Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PART ONE
PART TWO
1. Study sources A and B. Which would be more useful to a historian
explaining the causes of the Holocaust? (7)
7. Study all the sources. ‘The only reason the holocaust happened
was because people were afraid of not obeying Hitler.’ Do you
agree? Explain your answer (10)
Source A
Speech by Adolf Hitler, January 31, 1939.
Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals -
Washington, U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1949-1953, Vol XIII, p. 131:
Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers
in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more
into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the
earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race
in Europe!
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Source B
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Source C
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Source D
Smuggling began at the very moment that the Jewish area of residence
was established; its inhabitants were forced to live on 180 grams of bread
a day, 220 grams of sugar a month, 1 kg. of jam and 1 kg. of honey, etc. It
was calculated that the officially supplied rations did not cover even 10
percent of the normal requirements. If one had wanted really to restrict
oneself to the official rations then the entire population of the ghetto
would have had to die of hunger in a very short time....
The German authorities did everything to seal off the ghetto hermetically
and not to allow in a single gram of food. A wall was put up around the
ghetto on all sides that did not leave a single millimeter of open space....
They fixed barbed wire and broken glass to the top of the wall. When that
failed to help, the Judenrat was ordered to make the wall higher, at the
expense of the Jews, of course....
Several kinds of guards were appointed for the walls and the passages
through them; the categories of guards were constantly being changed
and their numbers increased. The walls were guarded by the gendarmerie
together with the Polish police; at the ghetto wall there were gendarmerie
post, Polish police and Jewish police...The victims of the smuggling were
mainly Jews, but they were not lacking either among the Aryans (Poles).
Auerswald, too, employed sharply repressive measures to stop the
smuggling. Several times smugglers were shot at the central lock-up on
Gesiowka Street. Once there was a veritable slaughter (100 persons were
shot near Warsaw). Among the Jewish victims of the smuggling there were
tens of Jewish children between 5 and 6 years old, whom the German
killers shot in great numbers near the passages and at the walls....
And despite that, without paying attention to the victims, the smuggling
never stopped for a moment. When the street was still slippery with the
blood that had been spilled, other smugglers already set out, as soon as
the "candles" had signaled that the way was clear, to carry on with the
work....
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Source E
...the greater the number of Jews liquidated, the more consolidated will
the situation in Europe be after this war.
Joseph Goebbels,
March 6, 1942
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Source F
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Source G
Propaganda Poster:“He (the Jew) is responsible for the war.”
From FHM Photo Archives.
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Source H
Picture (Joanna Duncan) Berlin Holocaust Museum
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Source I
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Source J
Shema by Primo Levi (1975)
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
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http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/RESOURCE/document/document.htm# (A-D)
http://www.holocaust-history.org/pamphlets/irving/pamphlet.shtm (E-F)
http://www.flholocaustmuseum.org/history_wing/assets/room1/17407.jpg (G)
Photo taken Oct 2007 in Berlin Museum (I)
http://shalomrav.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/holocaust2.jpg (J)