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1. Which groups of people did not meet the physical, racial, and religious standards of the German Nazi Party? How did the Nazis treat them?
The groups of people who did not meet the standards of the Nazi Party were Jews, Gypsies, Serbs, Social Democrats, other opposing politicians, opponents of Nazism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, habitual criminals, and “antisocials” (e.g., beggars, vagrants, hawkers), and the mentally ill. These people were ostracized. They were dismissed from their jobs, not allowed in school, forbidden to shop in certain stores, and discriminated against in every way. They were eventually confined to ghettos and ultimately exterminated.
2. What is the historical significance of the 1938 event known as Kristallnacht?
Kristallnacht, which is known in English as The Night of the Broken Glass, was an evening on which the Nazi Party gave the German police an order to break the windows of Jewish-owned stores. The Nazis also broke into Jewish homes that night and hauled people off to ghettos and concentration camps. Kristallnacht is recognized as the beginning of the systematized terror of the Jewish people by the Nazi Party.
3. What was life like for a Jewish person who was forced to live in a Nazi ghetto?
Life was very difficult for Jews who were in the ghettos. They were only allowed to leave to perform forced labor. The ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire and guards. They were fed very little, and they were beaten and killed for any small infraction of the rules—or for no reason whatsoever. In addition, by forbidding school and religious meetings, Nazis also suppressed their culture.
4. What are some examples of ways in which people resisted the Nazi Party’s treatment of Jews?
In other countries, most notably France, people hid Jewish children from the Nazis in their homes. In Denmark, the Danes helped most of their Jewish population flee to Sweden. In addition, Jews resisted the Nazis themselves by establishing illegal schools in the ghettos and taking up arms against the soldiers.
5. How were Jewish people treated when they were sent to a concentration camp?
Many Jews were forced into the cramped cattle cars of trains without food and water for the long trip to the camps. At the camps they were separated from their families. Their belongings and clothing were taken from them, and their heads were shaved. They were tattooed with a prisoner number, given prison clothes to wear, and starved. All the while, many were beaten and killed.
6. What was the ultimate purpose of the concentration camps?
The ultimate purpose of the concentration camps was to efficiently exterminate and cremate as many “undesirable” people as possible. Hitler called this horrific scheme “The Final Solution.”
7. In 1945, Germany began to lose World War II. What was the fate of the concentration camps and their prisoners?
In an attempt to erase all evidence of their war crimes, the Nazis tried to destroy the camps. They also forced the prisoners to march long distances away from where they had been held.
8. American and British soldiers attempted to liberate some of the concentration camps. What did they find when they arrived at them?
American and British soldiers found neat and tidy surroundings outside the camps and starving and dying prisoners, as well as evidence of mass extermination, inside them.
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