SOCIAL SCIENCES: HISTORY
GRADE 9
TASK 2: TERM 1 TEST
TIME: 1 hour
TOTAL: 50
Extermination camps and genocide, the massacre and the 'final solution'
GENOCIDE • Under Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist German Workers'
Party became very strong in Germany from 1933 to 1945.
• The Nazis wanted to get rid of people who they thought
were not as good as them. They especially hated Jews
and thought they were evil.
• In the beginning, they made life difficult for the Jews in
Germany and throughout Europe.
• Later they decided to kill them. This mass murder was
called the Holocaust.
• During World War II, the Nazi policy of persecution evolved
into genocide. This is known as the Holocaust.
THE 'FINAL • First Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were
SOLUTION' rounded up and shot. They were buried in mass graves.
After 1939, the Nazis set up death camps (or extermination
camps), where Jews would be systematically killed. The
Nazis called this the 'Final Solution'.
• Hitler's final solution rests on the belief that Aryans are a
superior people and that the strength and purity of this
'master race' must be preserved.
• To achieve this, the Nazis condemned not only the Jews,
but also other groups they considered inferior or unworthy
or 'enemies of the state' to slavery and death.
ELIMINATION CAMPS • Most of these camps were built in Poland, which had the
largest Jewish population in Europe. Jewish people from all
over Europe were taken to these camps in overcrowded
cattle trucks.
• Life in the camps was a cycle of hunger, humiliation and
work that almost always ended in death.
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• The prisoners were crammed into crude wooden barracks
that each held up to a thousand people. They shared their
overcrowded quarters as well as their meagre meals with
hordes of rats and fleas. At the camps they were forced to
work and as soon as they could no longer do it, they were
killed.
• As deadly as overwork, starvation, beatings and bullets,
they did not kill quickly enough to satisfy the Nazis.
THE MASSACRE • To lead to mass slaughter and starvation, they add a third
way to kill - murder with poison gas. Most were killed by
poison gas. The most famous camp was Auschwitz in
Poland.
• Two million Jews are thought to have been murdered
there. About six million of the nine million Jews in Europe
died in the Holocaust.
• Most of them came from Eastern European countries.
Jewish communities that had existed for thousands of years
were destroyed.
• They included 250,000 mentally or physically disabled,
intellectuals, political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah's
witnesses and 500,000 Roma [gypsies]. The Nazis also
conducted horrific medical experiments on approximately
350,000 people without their consent.
Resistance in Germany weeps the Nazis
Why didn't most people resist the Nazis?
• Many people believed the propaganda they were told.
• Others did not want to criticize the government because their lives had
improved under the Nazi government - they had jobs, homes and food.
• Most were willing to go along with the Nazis policy as long as the policy
had no influence on their own lives.
• Superior, armed force of the Germans against a largely unarmed
population.
• German tactics of 'collective responsibility' (typically 50 to 100 people
died in retaliation for every German soldier killed)
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