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Contents page

Page 1: Research (Jews)

Page 2: Research (Jews)

Page 3: Research (Jews)

Page 4: Research (Jews)

Page 5: Research (Disabled)

Page 6: Bibliography

Page 7: Bibliography

Page 8: Essay (intro& background)

Page 9: Essay (body)

Page 10: Essay (body)

Page 11: Essay (conclusion)

The Nazi officer’s wife

 Jews were forced to hand in their radios and typewriters which were then
distributed among Austrian Christians by Nazi’s. The idea was if they couldn’t
communicate with each other, they would be isolated and easily manipulated and
terrorized.
 The man sent to remove Jews from Vienna was Adolf Eichmann. Huge prices
were set for Jews to get their freedom. The rich handed in everything they owned
and the non-rich families sometimes had to decide who was going to stay and
who was going to be free because of the exorbitant amounts they had to pay for
tickets.
 March 12 1938 was the day that Austria was invaded by the German army. Life
before then wasn’t exactly perfect but it was quite comfortable and people could
roam the streets without fear of being killed or sent to a concentration camp by
the gang of thugs in brown shirts who drove in big trucks, flashed their guns and
swastika armbands. Even though Jews weren’t liked, they only had to face
bullying and discrimination before that day.
 After the 1940s the words ‘concentration camp’ didn’t only mean being sent to
work hard labour.
 Everyone had turned against Jews.
 The Nazi’s accused Jews of theft of everything they owned which gave the
Austrians a ‘right’ to steal it all back. They were accused of plotting to kill and
conquer them.
 They were restricted, fired from jobs, taken out of schools and were segregated
from everyone else.
 Jewish boys and men were hunted and dragged to a place unknown, possibly a
concentration camp. Others went into hiding until the Nazi’s had calmed down.
 Their houses were seized and given to ‘good’ Austrians.
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 Out of the 185 000 only about 100 000 managed to escape but the remainder
was forced at gunpoint to register. Some women were pulled from the long lines
of registration and sent to work in plantations. In the Martens plantation in
Osterburg the working conditions weren’t favorable. Women had to work from six
till noon then from one till six in the evening, six days a week. They lived in rooms
with about 3 other roommates. They slept on iron beds with straw mattresses in
cold conditions with nothing but sheets and a single blanket. They had to live on
half a loaf of bread from Sunday to Wednesday. They got a cold soup made from
deranged vegetables that couldn’t be sold. Their masters favoured the hard and
fast worker but abused the others. Some had to work while pregnant. They were
told that they would work for 6 weeks and some did return home after six weeks
but others were sent to work in a paper factory.
 They worked for up to 80 hours a week.
 Sometimes the overseers at the farms felt for the women working and showed a
tiny bit of humanity.
 At the paper factory they had to dress well so the owners wouldn’t have to be
reminded of their miserable lives and conditions.
 Some Jews pretended not to be Jewish. Others even fully converted to
Christianity.
 They were checked if they had any Jewish blood running in them. Even if their
ancestors were Jewish and they weren’t, people were considered Jewish.
 They had to wear yellow stars marked ‘Jude’
 They were allowed to send anything through mail to their families but then those
privileges were revoked and they could only send money and food
 The working conditions for the women were so bad that some of them even
stopped menstruating
 Even though the women worked in terrible conditions they still had hope that one
day the Nazi reign would end and they’d go back to living normally with their
families. Some days they would face reality and be hopeless because the Nazi’s
were conquering more and more countries.
 Jews were kept out of the sight of Germans most of the time because of the guilt
and compassion they might feel.

