Dear Students,
For your third Primary Source Assignment, we’re going to look at some material from the Holocaust. You’ll be reading 4 out of thousands of surviving documents that illustrate the utter evil, wrongness, and misery when racism and bigotry triumph over love and compassion.
In Hitler’s Germany, Jews were the primary people to be singled out for persecution, although gypsies, some Slavs, homosexuals, and people who were physically or intellectually disabled were also subject to eventual extermination under the Third Reich. It’s hard to conceptualize how a modern power in the 20th century could allow something like that to happen, but happen it did. And if it happened there, it could happen anywhere, even in the United States of America.
In order to better understand how this tragedy occurred, you’ll need to go to the following website:
Once there, go to Isolation and Ghettoization, which is on the LH side. Click on that, and read the introduction. Then go back, and from the selection of documents, look at the following 4 entries (none are very long):
1) Identification of Jews in the General government (pg. 1)
2) Eichmann Informs the Jews About Deporting Them From Austria and About the Theresienstadt Ghetto (pg. 3)
3) Order By Fischer on the Establishment of a Ghetto in Warsaw, Oct 2, 1940 (pg. 4)
Your question is this: With all of this unbelievably horrible stuff going on, why didn’t the US step in to help?
You need to write a 5 paragraph essay for this. If you don’t remember how, please see the guide on How To Write an Essay that is posted in the Modules Page.
Dr. L.