Historical+Background

Before Nazi's came into power before 1933, they believed in Anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was the hatred or discrimination of Jews. A major example of Anti-Semitism was the Holocaust which was a started in 1940 and ended in 1 945. One major political figure who believed in Anti-Semitism was Adolf Hitler. In 1919, Hitler created a small political party. He encouraged national pride, militarism, and racially "pure" Germany. He changed the name of the party to the National Socialist German Workers' Party, called for short, the Nazi Party. By 1920, over 3,000 members joined Hitlers Party and a year later Hitler was announced the official leader of the Nazi Party. Hitlers attempt to overthrow dictatorship in Munich failed and he was charged with treason. He was sentenced to five years in prison but was eligible for early parole. But a year later, he was still in prison but he got early parole. While he was in prison he wrote Mein Kampf meaning "My Struggle" in German. Mein Kampf was Hitlers views on political philosophy and also explained his hatred for jews. According to Hitler, Jews were the cause of many things he didn't like. Such as, modern art, and problems in society. Even though the jewish population was going to take over the nation even though it was under 1%. Hitler also stated that it was the Jews fault for losing WWI. The reason Hitler believed this was because many jewish people worked in the German Social Democrat Party. Jews took a position on democracy but according to Hitler argued against democracy and stated "a hundred blockheads do not equal one man in wisdom."

Within three years, of Hitler coming into power, he took over most land in Europe, and Northern Africa. When the invasion of Poland began, WWII was declared. Germany began engaging in many violent acts. March 12-13, 1938 Germany entered in Austria which had a population of 200,000 Jews mainly living in Vienna that were now under Hitlers control. During 1941, the Nazi Party started targeting jews, gypsies, the disabled, slavs. Mass shootings rang out in crowds many of those people were killed. Over the course of time the Nazi Party decided to bring jewish, slavs, and gypsies into concentration camps and have them work.

Jewish people were the most to be killed in these camps because the Nazi's saw them as a danger to Germany. Scientists and doctors were often brought in to perform cruel treatments to citizens in the camps. They did cruel experiments by genetic altering of twins, learning to treat and prevent contagious diseases, and altitude changes. But some of the experiments helped modern medicine today. It helped by showing how much tolerance the human body could take, what toxins or poisons were deadly to patients, and also they got more knowledge of the human body. At the end of the Holocaust, many survivors found they had no homes to return to. Their communities had been shattered, their homes destroyed or occupied by strangers, and their families decimated and dispersed. So many victims of the holocaust went to displacement camps or refugee camps provided by the Allied powers.

On December 1945, President Harry Truman loosened restriction quotas on immigration to the U.S. More than 41,000 displaced persons immigrated to the United States; approximately 28,000 were Jews. In 1948, the U.S. Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, which provided approximately 400,000 U.S. immigration visas for displaced persons between January 1, 1949, and December 31, 1952. This helped many victims of the Holocaust because they got to escape the Final Solutions. A year after the Holocaust was over approximately 90% of refugees in America were Jewish.

The number of concentration camps leads over to 15,000 that the Nazi's created. After several months of the camps being opened and everyone had been killed, the Nazi officers would destroy the camps trying to take away the evidence. When prisoners needed to switch camps, the would be led on a Death March which would consist of several miles of walking. Many found it impossible to walk and they would collapse from exhaustion and were shot. When prisoners got to the camps they were either going to be starved, put into gas showers, shot down, or burned. In most concentration camps there was a crematorium where they would burn dead bodies. But some camps such as Auschwitz treated their prisoners differently. When they reached the camps they had their heads shaved, got a uniform, were branded with a number, and were put into lines to decide if they lived or died. That differs from other camps because in other camps people were just sent to death. In the end, at Auschwitz 1.1–1.3 million people were gassed, 9 out of 10 of them Jews; at Treblinka between 750,000 and 870,000 Jews were killed; at Belzec some 500,000 Jews were murdered; at Chelmno some 150,000 Jews were gassed; at Sobibor at least 206,000 Jews were murdered; at Majdanek some 170,000. The total may exceed 2,750,000 in the killing centers alone.

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