HOLOCAUST

World War 2...brought out the best of Men (Men like Prime Minister Winston Churchill, FDR, General Patton, General Ike...Men of Easy Company and so forth)....and the worse of men....Hitler and his merry men.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

The Holocaust (the word derives from the Greek holókauston (Oλόκαυστον = Oλον [completely] + καυστον [burnt])., also known as Ha-Shoah (Hebrew: השואה), Khurbn (Yiddish: חורבן or Halokaust, האלאקאוסט, is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler. [1]Other groups were also persecuted and killed by the regime, including 220,000 Sinti and Roma (see Porajmos), as well as the disabled (see Action T4), homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet POWs, Polish citizens, and political prisoners. [

Many scholars do not include these groups in the definition of the Holocaust, defining it as the genocide of the Jews, or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" ("Die Endlösung der Judenfrage"). Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises considerably; estimates generally place the total number of victims at nine to 11 million.[4]The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word halekaustann, meaning a "completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)" sacrificial offering to a god. Since the late 19th century, "holocaust" has primarily been used to refer to disasters or catastrophes.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was first used to describe Hitler's treatment of the Jews from as early as 1942, though it did not become a standard reference until the 1950s. By the late 1970s, however, the conventional meaning of the word became the Nazi genocide. The term is also used by many in a narrower sense, to refer specifically to the unprecedented destruction of European Jews in particular. Some historians credited Elie Wiesel with giving the term 'Holocaust' its present meaning.

The biblical word Shoa (שואה), also spelled Shoah and Sho'ah, meaning "calamity" in Hebrew, became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the early 1940s.[5] Shoa is preferred by many Jews and a growing number of others for a number of reasons, including the potentially theologically offensive nature of the original meaning of the word holocaust.

The word "genocide" was coined during the Holocaust. In 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Raphael Lemkin's most important work, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in the United States. This book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II, along with the definition of the term genocide.[6]scott is the best person.

The Holocaust was characterized by the efficient and systematic attempt on an industrial scale to assemble and kill as many people as possible, using all of the resources and technology available to the Nazi state.[7] Germany was, at the time, one of the world's leading nations in terms of technology, industry, infrastructure, research, education, bureaucratic efficiency, and many other fields.[8]For example, detailed lists of potential victims were made and maintained using Dehomag statistical machinery, and meticulous records of the killings were produced.

As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property to the Nazis, which was then precisely catalogued and tagged, and for which receipts were issued (the issuing of receipts also helped to lull the victims into a false sense of security, as it made them believe that they would later be reunited with their property and luggage).

In addition, considerable effort was expended over the course of the Holocaust to find increasingly efficient means of killing more people.[9] Early mass murders by German soldiers of thousands of Jews in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, by shooting, had caused widespread reports of discomfort and demoralization among the German troops. Commanders had complained to their superiors that the face-to-face killings had a severely negative psychological impact on soldiers.

The German Nazi government decided to pursue more mechanical methods, beginning with experiments in explosives and poisons.In his book, Russia's War, British historian Richard Overy describes how the Nazis sought more efficient ways to kill people. In 1941, after occupying Belarus, they used mental patients from Minsk asylums as guinea pigs. Initially, they tried shooting them by having them stand one behind the other, so that several people could be killed with one bullet, but it was too slow. Then they tried dynamite, but few were killed and many were left wounded with hands and legs missing, so that the Germans had to finish them off with machine guns.

In October 1941, in Mogilev, they tried a Gaswagen or "gas car". First, they used a light military car, and it took more than 30 minutes for people to die; then, they used a larger truck exhaust and it took only eight minutes to kill all the people inside.[10]In the spring of 1942, the Aktion Reinhard camps began operating. Carbon monoxide was used in the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, whereas Zyklon B,a cyanide-based insecticide, was employed at Majdanek and Auschwitz.[11]The disposal of large numbers of bodies presented a logistical problem as well.

