Unit 8 Holocaust.doc

Unit 8 HolocaustWhat can you think of from the following pictures? Cultural knowledge:1. What is holocaust?It is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany.2. What is Nazi Party? Nazi Party was a political party in Germany between 1919 and 1945. It was known as the German Workers Party (DAP) prior to a change of name in 1920. The partys last leader, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. Hitler rapidly established a totalitarian regime known as the Third Reich.Nazi ideology supported the racial purity of the German people and that of other Northwestern Europeans. The Nazis persecuted those they perceived as race enemies, that is life unworthy of living. This included Jews, Slavs, Roma, and so-called Mischlinge (person with mixed blood ) along with Communists, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, and others. The persecution reached its climax when the party and the German state which it controlled organized the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews and six million other people from the other targeted groups, in what has become known as the Holocaust. Hitlers desire to build a German empire through expansionist policies led to the outbreak of World War II in Europe.3. Some statisticsTotal number of People killed: 5,962,129Total number of Jewish Survivors from the Holocaust: 3,546,211Total number of Children killed: Over 1.5 millionTotal number of Camps: 27, with over seven being Extermination camps Section A Directions: You are expected to study this section in class. Dont preview.Word Pretest For each italicized word or phrase, choose the best meaning below. 1. They have been overcoming difficulties since the inception of the enterprise.A. conceptionB. formation C. birth 2. The main plank in their election programme is the promise to cut taxes.A. planB. policyC. a wooden board3. An irrevocable decision was finally by the committee.A. unalterable B. inevitableC. changeable4. The smuggled goods were confiscated by the customs authorities.A. collected B. seized C. received5. They were guilty of barbarous atrocities.A. actions B. crueltiesC. instances6. I made what I thought was a perfect innocuous remark and he got most upset.A. casualB. harmless C. hurting7. When the soldiers act in defiance of orders. They will be severely punished.A. defenseB. disobedienceC. violation8. She couldnt fathom why Mc Curry was causing such a scene.A. measureB. understandC. believe9. He is under the delusion that he can beat his opponent.A. opinionB. false impressionC. belief10. Chalk and cheese are disparate substances.A. similarB. differentC. relevant The Holocaust1From its inception, the Nazi made anti-Semitism a major plank of its political platform. Its Programme of 1920, which was declared to be irrevocable, maintained that race was the basis of the German state and denied Jews the right to German citizenship:Only he who is a folk-comrade can be a citizen. Only he who is of German blood regardless of his Church can be a folk-comrade. No Jew, therefore, can be a folk-comrade. 2 The same programme pledged the Party to opposition against “the Jewish spirit within and around us”. The anti-Semitism of Hitler, who became Fuhrer of the Party in 1921, amounted to extreme paranoia: Mein Kampf (1925-7), his political testament and the Nazi Partys “gospel” , contains anti-Semitism of the crudest and most hostile kind.3In the 1920s and early 1930s, Nazi anti-Semitism was expressed in propaganda and in isolated acts of violence against Jewish individuals and their property. However,the situation changed dramatically in 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany into a one-party state. The Nazis were then able to implement an anti-Semitic policy backed by the powers and resources of a major, modern industrial state.4 The Nazi onslaught on the Jews can be divided into two main phases. The first phase extended from Hitlers accession to power in 1933 until about 1941; the second phase lasted from 1941 to the end of the war in 1945.5In the first phase the Nazis concentrated principally on forcing the Jews to leave Germany. Their aim was to make Germany free of Jews, and to accomplish this they partly used “legal” means. Laws, such as the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935, were passed to deprive Jews of German citizenship, exclude them from universities, public office, the civil service, the professions and artistic life, and to confiscate and “Aryanize” their businesses. The result was that the livelihoods of Jews in Germany were destroyed and their survival in Germany became virtually impossible.6At the same time, the Nazis orchestrated an unrelenting round of acts of thuggery against the Jews, which they often represented as spontaneous uprisings of the “Aryan” masses against their Jewish oppressors. These culminated in the so-called Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) of 9-10 November 1938, when Jewish houses, shops, warehouses and synagogues were attacked throughout Germany, allegedly in retaliation for the murder by a Polish Jew of Earnest Vom Rath, third secretary of the German embassy in Paris. These attacks took place in a climate created by a constant barrage of anti-Semitic propaganda aimed at vilifying the Jews and justifying the measures taken against them. To a large extent, the Nazis achieved their objective: life became intolerable for the Jews and many left Germany.7The second phase of the Nazi onslaught on the Jews was even more extreme, and included the notorious “Final Solution” (slaughter plan). This phase was given impetus by a number of factors. First, after the outbreak of war in 1939，Jewish emigration became increasingly impractical and, in 1941, the Nazis themselves put an end to it. Second, the Nazi victories in the early part of the war brought vast numbers of Jews under German control. This was most marked during the eastward thrust of the German armies into Poland (1939) and Russia (1941), the two main centers of Jewish population in Europe. These victories magnified the “Jewish problem” for the Nazis and prompted more radical solutions. Finally, in the 1930s, the attacks on the Jews had been carried out in full view of the world. During the war, however, with the media tightly controlled and with armies and civilians on the move, atrocities could be committed without attracting much attention.8In January 1942, a number of leading Nazis met at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, to plan and co-ordinate the “Final Solution”, which involved nothing less than the extermination of the Jews in Europe.9The Nazis carefully guarded the secrecy of the operation. All documents relating to it were classified as top secret, and even within these documents, coded language was used to conceal what was really happening. Aspects of the operation itself were referred to by innocuous and up-beat expressions: for example, gassed Jews were recorded as having been “appropriately dealt with”.10The genocide of the Jews was affected in two main ways. First, special mobile units followed the advancing German armies and shot all the Jews they could find. These units operated with particular efficiency in Russia. Second, Jews were herded into camps (such as Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz - Birkenau) where they were either worker worked to death, starved or gassed. These camps were death factories in which the Nazis applied the industrial techniques of mass production to the destruction of human beings with ruthless efficiency.11During the war, the Jews made occasional attempts to resist. The supreme (typical) example of this resistance was the Warsaw ghetto (a concentrated area of Jews) uprising, which the Nazis only managed to put down at considerable cost to (for) themselves. There were also uprisings in the camps. But such acts of defiance were the exception. The Nazis managed to deceive, disorientate and terrorize their victims so effectively that most went unresisting to their deaths.12Intervention from outside Nazi-controlled Europe was largely ineffectual, especially after the outbreak of war. It took some time for news of the extermination programme to leak out, and even when it did it tended to be met with incredulity at first. However, some rescue operations were successfully mounted, though on a pitifully small scale. After the war, various organizations, both Jewish and non-Jewish, moved into Europe to help the survivors, many of whom expressed the understandable wish to emigrate and leave behind the trauma of their life in Europe.13It is not easy to penetrate the mentality of the Nazis, nor to fathom their reasons for committing such acts of unparalleled barbarism. There was, undoubtedly, an element of opportunism and expediency (private profit) in their policy. Anti-Semitism was endemic (regional) in German society, and the Jew was a popular “bogeyman” (terrible man, evil) against whom everyone could unite. This, however, cannot be the whole story, as the Nazis continued killing Jews almost to the very end of the war-long after, on any rational calculation, this policy could have yielded any possible “benefits”. Almost to the end, transport and materials desperately needed for the war effort were diverted to keep the camps running. This suggests that the Nazis were laboring under the delusion that it was the Jews, and not the Allies, who were their main enemy, a delusion which maker sense only in the context of some bizarre apocalyptic vision of the world.14In his political last will and testament, dictated in his bunker as Berlin collapsed in flamed around him, Hitler wrote: “Above all, I bind the leadership of the nation and its subordinates to the painful observance of the racial laws and to merciless resistance against the world-prisoner of all nations, international Jewry.” This monstrous vision of the world fused together with deadly clarity all the disparate elements of one thousand years of theological and racial anti-Semitism and Judeophobia in Europe.15 The Nazis and their collaborators murdered around six million Jews, totally destroying the great Jewish communities of Germany and of central and eastern Europe. As a result, the center of gravity in Jewish culture moved irrevocably from Europe to Israel and the USA. Thus Holocaust was a pivotal element of twentieth-century Jewish history, an event would soon have a profound impact on Jewish life and thought.Total Words: 1 240Total Reading Time:_The text is based on The Jewish Enigma by David Englander, the Open University.Reading Comprehension:Circle the letter of the best answer.1. Anti - Semitism became a major political of the Nazi Party from the time when_A. the Nazi Party was foundedB. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany C. Germany became a one-party state2. The Nazi onslaught on the Jews can be divided into two main phases: _A. 1925 -1927 and 1927-1933B. 1933 -1941 and 1941-1945C. 1938 -1941 and 1941-19453. Two main centers of Jewish population in Europe were_A. Germany and RussiaB. Poland and Russia C. German