Lesson video

Hello, and welcome back to history at the Oak National Academy.

My name is Mr. Arscott.

Hopefully you recognise me because it's our second lesson looking at the inquiry question of what was the Holocaust.

Now if you don't recognise me, that's probably because you haven't done the first lesson yet, so please make sure you do that because it will help make sense what we're going to talk about today.

Now, like the last lesson, what we're going to be looking at today is a very tragic period in history where millions of people experienced unimaginable suffering.

So if you think you're going to be particularly affected by this, I recommend you watch this video with a guardian or a parent, so they can accompany you.

Now for today's lesson you're going to need a piece of paper and a pen, and a ruler as well as a pencil.

So please make sure you get those things now.

You might want to pause the video whilst you do that and then unpause it and then we're ready to go.

So our title today is "The demolition of man".

And if you haven't written down today's title yet please pause the video whilst you write it down, then unpause it when you're done.

So we're going to start today's lesson looking at the figure that we met at the end of last lesson, Primo Levi.

And if you remember, Primo Levi was an Italian chemist and he also happened to be Jewish.

Now he lived in Italy before the second world war and during it.

But in December 1943 he was arrested because of his Jewish background.

As a result, he was then transported to Auschwitz, that same place where the owner of those shoes was murdered that we met last lesson.

And in February 1944, he arrived at Auschwitz.

Now unlike the owner of those shoes, he was not taken directly to be murdered when he arrived.

Instead, he was deemed fit enough and he was sent to work as an enslaved person in Auschwitz.

And he writes down his experiences about what it was like being an enslaved person working in Auschwitz.

He describes how when he arrived he was stripped of his identity.

He was no longer called Primo Levi.

He no longer had that name.

Instead he was referred to as record number 174517.

He also described how his hair was shaven, how his clothes were taken away from him, and he was stripped of everything that made him who he was.

Now what Primo Levi experienced at Auschwitz was absolutely horrifying, but the fact he survived was down to an element of chance.

Primo Levi had fallen ill shortly before the end of the second world war.

All the enslaved people who had been healthy enough just before the end of second world war were taken in what was known as a death march.

They were forced to leave the concentration camps like Auschwitz, and they were marched until they died from exhaustion, by their Nazi guards.

So Primo Levi survived, and he survived because he was in the Auschwitz hospital.

And that meant in January 1945, when the camp was liberated, so when allied soldiers arrived and freed the people in the camps like Auschwitz, he was able to survive.

Now I want us to turn to another passage from his experiences.

I'll read and have you follow.

"We became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of man.

In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us; we'd reached the bottom.

It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so.

Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand.

They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains." Now what Primo Levi is describing here is how the Jewish people that experienced the huge suffering in the camps, not only were they suffering physical pain, not only were they suffering emotional pain from knowing their loved ones had died, they were also dehumanised.

That's what he means by the demolition of man.

It means that everything that made them special and unique was taken away.

He describes how their physical belongings were taken away, but also they were treated as subhuman by the guards.

And that's this, and this quote from Primo Levi, "The demolition man" is today's title.

And two key points I want you to focus on is nothing belongs to us.

They've taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair.

So everything that made them special is gone.

And on the right, we can see a photo of another survivor of the Holocaust.

And you can see the tattoo showing their identity number.

Almost all Jewish people who experienced the work camps, labour camps, and death camps had their names taken away and instead were referred to as a number like this, and it was tattooed onto their arms. Now not only is this deeply dehumanising because it takes away the thing that makes them unique, it was also deeply offensive, because according to Jewish tradition, tattooing the body is seen as offensive.

So this is what Primo Levi means by the demolition of man.

Everything that made them who they were was taken away from them.

The experience was dehumanising.

All right, well I want you to have a go now at doing is answering this question.

Why did Primo Levi describe his experiences in the camps as the demolition of man? I put a sentence starter for you to use at the beginning, then I want you to end with that sentence.

So please pause the video whilst you're answering that, then unpause it when you're done.

Well done, I'm sure you've written something really, really good.

I'll just give you an example of something you could have used to finish your answer.

Now if you didn't get exactly this, that doesn't mean you got it wrong, it's just an example of what you could have written.

