop out through natural reduction [death from disease, starvation or brutality]”. Europe was also to be combed through from west to east for Jews. The evacuated Jews will be taken to transit ghettos - where the Jews were placed whilst waiting for the train to the appropriate camp - before being transported further East [i.e.: death camps] for ‘suitable treatment’. Suitable Treatment was the euphemism used by the Nazi’s for the mass murdering of the Jews in the concentration camps. It was eventually conceived that concentration camps would be built in East Poland. Chelmno was built in December 1941, followed by Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor in spring 1942.

In 1944, the Allies had begun to advance on both sides of Germany, and so the Nazis sought to destroy evidence of the death camps in East Poland and moved those who could walk on ‘death marches’ into camps in Central Germany. These death marches were simply another way to kill the remainder of the Jews in the camps before the camps were liberated in 1944. The Nazis decided to leave the Jews at camps in Central Germany because that would be the last point that both the USSR and the USA and UK would reach and many would die of starvation or disease by the time they reached them.

The Nazis treatment of the Jews changed greatly over the period of the war, mostly due to the fact that they had managed to commit these atrocities totally unnoticed, due to the focus being on the war effort and the respectable leaders of the allied Countries held no suspicions. As a result, the treatment of the Jews became more severe in parallel due to the fact nobody was suspicious.

Before the end of the war, Allied forces had already begun to liberate the concentration camps in the east of Poland, starting with Buchenwald. Although rumours had already been travelling around, nothing could have prepared the Allied troops for the horrors they would soon see in the concentration camps. When the first concentration camp was liberated General Eisenhower made a visit to the camp to see the horrors for himself. He insisted that German citizens and US troops should acknowledge the existence of these camps. SS guards were forced to dig mass graves for the corpses that were strewn across the camp.

A long while before the end of the war, the allies had decided that was the war was over, they would begin to prosecute and punish those responsible for criminal acts committed against civilians and was included among the principal war aims. Shortly after, on the 1st of November 1943 the USA, USSR and Great Britain committed themselves to the punishment of those responsible for war crimes. Once the war had ended, the decision was made to establish the International Military Tribunal. The IMT’s charter consisted of the aim to prosecute for three primary crimes: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Crimes against humanity dealt primarily with the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust. In total, sixteen countries endorsed this charter and the biggest trials began in Nuremburg, the mystical heart of Nazism. The many laws passed against Jewish society over the years had been a basis of Nazi society, so it seemed duly fitting to end Nazism there.

Unfortunately, many Nazi leaders were unable to be tried at Nuremberg. Both Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide before they could be caught, and Himmler committed suicide subsequent to his capture by British troops. The SS arrested Goering, but Ribbentrop fled from Berlin. Hundreds of Nazis fled the country to live abroad, many going to the United States. As well as Germans involved in killings - people who assisted the Einsatzgruppen - and Nazi sympathizers. Despite this, the trials went ahead as planned and involved 22 major figures.

Firstly, they had to devise a philosophy for the trial, eventually it was decided that based on conspiracy theory that Nazi policy was designed to steal territory and wealth and to exterminate the Jews, therefore to be involved in that policy was to be a mass murderer. The IMT consisted of judges from the Allies - Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States.

Over the course of the Nuremburg trials - which lasted from November 1945 up until the October of 1946 - an overwhelming amount of evidence was presented. Witnesses, photographs, and documents were presented and during this time, Hess apparently lost his memory, Goering was proud of his position of chief defendant whereas Speer was totally honest and hid nothing. Out of the twenty-two people tried, 12 were sentenced to death, including; Goering - Hitler’s second in command - who committed suicide before he was to be hung. Von Ribbentrop - Hitler’s foreign minister known as ‘the salesman of deception’. Rosenberg - ‘intellectual high priest of Nazism’. - was in charge of the justification of the holocaust. Fritz Sotel, in charge of slave labour. Hans Frank - ‘butcher of the Jews’ - ran the ghetto at Krakow, butcher of the Jews. Other punishments included life imprisonment for Von Funk - finance minister - and Hess - Hitler’s third in command. A long sentence was issued (less than life) to Von Chirac, the Nazi Youth leader. Finally, a twenty-year sentence for Speer, who had obviously been aided by his honesty.

