Kristallnacht

Many people do not consider the events which lead to the Holocaust, they prefer to believe or simply assume that it all happened overnight. However, the Holocaust was the unfortunate result of many different events and factors. Some of these include; the years preceding, the economy, German moral, social climate, feelings towards the Jews, and Jewish religion. The years before the Holocaust could be compared to the rising action in nearly any plot. These years helped set the stage and tone for…

Dachau was the first concentration camp established by Nazi Germany in 1933. It was a labor camp designed to punish political prisoners and enemies of Adolf Hitler. Dachau was a model for how other concentration camps should operate under Nazi Germany. Through intense labor and strict regulations, prisoners were taught to obey authority. Dachau was created to enforce compliance with the Nazi regime. Unlike the death camps that focused on extermination, Dachau was a labor camp where the…

I have a motto that if something isn’t blatantly impossible, then there must be a way of doing it. ~ Sir Nicholas Winton When the Holocaust broke out many lives were put at risk, however people like Nicholas Winton became heroes for their deeds. Nicholas Winton’s deed was that he saved 669 children from death. Emigration wasn't an option. The world's doors were closed to refugees. Conditions in the camps were brutal for the 150,000 people trapped there, especially for the children. And no one…

Liang Heng, the author of “Son of the Revolution”, spent almost his whole life under the Communist Party of China, and he was able to share all the details of his difficult life with the world through writing with the help of his wife, and co author, Judith Shapiro. Liang Heng’s life was filled with suffering from sacrifices he and his family made to please the Party. After making it through life with the cap of being the son of a rightist and having a father accused of having capitalist…

The streets sparkled with shattered glass, gleaming with a crimson glow as the flames danced into the night. The date is November 9th, 1938, and this is the Night of Broken Glass, also known as the Kristallnacht. The embers of hatred have began to engulf the country of Germany, as the weakened loser of the first world war ignited the flames of bloodshed once again. This once powerful country had been dismantled under the Treaty of Versailles, oppressed by the allies that feared another war that…

Your best friend is being put to death with her family right in front of you, you watch her sink to the ground . You are young and you don't understand, you turn to your mother and ask, “Why must she die,”, and your mother looks at you solemnly and replies, “Her family and her were Jews,they must be eliminated according to our government,”. You start to cry not understanding how people can kill each other because they have a certain region. During WW2 citizens were motivated to support the…

The first of Stanton’s stages, that of classification, is certainly applicable to the genocide against the Jews during the Holocaust. Stanton depicts classification as a process of ‘othering’, the aim of which is to distinguish the differences between desirable and undesirable demographic groups. In this case you have the polarities of the ideal Aryan race and the Jews. The Nazi regime sought to ensure as little confusion as possible as to which category an individual belonged. In September of…

As anyone like myself who has heard of the Holocaust era, we can only imagine what a devastating and tragic time that must’ve been for the Jewish people. Imagine being torn away from your families and your basic necessities, and then thrown into captivity for no plausible reason. Then tortured like you were some kind of criminal who deserved to be mistreated and dehumanized. As I hear more about this horrific event that took place and listen to stories from some of the victims, I can’t help…

As if another world war was not devastating enough, the Holocaust also occurred during World War II. The Holocaust began with the discriminatory Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which stripped Jews of their natural rights. In 1938, Kristallnacht occurred, commencing government-approved violence against all Jews for simply being Jewish. Afterwards, Jews were moved into ghettos and transported to camps. The Nazi policy of murdering Jews only intensified in 1942, with the decision to implement the Final…

After the ultimate end of WWI the world was in utter chaos, due to Germany’s defeat during the war, the Treaty of Versailles was created. The Treaty was created by the Allied powers outside Paris, inside the Palace of Versailles on January 1919. This peace conference was dominated by the big four, this included the following countries and their leaders: France, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States. After a prolonged session of meeting after meeting the big four was eventually able to come…