So Primo Levi described his experience in the camps as the demolition of man, because the Nazis attempted to take away everything that made the prisoners unique.

Now, as we ended the last lesson I said, one of the key questions that people often want to ask is why did this happen.

How could something so horrifying, where humans de-humanize other humans, where they made their lives so miserable and where they killed millions of people, how did that happen? How could people do that to each other? And that's captured in this question.

Why did the Holocaust take place? And that's what we're going to have a go at trying to answer today.

Now to help us answer it, we're going to turn to two historians who've written about this, and they've tried to also explain this event, which seems unexplainable.

One is Ian Kershaw and the other is Hannah Arendt.

And although they would probably agree with lots of what the other would write, they give a set of different contexts for the Holocaust in two of their books.

So in his book "To Hell and Back" Ian Kershaw contextualise the Holocaust within the fighting of the second world war, in the World War Two.

So he explains why the Holocaust happens within the context of the other things which were going on within the second world war.

In her book, Hannah Arendt's book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" she contextualised the Holocaust within this study of Nazi control.

So how the Nazis were able to create a dictatorship which controlled every aspect of life in Germany and then in the rest of Europe.

So they both give these slight different contexts to explain why the Holocaust take place.

And we'll return to their thoughts shortly.

Now, one of the traditional ways in which the Holocaust is understood is as a series of steps.

People say that the Holocaust built up gradually over time and there's certain steps that it went through in order to allow it to happen.

And I've shown some of these steps that we could try to understand the Holocaust through in this diagram here.

So step one starts with discrimination within Germany.

And this is where German citizens were encouraged to see Jewish people as different.

So it was a time when Jewish people had their rights taken away and Jewish people were encouraged to immigrate.

So that means to leave Germany.

Then step two, which was when this turned into violence.

So there's violent persecution within Germany and the land that Germany controlled at that point.

And that bode physical attacks on Jewish people and their property.

Then the scale of violence against Jewish people increased again.

And that's when, in step three, the Nazis occupied large amounts of Europe during the second world war.

Now step three, this violence took on several different forms. So in one set, in some places it took on a form of segregation.

That's where Jewish people were separated from non-Jewish people.

And they encouraged non-Jewish people to see Jewish people as other or different, or maybe subhuman.

There was also an element of enslavement, where Jewish people were forced to work for free to support the Nazi war effort.

And there's also an element of mass killings during this point.

So Nazi soldiers would follow the Nazi armies and kill Jewish people as they invaded different parts of Europe.

But the crucial step is step four, known as the Final Solution.

And this is where Nazi leaders planned to use the resources Germany had and use industrial methods, by the use of gas and the railway systems and building camps, in order to consciously try to exterminate all Jewish people living in Europe.

Now in one sense, these steps in this diagram is quite useful.

It's simplifies what happened so we can try to understand it.

However, there are a few problems with accepting this diagram just as it is.

By putting these events into a number of steps it implies that the Holocaust was inevitable.

That means, it implies the Holocaust had to happen, and that is definitely not the case.

The Holocaust was the result of humans making decisions and choices to act the way they did.

And they could have chosen not to do this.

So there's nothing inevitable about the Holocaust, and we shouldn't see these steps as implying that.

So a slightly better way to look at it I think is to use a timeline.

Now to give you a bit of context here's this big zoomed out timeline of the 20th century with some of the events that you might already be aware of.

So for example, we've got the first world war, which was between 1914 and 1918.

Then we got Hitler comes to power, which happened in 1933.

We've the second world war, which starts in 1939 and ends in 1945.

Then at the end we see today.

Now we're going to zoom in on the key bit which is our focus, which is this period between 1933 and 1945.

So here's the zoomed in version.

So Hitler comes to power in 1933, World War Two begins in 1939 and World War Two ends in 1945.

What I'm going to ask you to do is to copy this down.

Now you're going to need a full side of a A4 to do this so you might want to flip your piece of paper over and then turn it landscape and then draw this timeline out.

Make sure you've got lots of space so you can add some detail in.

So please pause the video whilst you copy this out.

Make sure you use a ruler for the lines and then unpause it when you're done.

Welcome back.

So we're going to focus first of all in this period here, discrimination within Germany, which happened between 1933 and 1939.