Over the course of 1948 to 1949, the subsequent trials of the lesser Nazis began. These involved 177 Nazis who were convicted, most of whom were minor officials, twelve were sentenced to death, twenty-five were given life imprisonment and the remainder were issued with long prison terms. In 1951, the Clemency Act was passed, which resulted in the early release of many of the convicted. The Clemency Act was basically someone’s wish to forget about the Holocaust, and as a result let those convicted run free.

Despite 177 lesser Nazi’s, and 22 leading Nazis being convicted, by 1950 many Nazis were still being tracked down and tried. As late as 1961, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal tracked down Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Eichmann was captured and Israeli agents then bought him to Israel and his trial took place in Jerusalem, and became the first ever to be televised. Over the four weeks of his trial, film, photographs and documents were all used, but the of the evidence the most used were live witnesses. The prosecution tried to use at least one witness from every country affected by the holocaust, and 110 witnesses were used in total, including one former witness from Auschwitz who collapsed from a stroke in the dock and later died in hospital. Throughout this all, Eichmann remained calm and particularly composed whilst giving his defence, and claimed to have helped Zionism in their quest for the foundation of a Jewish state, albeit forcibly. “I am to help in emigration and make the best of this terrible situation”. He also claimed that after the Wannsee conference he was no longer responsible for his actions, and “made no decisions without orders of my superiors.” Although his guilt was never in doubt, his sentence was hotly debated. The verdict was death. Eichmann’s sentence is the first and only death sentence ever issued in the history of the state of Israel. He was also one of the last major war criminals tried and found guilty for crimes against humanity under the International Military Tribunal.

According to German sources, around 80,000 Germans were eventually convicted for crimes against humanity in countries under Nazi control. Another thing worth noting is the complicity of the German people in general. It is a greatly looked over fact that these atrocities would never had possibly taken place without the large-scale complicity of many German citizens. This is not to say they are to blame, but who can account for the German army, the 900,000 members of the SS and or police units, the one million employees of the German railway system who kept the trains running to the death camps, the industrialists who profited from Jewish slave labour, and the huge bureaucracy that carried out the necessary paperwork were all in their own way indispensable to the ‘Final Solution’.

Many might argue that despite the number of Nazis who were sentenced to death over the duration of these trials, it could not measure up to the enormity of the crimes committed against the Jewish people. Nevertheless, the trials served an important purpose in revealing an incredible amount of information about the holocaust and the concentration camps in particular, which increased public awareness about the events vasty.

After the Holocaust had come to an end, the surviving Jewish people were desperately in need of a land to call their own, partly because they had nowhere else to go, but also because they needed somewhere that they could hold no fear of being persecuted against by the government. Eventually, on the 14th May 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the independence of the state of Israel, and as such became the country’s first Prime Minister. There were many contributing factors to the establishment of the state of Israel, such as the earliest forms of Zionism, the conflict with the Arabs, the Holocaust, and the support given to the Jewish people before and after the Holocaust by the British and the Americans.

The Jews had no homeland since their expulsion from Palestine in AD70 by the Romans and up until 1948 had no official state. In the late 19th Century, Zionism began to emerge, and in 1897 the first Zionist Conference was held. Zionists were Jews who firmly believed in the re-establishment and development of a Jewish state, and their primary aim was to set up a separate Jewish state in Palestine and soon after some Jews began to settle there. The desperation and determination of the Zionists soon became evident and they began to fight vigorously for a homeland of their own.

In 1914, World War One broke out. Palestine was part of the Turkish Empire, whom were allied with Germany during the war. As a result, Britain made contradictory promises to the Arabs and to the Jews, saying to the Arabs “If you help us fight the Germans we will help you get independence from Turkey”, and to the Jews “We think it is a good idea for Palestine to be established as a home for the Jewish people”. Obviously, both cannot exist simultaneously. When the war was over, the Arabs were disappointed as little of the Turkish empire was granted independence and Palestine was held by Britain as a mandate - looked after with the expectation that independence would be granted to it in the near future - Britain took control of Palestine from Turkey. The colonial office allowed Jews to emigrate to Palestine in almost unrestricted number until 1936, and immigration was extremely high in the 1920’s to the 1930’s. This led to tension between the Jews and the Arabs, and as a result violent clashes occurred. The Jews felt Britain wasn’t helping them protect themselves from the Arabs, so they formed their own military defense group: Haganah and later on Irguan Zvai Leumi. The Arabs began to see that they would soon be outnumbered with the Jewish immigration ever increasing as Hitler’s persecution began, and they revolted in 1936-39 during which almost 2000 people were killed in violent clashes all over Palestine.

