The Holocaust

A condensed, point-by-point summary of the module, for reviewing right before a test or exam.

1. The Long Roots of European Antisemitism. Centuries of religious and then racial antisemitism prepared the ideological ground for the Nazi genocide.
2. Legal Persecution in Nazi Germany and Austria, 1933-1939. Nazi Germany escalated persecution through legal stages, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht.
3. Invasion of Poland and the Ghetto System, 1939-1941. Germany's occupation of Poland confined Jews in sealed, starving ghettos such as Lodz and Warsaw.
4. The Einsatzgruppen and the Holocaust by Bullets, 1941. Mobile SS killing units shot well over a million Jews and others in the occupied Soviet Union after 1941.
5. The Wannsee Conference and the Operation Reinhard Camps. The January 1942 Wannsee Conference coordinated the "Final Solution," formalized in the Operation Reinhard camps.
6. Auschwitz-Birkenau: Extermination and Slave Labor Combined. Auschwitz uniquely combined mass extermination with slave-labor exploitation before its liberation in January 1945.
7. Deportation, National Collaboration, Resistance, and Rescue. Europe's Jews were deported by rail under widely varying national collaboration, resistance, and rare rescue.
8. Other Victims, the Demographic Toll, and Postwar Justice. Roma, disabled people, and others also perished; the six-million toll shaped Nuremberg, Eichmann's trial, and memory.