So what happened? Well within this period the German government discriminated against Jewish people.

What that means is they treat them worse than non-Jewish people because of their Jewish identity, because either they followed the Jewish religion or they were the descendants of people that had followed the Jewish religion.

Now on the photo on the right we can see an image which gives us a bit of a flavour about how the Nazis carried this out.

These people were in uniform.

They were known as the SA, which is a form of Nazi police force.

And they're wearing some big posters which have some racist things written on them, some anti-Semitic things written on them, which is racism towards Jewish people.

And it says, Germans defend yourselves, don't buy from Jews.

Now what's behind these armed men, or these men in uniform, is a department store which is owned by a Jewish person.

And what this Nazi police force is trying to do is they're trying to encourage people not to buy anything which supports a Jewish business.

And this is called a boycott.

And this is one of the things the Nazis did as soon as they are in power from 1933 onwards.

They used boycotts and intimidation to try to make life unbearable for Jewish people.

They tried to deprive them of their business so they couldn't survive, and they tried to scare Jewish people.

And this is all done to try to encourage Jewish people to leave Germany.

The Nazis didn't believe Jews deserved to be in Germany and so they were trying to force them out.

Other things the Nazis did during this period of discrimination was that Jewish people were dismissed from their jobs.

So if any Jewish person worked for the government, either as a civil servant or a teacher or professor, they lost their jobs almost immediately.

And they carried out book burnings, where any book that's written by a Jewish person would be burnt in big bonfires and encourage lots of other German citizens to watch and celebrate as Jewish books were burned.

And all of this was done to create an atmosphere which is intimidating for Jewish people so they didn't want to be in Germany anymore.

And perhaps the most famous example of this happened in 1935, where the Nazi government passed a series of laws, known as the Nuremberg Laws.

And these laws effectively took away any legal rights Jewish people had as German citizens.

So they stripped them of their ability to be German.

In particular, they'd said things like Jewish people were not allowed to marry Germans, and anyone caught, any Jewish person they caught having sex with a non-Jewish person would be arrested and punished.

So what I want you to have a go at doing now is turn back to your timeline, and I want you to add a few details of the things that happened in this period, this period of discrimination within Germany.

So for example, I've put the Nuremberg Laws denied Jewish people rights as one thing to add to my timeline.

So I'm going to ask you to pause the video whilst you do that now, then unpause it when you're done.

Welcome back.

So let's look at the next period.

In the next period is when we have violent persecution.

So the period of violent persecution we can roughly say is between 1938 and 1939.

And there's one really key event which is important that we all know about.

It happened between the 9th and 10th of November in 1938.

And it's got several different names.

Some people call it the November Pogrom, some people call it Kristallnacht, and in English that is translated as the night of broken glass.

And what happened was that that thuggish Nazi police force we just looked at, the SA, went around trying to destroy as many Jewish businesses, properties and objects as possible.

But it wasn't just them, they encouraged ordinary Germans to participate in it as well and get joy out of destroying Jewish owned things.

So during this night, 267 synagogues were destroyed.

The photo on the right shows when the Munich synagogues, which was destroyed by burning during this night.

7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed there.

The glass fronts of their shops were smashed in.

Sometimes their papers were destroyed.

Their property was destroyed or stolen.

30,000 Jewish men were arrested, and there was an unknown number of deaths.

There's about under a hundred murders that were carried out during Kristallnacht itself, where Jewish people were killed.

There's a huge number of deaths afterwards, which historians have yet been unable to fully agree on.

Now, the key aim of this was to encourage all Jewish people to flee Germany.

And as a result, thousands of Jewish people did.

They realised that the discrimination was not going to end, and in fact, they were no longer safe in Germany.

Now this was particularly difficult for Jewish people that weren't very wealthy.

It was difficult for them to afford to buy train tickets, or to pay for transportation, or pay for removal to take their things from Germany elsewhere.

But they realised it was not safe anymore and so thousands did.

All right, let's turn back to our timeline now.

I'd like to add a few more notes of things that happened.

So the key event you want to include is Kristallnacht.

Be mindful to put a few details about what happened in Kristallnacht so that your timeline has a bit more detail than mine.

So pause the video whilst you're doing that, then please unpause it when you're done.