The Nazis were constantly studying ways to improve fuel efficiency, using a combination of different fuels, such as coke, wood and body fat. According to surviving Sonderkommandos, multiple bodies were added to the furnaces to obtain optimal fuel efficiency and speed, particularly when the demand was higher.[5]Corporate involvement in the Holocaust has created significant controversy in recent years. Rudolf Höß, Auschwitz camp commandant, said that far from having to advertise their slave labour services, the concentration camps were actually approached by various large German businesses, some of which are still in existence.[6]

Technology developed by IBM also played a role in the categorization of prisoners, through the use of punched card machines.[7][12]ScaleThe Holocaust was geographically widespread and systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory, where victims were targeted in what are now 35 separate European countries, and sent to labor camps in some countries or extermination camps in others.[13] The mass killing was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than 7 million Jews in 1939; about 5 million Jews were killed there, including 3 million in occupied Poland and over 1 million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece.Documented evidence suggests that the Nazis planned to carry out their "final solution" in other regions if they were conquered, such as the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.[14]

The extermination continued in different parts of Nazi-controlled territory until the end of World War II, only completely ending when the Allies entered Germany itself and forced the Nazis to surrender in May 1945. Cruelty The Holocaust was carried out without any reprieve even for children or babies, and victims were often tortured before being killed. Nazis carried out deadly medical experiments on prisoners, including children. Dr. Josef Mengele, medical officer at Auschwitz and chief medical officer at Birkenau, was known as the "Angel of Death" for his medical and eugenical experiments, e.g., trying to change people's eye color by injecting dye into their eyes.[15] Aribert Heim, another doctor who worked at Mauthausen, was known as "Doctor Death".

The guards in the concentration camps carried out beatings and acts of torture on a daily basis. Some women (usually convicted prostitutes) worked in brothels for the guards and privileged prisoners. It has been argued that some were forced to do so.[16]. Russian prisoners of war were used for experiments, such as being immersed in ice water or being put into pressure chambers in which air was evacuated to see how long they would survive as a means to better protect German airmen.

Homosexual men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration camps.[17] They faced persecution not only from German soldiers but also from other prisoners, and many homosexual men were beaten to death.[18] Additionally, homosexuals in forced labor camps routinely received more grueling and dangerous work assignments than other non-Jewish inmates, under the policy of "Extermination Through Work".[19] German soldiers also were known to use homosexuals for target practice, aiming their weapons at the pink triangles their human targets were forced to wear.[20]

ChildrenDuring the selection process, children were divided into two groups: those who were fit for work, and those who were not. Those who were deemed healthy enough to work had their prisoner ID tattooed on them, and were given a uniform. The children who were sent to work, most often in munitions factories,[21] were not anticipated to survive for much longer than a few weeks. This was due to the workload, placed on them by the Nazis and due to the lack of food and unhygienic conditions within the camp.Those children deemed unfit for work, mostly young children, were immediately taken to the gas chambers.[22] These children were often very dependant on their mothers.

However, some very small children, particularly twins, were kept by the camp "doctor" for medical experimentation [23]ExperimentsMain article: Nazi human experimentationAt the Auschwitz concentration camp, Dr. Josef Mengele was infamous for carrying out medical experiments on human subjects. These included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing various drugs on them, freezing them to death, and various other usually fatal traumas. Of particular interest to Mengele were twins, Gypsies, dwarves and infants.[24] Beginning in 1943, twins were selected and placed in special barracks.[25]Almost all of Mengele's experiments were of little scientific value, including attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations and other brutal surgeries, and in at least one case attempting to surgically transform normal twins into Siamese twins.

The full extent of Mengele's work will never be known because the two truckloads of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by the latter. Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed after the experiments for dissection.While Mengele's experiments were the most notorious, his behavior was not an isolated aberration. Other Nazi physicians also engaged in human experimentation at several concentration camps, including Dachau[27], Buchenwald[28], Ravensbrück[29], Sachsenhausen[30], and Natzweiler concentration camps.[31]im a leprechaun have some cheer...you know i am...shout it out loud clear...were all leprechauns oh my dear!!!!!