 Never again (a history of the Holocaust)

 Hitler expressed his attitude towards the Jews when the Nazi party still had 6
members in 1920.
4

 A demand was put forth in 1920 that all Jews who had come to Germany after
1914 should be forced to leave even if they were contributing to the German
economy and life and in 1938 it was carried out.
 On March 9 of 1933 the first attack on Jews took place. Storm troopers in groups
of five to thirty surrounded Jews and beat them until ‘blood ran from their heads
and faces’. After this day the violence against Jews became worse and
consistent. The first concentration camp was opened on this day.
 The Nazi’s planned to boycott the Jews on the first of April but a protest was held
in New York, America which threatened a counter-boycott of all German-made
goods.
 From 1933 to the end of 1938 about 453 721 Jewish Germans were taken in by
other countries who had not been conquered by Germany as refugees. South
Africa took in about 26 100 refugees
 The British took in children from ages 3 months to 17 years old with only a
document if identity needed. This was done to get them out of danger.
 The children travelled alone and most of them never saw their parents again.
 A ghetto was a confined area filled with Jews which was set up by the president
of the main Reich office, General Reinhard Heydrich. These places were
surrounded by barbed wire, brick walls and armed guards.
 The morning of 19 April 1943, Germans entered the Warsaw ghetto. Even though
the Jews were fighting back they had a shortage of weapons
 Against the Germans. Their biggest advantages were the grenades
supplemented by petrol filled bottles.
 The fighting lasted for a month.
 On April 20th Germans broke into the Jewish hospital and killed all patients as
they lay in their beds sick and wounded. After that they burned the building with
nurses and the patients inside.
 Survivors are often asked why they didn’t resist and they respond by saying that
they could resist soldiers because they were unarmed and weak from starvation.
Parents could resist because they were too busy taking care of their children as
best as they could. They couldn’t risk being sent to concentration camps or being
deported and taken away from their families.
 7000 Jews had been killed in the fighting and 30 000 more were deported to
Treblinka where they were then killed.
 ‘Jewish self defense in the Warsaw ghetto has become a fact. Jewish armed
resistance and retaliation have become a reality. I have been witness to the
magnificent heroic struggle of the Jewish fighters’ this is a writing from Mordechai
Anielewicz to Yitzhak Zuckerman before he was killed.
 Revolts did not only take place in the Warsaw ghetto but many more other
ghettos revolted. There were even revolts in the concentration camps.
5

 The Jewish Self-Defense Organization developed slogans like ‘Fight for life to the
last breath’ to motivate Jews not to back down. They would have rather died
trying to defend themselves than dying for no reason.
 The Jews ‘saved’ others so that someone could tell the story or ‘relate to our
story ‘as Liebekinds wife said.
 The Jewish Self-Defense Organization developed appeals that said to ‘fall upon
the enemy in time, kill and disarm him’

Disabled people during the Nazi regime

 Disabled people were believed to be a burden to society and they believed that
the mass killings of disabled people would lessen the amount of future disabled
generations and they based this idea on eugenic research.
 In 1933 the Law of prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring was passed. It
meant that people who were presumed unfit for having children were sterilized.
 Prisons, nursing homes, asylums, special schools and care homes for the elderly
were targeted.
 From 1933-39 360 000 people were forced to be sterilized.
 After 1939 the killing of disabled individuals began
 The Aktion T4\T4 was a campaign of mass murder which targeted people with
disabilities in Nazi Germany by involuntary euthanasia. It was never officially
announced to the public to keep it a secret.
 Parents were told that their kids were being sent for improved care and after a
while they were told that pneumonia had killed them
 Six killing centers were established because the previous method of lethal
injection and starvation was deemed too slow to cope with the bug number of
adults.
6

 In the killing centers situated in Brandenburg the first experimental gassings took
place and thousands of disabled patients were killed in gas chambers disguised
as shower rooms
 It is believed that an estimation of about 250 000 disabled people were killed
during the Nazi regime
 The bodies of these people were disagreed by being put in a giant oven called
crematoria or as they told parents “cremated to kill disease”
 In August 1941, Adolf Hitler ordered the program to end due to the mounting
public criticism of the euthanasia killings
 . Even though the euthanasia program had ended people still did kill those
disabled as they were deemed useless
 Nazi Germany wasn’t the first and only regime that practiced forced sterilization
of disabled people. As early as 1907 American states passed compulsory
sterilisation laws.
 A Catholic churchman addressed the mass killings of disabled patients during a
sermon and this led Hitler to ending the program temporarily. The killings did
restart in 1942
 Their only exceptions were the disabled war heroes who received sheltered
employment.