All right, we're now going to look at our next stage, which is the state of Nazi occupation.

So the period that we're now looking at is the period of the Nazi occupation of Europe, which happened during the second world war and we should be focusing right now on the period 1939 to 1942.

Now you've seen the map on the right before, and this map shows the areas of Europe the Nazis controlled during the second world war, their greatest extent.

Now the dark grey in the middle shows the area that Germany itself said the German government ruled.

So that includes the modern-day countries of Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and bits of a few others.

Now the areas in the lighter greys, or slightly darker greys are either allies of Germany or areas that Germany itself decided to govern through its army.

Now in all of these areas Jewish people who had lived in Germany had fled, and they were also local Jewish populations.

So the Nazi government now found that it controlled an area which had far more Jewish people than they'd ever had before, and so they needed to develop new policies.

Now, one of the policies they followed during this period was the policy of segregation, and this way Jewish people were separated from non-Jews.

The best example of that is the creation of ghettos.

And these were areas of cities which were separated from the rest of the city, often with terrible conditions.

And the most famous of these was the Warsaw ghetto, which was created in 1940.

Now Warsaw had been the largest Jewish population in Europe, and all the Jewish people of Warsaw were forced into a tiny area where there's not possibly enough space or resources for all of them.

And in the Warsaw ghetto many Jewish people starved and many were forced to work to support the Nazi war effort.

There was also enslavement of Jewish people across different parts of Europe, and many Jewish people were sent to concentration camps in order to work for free for the Nazi government.

So they ended up having to work to support a government that was discriminating against them and persecuting them.

Perhaps the most shocking thing that happened during this period was the creation of an armed group known as the Einsatzgruppen, and these were created in 1941.

And these were soldiers, and these soldiers followed the Nazi army as they invaded the Soviet Union, so this area here on the map.

And everything in this kind of darkish grey area here was areas where the Einsatzgruppen worked.

And what the Einsatzgruppen did is they followed the Nazi armies in as they invaded the Soviet Union, and then they tried to find as many Jewish people as possible in that area.

And then they murdered them in cold blood.

Sometimes they'd tie hundreds of Jewish people together and then shoot them into rivers so they'd drown.

Sometimes they'd shoot them directly into pits that the Jewish people been forced to dig themselves.

But huge amounts of violent, barbaric bloodshed happened at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen.

All right, now I want you to turn back to your timeline.

I want you to add a few more key details about things that happened during this period of the Nazi occupation of Europe.

Pause the video whilst you're doing that and unpause it when you're done please.

All right, and the final stage we're going to look at is known as the Final Solution.

Now the Final Solution is probably the most famous element of the Holocaust, and perhaps maybe the most shocking element too.

Now in 1942 leading Nazis had a conference.

They met up together and they made a decision, it's known as the Wansee Conference.

And at this conference the leading Nazis decided that they were going to dedicate their resources whilst they're fighting the second world war to make sure every Jewish person in Europe was killed.

This wasn't going to help them win the war, but they decided it was as important as their aim of winning the war.

And so these leading Nazis decided to create death camps across Europe.

Many of these were in Eastern Europe, and one of the best examples of that is Auschwitz-Birkenau, which we looked at last lesson.

Now, these camps were often created next to the concentration camps where Jewish people had been working as enslaved labour throughout earlier parts of the war.

Now the gas chambers were created at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942, and there 1 million Jewish people were killed.

There are lots of other death camps where Jewish were taken to their deaths in similar conditions.

Now at the very end of the war, when it looked like the Nazis were going to lose, they made a decision that they were still committed to the Final Solution, even though they knew that Germany was about to be defeated by Britain, America, the Soviet Union and the other allies, they decided they wanted to pursue their aim of trying to make Europe Jew free.

So the Jewish people that were still in the concentration camp, the death camps, were taken on long marches back towards Germany.

And during these long marches the Jewish people were given no food and no water, and they were told to keep marching until they died of starvation or exhaustion or dehydration.

Now in total, by the end of the Final Solution, 6 million Jewish people had been killed.

All right, and now I want you to try to add some final notes to your timeline based on what we've just looked at.

I've added two more, so the gas chambers built at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Wannsee Conference.

If you want to put a few more details on there that'd be excellent.