While the victims of the Holocaust were primarily Jews, the Nazis also persecuted and slaughtered the members of other groups they considered inferior, undesirable or dangerous, including Poles and other Slavic peoples such as Russians, Belarusians and Serbs, Roma (also known as Gypsies), and some Africans, Asians and others who did not belong to the "Aryan race"; the mentally ill and the physically disabled; homosexuals; and political opponents and religious dissidents such as communists, trade unionists, Freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses.[32]The victims of the Holocaust were generally described by the Nazis as "undesirables," "enemies of the state", "asocial elements," and "moral degenerates," labels that went hand-in-hand with their term Untermensch ("sub-human").

The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime may never be known, but scholars, using a variety of methods, including documentation from the Nazis of determining the death toll, have generally agreed upon common range of the number of victims. Recently declassified British and Soviet documents have indicated the total may be somewhat higher than previously believed.[33] The following estimates provide a range of the number of victims:An estimated 5 to 6 million Jews,[34] including 3 million Polish Jews1.8 – 1.9 million Christian Poles and other (non-Jewish) Poles (estimate includes civilians killed as a result of Nazi aggression and occupation but does not include the military casualties of Nazi aggression or the victims of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and of deportations to Central Asia and Siberia)[35]200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti (Gypsies)200,000–300,000 people with disabilities100,000 communists10,000–25,000 homosexual men2,500–5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses[36]Raul Hilberg, in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume work, The Destruction of the European Jews, estimates that 5.1 million Jews died during the Holocaust.

This figure includes "over 800,000" who died from "Ghettoization and general privation"; 1,400,000 who were killed in "Open-air shootings"; and "up to 2,900,000" who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll in Poland at "up to 3,000,000".[37] Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they generally include only those deaths for which some records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.[38] British historian Martin Gilbert used a similar approach in his Atlas of the Holocaust, but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.[39]

Lucy S. Dawidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died. Using official census counts may cause an underestimate since many births and deaths were not recorded in small towns and villages. Another reason some consider her estimate too low is that many records were destroyed during the war. Her listing of deaths by country of origin is available in the article about her book, The War Against the Jews.[40]One of the most authoritative German scholars of the Holocaust, Prof. Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin, cites between 5.3 and 6.2 million Jews killed in Dimension des Volksmords (1991), while Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimate between 5.59 and 5.86 million Jewish victims in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust (1990).[41]

The following groups of people were also killed by the Nazi regime, but there is little evidence that the Nazis planned to systematically target them for genocide as was the case for the groups above.3.5–6 million other Slavic civilians2.5–4 million Soviet POWs1–1.5 million political dissidentsAdditionally, the Ustaša regime, the Nazis' allies in Croatia, conducted its own campaign of mass extermination against the Serbs in the areas which it controlled, resulting in the deaths of 500,000–1.2 million Serbs.

The summary of various sources' estimates on the number of Nazi regime victims is given in Matthew White's online atlas of 20th century history.In his article "Assaults on Truth and Memory: Holocaust Denial in Context", which appears in A Little Matter of Genocide (1997), Ward Churchill addresses Holocaust scholarship that claims for the Jews "the status of an 'unparalleled' victimization".

He argues that the suffering of non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust (as well as victims of other genocides) "is correspondingly downgraded or shunted into historical oblivion." With that in mind, Churchill counts all the Slavic peoples as targets for Nazi genocide, partly based on their being classified, like the Jews and Gypsies, as Untermenschen (subhumans).

But the crux of his argument for including the Slavs (other than the Poles, who were more directly targeted) lies in "the Hitlerian vision of Lebensraumpolitik—the conquest of vast expanses of Slavic territory in eastern Europe for 'resettlement' by a tremendously enlarged Germanic population....The 45 million human beings constituting the difference between the existing population and its projected diminishment were to be dispensed with through a combination of massive expulsion and a variety of killing programs."

Churchill goes on to calculate the total number of Slavic victims of the Holocaust as roughly 20 million, a number that includes the 3.5 million Soviet POWs, 3 million Soviet slave laborers, 7 million Ukrainian civilians over the course of Nazi invasion and occupation, 1.2 million Yugoslav civilians, and 3 million Christian Poles, among others. In addition, he estimates the number of Sinti and Roma victims at over one million. [42]