Name: The Holocaust,Genocides, and Mass Murder of WWII: Crash Course European History #40
Uploaded: 2020-04-13T16:57:47.000Z
Duration: 13 min 39 s
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Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

Today, we're going to talk about the Holocaust, which was an integral part of Nazism in World

The genocide of the Holocaust--millions of Jewish people were systematically murdered--shows

And we've thought a lot about how much footage to show from the camps where so many millions

were condemned to death, and we've decided not to have a Thought Bubble in today's

But we will be showing some archival footage, not least because anti-semitic disinformation

campaigns throughout the last seventy years have sought to minimize or outright deny that

Maybe there's no countering such conspiracy theories--the evidence of the Holocaust is

vast, including hundreds of thousands of witness accounts, testimony from war crimes trials,

and extensive documentation by the Nazis themselves of their attempts to systematically elminate

Jewish people from the world--and also others deemed inferior, including disabled people,

Roma people, many Slavs, Communists, and LGBT people.

But we think it is important to try to tell the truth, both in what we say and in what

Some maintain that the Holocaust is incomprehensible--an outsized phenomenon beyond ordinary concepts

And in some ways that's true, but it ignores the centuries of anti-Semitism that laid the

groundwork for the dehumanization of Jewish people that intensified in the 20th century.

It is critical that we remember the horrors of the holocaust.

History is, in the broadest sense, collective memory, and as Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel

has written, “Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.”

[Intro] The beginning of the mass murder occurred

late in the 1930s, when doctors mobilized to murder some 200,000 disabled people in

the T4 project, which aimed to save the purported purity of the German race.

In Permission for the Destruction of Worthless Life (1920), a noted jurist and a psychiatrist

argued that people deemed “without value” should be eliminated.

T4 murderers used carbon monoxide gas to kill their victims, including in mobile gas chambers.

Many of these victims were taken from institutions without the knowledge of their families.

The list of dangerous people or people without value resulted from multiple hatreds: of disabled

people, but also of Jewish people, and Sinti and Roma people, and certain groups of Slavs

such as Poles, Czechs, and Russians, also homosexuals, black people, and Jehovah's

In the 1930s, political opponents and these marginalized people comprised those in early

concentration camps, which were more like large-scale prisons, albeit ones where murder

was common, as distinct from the extermination camps that were set up later in the war, and

which functioned primarily as places to systematically murder people.

In 1939, as German soldiers moved through Poland they murdered many Poles including

Polish Jews, especially going after the most literate citizens, like political leaders,

And as Nazi forces moved eastward, Christian citizens joined in this murderous rampage

against Jewish people, as a supposedly righteous crusade against those who had killed Jesus.

Jesus, for the record, was Jewish, and he was killed by Roman authorities not Jewish

ones, but none of this hatred was fact-based.

Special Nazi forces called the Einzatzgruppen took the lead but they were joined by civilians

Hitler had always aspired to rid Germany of Jews, initially by means like forced migration

or the creation of such dire living conditions that Jewish people would die at a rapid rate.

And the creation of the Warsaw ghetto embodied this hope for ethnic cleansing: some thirty

percent of the city's population was jammed into two percent of its space to live on drastically

reduced rations and necessities such as coal and medical supplies.

“The more that die, the better,” enthused Hans Frank, Governor of German occupied Poland.

And then, in the early years of the war, the plan for what became the Holocaust took shape,

in part because it was felt that Poles were not being converted into slave labor fast

enough and also because it was felt that Jewish people were not dying quickly enough.

As the Nazi invasion of the USSR (Operation Barbarossa) began to fail by the end of 1941,

Nazi officials set in motion a system of industrial killing modeled on the T4 program, including

plans for transport of Jewish and other victims to extermination camps.

They then communicated these plans to those responsible for carrying them out at the Wannsee

Conference outside Berlin in January 1942.

Jewish leaders were tasked with selecting members of their conquered communities supposedly

But these “resettlements” were not resettlements--instead, they entailed being transported to the new

extermination camps and gassed on arrival (as was the case for most children and women)

or worked to death (as was the case for boys and men and some women).

Some camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau were both labor and extermination camps, while

others such as Chelmno were solely to murder captives.

And it should also be noted that mass killings continued around captured cities and towns,

Nazi soldiers who objected, and there were some, were simply given other assignments.

It was possible, the record shows, to just say no.

But many soldiers and other authorities believed in the so-called “Final Solution” of killing

Soliders and other authorities were often white supremacists--although historians have

differing judgements about the weight of other motivations, such as obedience to authority,

the normalization of mass murder, or greed and opportunities to steal from victims--just

to name a few of the possible motivations.

Eventually, people were able to begin reporting not just the brutality of forced deportations

This was called the “Jewish mouth-radio.”

But resistance was incredibly difficult for people who were weakened by starvation, and

lack of medical care, and a range of other physical and mental abuse.

Still, in 1943 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto used guns provided by the Polish resistance to

The Germans slaughtered most of the ghetto inhabitants, with a few escapees joining other

In the camps themselves, resistance was even less plausible for people living on two hundred

calories a day and constantly monitored by heavily armed guards.

From the beginning, the Nazis, though proudly committed to, in Hitler's words, “the

destruction of the Jewish race in Europe,” did a lot to hide their mass murder.

Death camps had ornate entry gates adorned with cheering messages.

Those to be murdered were greeted by bands playing merry tunes.

So imagine the shock as new inmates were stripped of their illusions of safety in the camps:

“You see those flames?” one newly arrived wife and mother was asked by a seasoned prisoner.

. . Call it by the name we use: the bakery.