So please pause the video whilst you're doing that and then unpause it when you're done.

Now, having looked at all of that and now having a really full timeline you might still have the question but why did the Holocaust take place.

Knowing the events that led up to it, it doesn't really explain how humans did this to other humans.

So let's turn back to our historians to see if they can help us.

Now if you remember, Ian Kershaw and Hannah Arendt had slightly different contexts to help explain why the Holocaust took place.

So Ian Kershaw describes the Holocaust taking place within the second World War, and Hannah Arendt describes the Holocaust taking place within this Nazi control and how the Nazis were able to control people totally.

So let's look at what they said in a bit more detail.

We'll look at Ian Kershaw first.

So in his book "To Hell and Back" Kershaw describes how the Nazis used the war as an excuse to ignore critics.

Even though the Nazis had almost total control of the people in Germany, there were still certain people, particularly religious figures, that could criticise Nazis and sway public opinion.

And before the war, religious figures were very critical of Nazis murdering other people.

Now once the war started the Nazis were able to ignore those critics and start pursuing their murderous and genocidal policies with fewer criticisms. The nature of fighting a war also meant that the Nazis could enslave healthy Jewish people in order to help them support the war effort, and those policies seemed more acceptable and seemed to make more sense to leading Nazis.

But, Ian Kershaw stresses that the anti-Semitic, so the anti-Jewish ideology of the Nazis, took priority, took precedence over their other beliefs and that's shown by the death marches.

So the fact that at the end of the war, when Germany looked like it was going to lose, they were still committed to trying to kill Jewish people.

And so the death marches could be made sense of because of Germany desperately trying to pursue this genocidal policy even when it looked like they were going to lose the war.

Now if we look at Hannah Arendt's context she helps to explain the Holocaust in a slightly different way.

She talks about this long history of anti-semitism, how in Europe for thousands of years governments have pursued policies which made Jewish people seem other or different or less than non-Jewish people.

And she said that the Nazis were able to exploit these beliefs in order to create this horrible climate within Germany, which encouraged people to see the Jewish people as subhuman or non-human.

She also emphasised the fact that the Nazis used fear in order to encourage Germans to accept blind obedience to Hitler.

So people couldn't even think for themselves because they feared they might be punished.

And so that enabled the Nazis to carry out policies which in most circumstances people have realised were horrible and immoral and should never have happened.

And here's a quote of one, from Hannah Arendt's book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism." "The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instil convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any." So what she means here is when a totalitarian government, like the Nazi government, tries to teach people they're not teaching them to be able to think for themselves or to develop moral principles about good and bad, instead the aim of the education is to destroy people's ability to think in terms of good and bad.

All the Nazis wanted people to think about was whether or not the Nazis wanted it.

She said, that belief system enabled the Nazis to carry out this terrible crime of the Holocaust.

So let's turn back to our question.

Why did the Holocaust take place? Now, I'm going to ask you to answer that shortly, but before you do that it's worth having a look at some key terms I've used several times and you might be unfamiliar with.

So I want you to pause the video and just have a read through these, and if any of them are ones that you don't know or haven't heard before, it might be a good idea for you to copy them down into your notes before you have a go at trying to carry out the writing.

If you do know them all, just let the video keep playing, you don't need to copy any down.

Welcome back.

So, why did the Holocaust take place? So I'm going to ask you to have a go at trying to answer this question now.

And below I've put some sentence starters to help you structure your writing.

So the idea is to give you some opportunities to give some examples of key things from your timeline to help explain why the Holocaust took place.

I have also included some key words, or key terms, that we've looked at throughout this lesson to help you try to develop your writing even further.

And if you use lots of those key terms it's likely you're going to get a really full and accurate answer.

So I'm going to ask you to pause the video now, have a go at writing that, then when you're done unpause the video and let it keep playing.

I want to end by saying thank you for working so hard on these two lessons, looking at what was the Holocaust.

Although this is a very upsetting period to be studying it's really important that we know about it so that we can find out about some of the horrors that happened in our past.

Now, if you want to learn more about this I recommend you do our next inquiry looking at how Jewish people resisted during the Holocaust.

There's one final thing that I'd like you to do before you end, which is to have a go at the end of lesson quiz.

Thank you very much.