In 1937, the Peel Report was published, which contained a paragraph stating that “the problem cannot be solved by giving either the Arabs or the Jews all that they want. The answer to the question ‘which of them in the end of will govern Palestine?’ must surely be ‘neither’. We do not think that any fair minded statesman would suppose that Britain ought to hand over to Arab rule 400,000 Jews; or that a million or so Arabs should be handed over to their [Jewish] rule.” Quite literally and in no uncertain terms this stated that; neither the Arabs or the Jews would be given control over the country and that it would continue to be held under mandate. This was in order to maintain Arab oil supplies as well as their friendship against Hitler. This also led to limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine to a maximum of 12,000 per year for five years, in May 1939 this was revised to a total of 75,000 thereafter there would be no admittance without Arab consent. This led to large-scale illegal immigration between 1939 and 1941. The British reaction to this illegal immigration was fierce and often brutal, in one instance the ship Exodus was rammed by a British destroyer as it tried to break the blockade and land 4,500 Jews. They were sent back to Germany.

After World War Two and the Holocaust was over, the world had become aware of the full extent of the persecution of the Jews and sympathy for them greatly increased, as did the number of Jews wanting to enter Palestine. As a result of the increasing Jewish sympathy among the public in the USA, the US Government put pressure on Britain to allow 100,000 settlers in immediately, to which the British refused because she was afraid of further bloodshed between the Arabs and Jews as well as not wishing to offend the Arabs because Britain relied on her oil supplies and easy access to the Suez Canal. By 1946, Jewish terrorist groups began to campaign actively and violently for an independent state, and the British HQ at the King David Hotel was blown up resulting in the death of 88 people. Furthermore, soldiers were killed, roads were littered with mines, and letter bombs were sent. Despite these terrorist activities against the British, Jewish sympathy around the World was still very high and Britain was still turning away Jewish refugees seeking to settle in Palestine. By now the mandate cost the British £40 Million a year and occupied around 10% of the British Army.

Eventually, Britain declared she could find no solution to the problem in the Middle East and handed over the mandate to the United Nations, who put forward a plan; the White Paper. This proposed that Palestine was to be divided in two. The Arabs rejected the plan but it was accepted by the Jews, in spite of this the United Nations went ahead with the plan regardless. Violence on both sides increased significantly and there were many deaths, the worst of which was in 1948 at Deir Yassin, where several hundred Arabs were killed. By early 1948, the British had withdrawn their troops and in May, leading Israeli politician David Ben-Gurion declared the existence of the state of Israel. Almost immediately, there was fighting between the Jews and surrounding Arab states, as Iraq, Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria all began to attack Israel. Despite being greatly outnumbered the Israeli’s were able to defeat their attackers and they gained more land than the UN partition originally offered, with two minor setbacks; they were unable to secure the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem. One of the main reasons the Israeli’s succeeded in fending off their attackers was unsurprisingly their determination. After years of persecution their hard fighting and campaigning had paid off and they finally had a homeland, albeit their victory against the Arabs was mostly due to the enemies being divided and unable to agree on anything, and the Israeli’s equipment being much more modern thanks to large amounts of money raised by American Jews which was duly spent on Czech armaments.

There were many factors which played a part in the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel, one of which was the Holocaust. If you look at the attitude towards the Jews before the Holocaust, many countries simply did not care about their plight. Once the atrocities of the concentration camps became apparent, sympathy for their cause escalated on a large scale. As a result huge support was offered by the USA. The large influx of immigration due to the persecution by the Nazi’s, enabled them to revolt against the British which meant they handed over the mandate to the UN who eventually partitioned the country and the state of Israel was formed. Once again the American Jews came to help with finances once the Jews had been attacked. If the Holocaust had not have happened, I feel that it is unlikely the state of Israel would have been founded at all, and as such it played quite a large part in the establishment of the state of Israel.