Holocaust Dbq Essay

"Concentration camps, that's what you call, uh, a camp what actually is annihilation...they annihilate people, actually." This quote by Abraham Lewent sums up the story of the Holocaust and what an egregious time it was. The genocide of over six million people during World War II was the Holocaust. It all started with a man named Adolf Hitler and his rise to power and the German people who were desperate to believe anything they were told. The overall causes of the Holocaust were fear, anti-Semitism and the stages of the Holocaust.

Fear was a main reason why the Holocaust got to be as bad as it did. Once the Nazis started taking away people and beating them up and killing them, it instilled fear in people. Nobody was going to stand up

The Nazis used a specific process to convince the German people that they were right and to follow them would be the right thing to do. According to Source F "In the definition stage, the Nazis defined a Jew based on irrational pseudo-scientific beliefs." This indicates that the Nazis first found a group of people to blame for all of the problems that Germans were having. That group was the Jewish people and they became the scapegoat and they were blamed for everything that was going wrong even though it was not their fault at all. The next step according to Source F was "Expropriation: Because Jews had already been identified in the first stage it was easy to enforce the new laws against them." This suggests that since the Jews were already being singled out and separated from the society making laws specifically about them would be easy since Jews are already considered as different. These laws included "Jews may not take part in public sports, Jews are forbidden to visit theaters, cinemas and other places of entertainment etc." according to the Diary of Anne Frank. Additionally, in Source C it states another step was "Dehumanization." The Nazis no longer regarded the Jews as humans but as vermin and sub-human. There is a picture in Source C that the Nazis used as propaganda and it was a drawing of Jews. The drawing portrays the Jewish people as disgusting and disabled and like they weren't part of the human race. This propaganda helped turn people against the Jews and made it feel like it was right what the Nazis were doing to them. Next were the concentration camps. Furthermore, in Source D during The Night of Broken Glass it says more than "30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps." The Night of Broken Glass was all about sending a message to the Jews by saying don't mess with the Nazis otherwise there would be terrible consequences. This is where the main part