Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

1. What are the two schools of thought about the Holocaust? Define them. There are two major schools of thought regarding the planning of the Holocaust; the Intentionalist school, and the Functionalist school. The Intentionalist school believes that Hitler’s intentions from very early on were for the exterminations of the Jewish race. According to them the “Final Solution” was simply a means of completing this goal of Hitler’s. On the other hand, according to the Functionalist school, although…

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah', was a genocide in which approximately six million Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime and its collaborators. Some historians use a definition of the Holocaust that includes the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to approximately eleven million. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories. From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in a genocide, one of…

One individual lived through both the ghettoization of Warsaw Jews, life in the Warsaw ghettos, the Warsaw Uprising and last but not least, life in Auschwitz- Halina Birenbaum. She speaks in her work of those experiences and, particularly, of being a young girl in the ghetto and in the camps through her personal memoir Hope is the Last to Die. Her memoir was published 22 years after the liberation of Auschwitz when…

Nearing the end of the war there was an influx of killing frenzies, manic death throes, and hundreds of thousands dead, all occurring between 1944-1945. In the beginning of 1944 many Germans still expected to win the war, however, by the end of the year that opinion had changed. Hitler was under assault from the air, from the Red Army in the east, and, after D-day in June, from the Allies in the west. German defeat was looming, yet killing went on in many varied settings; from the extreme death…

Two courses of action, it was argued, were required. First, crypto-Judaism could only be overcome by the introduction of an Inquisition; second, Jewish influence over the conversos could only be overcome by their expulsion. These ideas, adumbrated in works such as Alonso de Espina's Fortalitium Fidei, continued to gain ground, and on 27 September 1480 the Catholic Monarchs appointed Inquisitors in Castile who began their work in Seville shortly after (1481). Conversos, often subjected to torture…

In The Cunning of History, author Richard Rubenstein discusses the elements within Germany and other countries of the world that contributed to the mass killings of the Jews in what we know as the Holocaust. Rubenstein further discusses the history of anti-Semitism that enabled the persecution of the Jews, and also compares the slave industry of the world wherein the importation and persecution of slaves in the United States and other parts of the world had existed pre-Holocaust. Rubenstein…