Bibliography

1. Cook, I. (2008) The holocaust and disabled people, BBC News. Available at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/fact/the_holocaust_and_disabled_people_faq_freque
ntly_asked_questions.shtml (Accessed: 16 April 2025).
2. Holocaust memorial , U.S. (no date) The holocaust explained , United States
holocaust memorial museum. Available at:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-murder-of-people-with-
disabilities (Accessed: 16 April 2025).
3. Day trust, H. memorial (2023) Disabled people, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
Available at: https://hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/nazi-
persecution/disabled-people/ (Accessed: 16 April 2025).
4. Hahn-Beer, E. and Rosenblat, B. (2003) Nazi officers’ wife: How One Jewish
woman survived the Holocaust. Edith Hahn Beer. Jewish Contemporary Classics.
5. Gilbert, M. (2015) Never again: A history of the Holocaust. New York:
RosettaBooks.
7

6. Koen Smilde Year: 2018 Container: Anne Frank Website Publisher: Anne Frank
House URL: https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/why-did-hitler-
hate-jews
7. Adolf Hitler | Biography, Rise to Power, & Facts
By Alan Bullock Year: 2018 Container: Encyclopædia Britannica URL:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adolf-Hitler
8

Prompt: To what extent were the undesirables (Jews) persecuted and

There were about 525 000 Jews living in Germany before the holocaust but the number
drastically reduced to 37 000 after the Nazi rule. This essay will discuss to what extent
Jews particularly female Jews were treated and how they resisted the Nazi government.
The idea of a pure Aryan race was adopted by the Nazi’s from the study of eugenics by
Francis Galton that tried proving that humans could be improved by selectively breeding
populations which was later proven to be scientifically incorrect. Because of their belief
in eugenics, the Nazi’s killed and tortured anyone they found unfit to be a part of their
pure Aryan race which were labelled as the undesirables. Not only did they target Jews
in Germany but also Jews in the countries they conquered and conceivably Jews in the
entire world.
Before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, Jews had been victims of discrimination and
persecution since the Middle Ages, often for religious reasons(Smilde, 2018, para 4).
They were usually forced to convert or they weren’t allowed to practice specific
professions. Hitler was exposed to Anti-Semitic ideas at a young age. To what extent he
shared them at that point is not certain(Smilde, 2018, para 5). After fighting in war and
sustaining a few injuries, Hitler took up political work in 1919. In 1920 he was put in
charge of the German Worker’s Party propaganda and left the army to focus more on
improving his position in the party. He was then named National-sozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei in that same year. Hitler expressed his attitude towards the Jews when
the Nazi party still had 6 members in 1920. In the same year a demand was put forth
that all Jews who had come to Germany after 1914 should be forced to leave even if
they contributed to the German economy and it was carried out in 1938. The first attack
on Jews took place on March 9 of 1933. Storm troopers in groups of five to thirty
surrounded Jews and beat them until blood ran from their faces and heads. On this day
the first concentration camp was opened. The Nazis planned to boycott Jews on the first
of April but a protest was held in New York, America which threatened to counter-
boycott of all German-made goods.

When the German army invaded Austria in March of 1938, the Jews that lived there
were stripped of their privileges and their belongings were taken from them. Children
were taken out of schools, people fired from their jobs and were segregated from
others. Their houses were seized and given to ‘good’ Austrians. The idea of Jews being
able to communicate with one another made it harder for Nazis to manipulate and
9

isolate them, so instead they took their communication devices. These were then
repossessed by the good Austrians. Austrians were allowed to steal back from the Jews
who were accused of stealing. The biggest privilege that the Jews lost was freedom.
They had the choice to buy their freedom at the beginning of the Holocaust and the rich
had to sell everything they owned for a ticket to freedom whereas the poorer families
had to decide which family member would be free. They usually picked children as they
still had more life to live. This was the beginning of the horror of Nazi rule for the Jewish
community in Austria. During this time other Jews decided to convert to Christianity and
others tried to hide the fact that they were Jews. They were forced to wear yellow stars
marked ‘Jude’ and even if they had past family members who were Jews they were
forced to wear the star of David. Jewish men and boys were taken to a place unknown,
possibly a concentration camp, which at that time no longer meant being sent to work in
hard labour.

