Entry 3: Organizers and Leaders (Example Post)

This is an example of what Ms. Murphy will be looking for in your blog posts. This post is about 430 words long, so it is longer than your minimum word requirement. Notice how it is arranged in paragraphs, covers many points, and uses parenthetical citations! The Works Cited example blog entry corresponds with this entry.

Leading up to the Holocaust, before Adolf Hitler was elected the leader of Germany he published “the story of his ‘heroic’ fight against the enemies of Germany,” entitled Mein Kampf (Norton 12). Mein Kampf discussed how the Jewish people of Germany were the problem with Germany’s economy and culture. Hitler claimed that Jews were diseased, greedy, immoral, and weak (Norton 16). Because Hitler was very good at using propaganda to his advantage, he created posters, public service announcements, and speeches that worked to turn non-Jewish Germans against all Jewish people. The propaganda that he distributed tried to disregard the fact that many Jewish citizens were “great contributors to German economic, intellectual, creative, and artistic vitality” (Norton 16). These pieces also ignored the fact that “large numbers of loyal German Jews had fought with bravery (and many had died) during [World War I]" (Rees 3).

The Jewish people, along with others Hitler viewed as less than desirable, such as “Gypsies (Roma)…those of African descent, and the mentally or physically ill” were banned from holding positions of power, maintaining business, and later buying from many businesses (Norton 20). This caused many to starve or begin stealing food in order to live. Of course, when caught, many were punished by death. Also, they were banned from many places such as hospitals, restaurants, universities, and the military (Norton 23).

Later, it was decided that the Jews were taking up too much room in the German and Polish cities. Therefore, it was decided that all Jews be relocated to ghettos. Each ghetto was a “completely segregated district where only Jews would live” (Rees 15). When these became too crowded, the real trouble began.

The majority of people who died during The Holocaust died as a result of concentration camps. Such camps, like Auschwitz, were originally “conceived as a holding concentration camp…in which to keep prisoners before they were sent on to other concentration camps,” but it was quickly discovered that their original intention would not become their true purpose (Rees 19). The camps began to fill with Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others. Most camps were mostly used to provide cheap slave labor, as paid laborers were hard to find during war time (Norton 29). Camps such as Treblinka, Chelmno, and Sobibor were used primarily for killing. Gas chambers, which used carbon monoxide to kill large groups of people at a time, were the main source of the death (Norton 34). People who arrived at the camps would have their valuables taken, their families separated, and be directed to the gas chambers, where they were immediately gassed to death.