Jews were then sent to go for registration where some females were dragged out of the
long registration lines and sent to work in plantations. Working in these plantations was
not easy as the working conditions were not favourable. The women had to work from
six in the morning till noon then from one till six in the evening, six days a week. They
were forced to live in tiny rooms with 3 other roommates where they slept on iron beds
with straw mattresses in cold conditions with nothing but sheets and a single blanket. All
they got to eat was a half a loaf of bread which was supposed to last from Sunday to
Wednesday and occasionally a cold soup with deranged vegetables that couldn’t be
sold. Their masters showed no mercy to those who worked slowly, beating and forcing
them to work longer to make up for being slow on the fields. To show how cruel and
merciless these masters were, other women were even forced to work while pregnant
and they worked for up to 80 hours per week. Sometimes the overseers would feel pity
for the women and show a bit of humanity by covering for the women when they took
walks in the town on their day off. By the end of the six weeks some women were able
to go home while others were assigned to work in other places. Particularly the women
who worked in Osterburg had to go and work in paper factories. The uniforms at the
paper factory were better than those at the plantations but only because the owners
10

didn't want to be reminded of the worker's miserable lives and conditions. Working
conditions were even worse at the factories. Even though they worked in terrible
conditions they still had hope that life would eventually go back to the way it was before
Nazi Germany but that hope was shattered when they heard how Germany was
conquering more countries.
Ghettos were set by the president of the main Reich office as a place for to confine and
segregate Jews. These places were surrounded by barbed wire, brick walls and armed
guards. Germans entered the Warsaw ghetto on the 19 th of April in 1943. A war broke
out between the Jews and the Germans. The Jews had advantages like grenades
supplemented by petrol filled bottles but even then they were still losing because the
Germans had more weapons and soldiers. The war lasted a month. Germans burned
down buildings with people in them. Survivors who were asked why they didn’t resist
often answered by saying they were unarmed and weak from starvation. Parents
couldn’t resist because they were too busy trying to protect and transport their children
to safer parts. They couldn’t risk being sent to concentration camps or being deported
and separated from their families. Seven thousand Jews were killed in the fighting and
thirty thousand more were deported to Treblinka where they were also killed. ‘Jewish
self defense in the Warsaw ghetto has become a fact. Jewish armed resistance and
retaliation have become a reality. I have been witness to the magnificent heroic struggle
of the Jewish fighters’ this was a writing from Mordechai Anielewicz to Yitzhak
Zuckerman before he was killed. Aside from the Warsaw ghetto revolting, many other
ghettos revolted. The Jewish Self-defense Organization developed slogans like ‘Fight
for life to the last breath’ to motivate Jews not to back down. They would have rather
died trying to defend themselves than to die for no reason. They ‘saved’ others so they
could live to tell the story or ‘relate to our story’ as Liebekinds wife said.
The worst method of torture/ persecution used by the German Nazis was the gas
chambers. People were told that they were going to the camps but had to be disinfected
first unaware that that would be their death. When they got into these ‘shower’ rooms a
gas was released that killed everyone inside and they were then taken to crematorium
furnaces where they burned. Before they were cremated the SS men cut women’s hair
and took off all valuables from their bodies. The Jews resisting was mainly to stall the
armies because their deaths were inevitable with the Nazis having large groups of men
and huge amounts of weapons to fight them off however other countries did try to help
and take a few refugees and by the end of 1938, 453 721 Jewish Germans were taken
in by countries that had not been conquered by Germany.