For your third Primary Source Assignment, we’re going to look at some material from the Holocaust. You’ll be reading commentaries that were written from 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:
https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about.html (Links to an external site.)
and read the following sections:
About the Holocaust
The Ghettos
Daily Life in the Ghettos, Warsaw Ghetto, Theresienstadt
The Beginning of the Final Solution
The Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Beginning of Mass Murder
The Implementation of the Final Solution
The Death Camps
Then read this:
(Links to an external site.)
Your question is this: With all of this unbelievably horrible stuff going on, why didn’t the US step in to help? We knew what was happening, so why did we just sit there? Feel free to use your textbook in moderation; remember, this is a primary source assignment, so most (like 90%) of your work needs to come from information you get from the above listed sources. Be sure to cite your sources and put everything (except a quote) in your own words. Paraphrasing someone else’s work is still considered plagiarism! You can use one or two short quotes in each paragraph to support your points, but again, 90% of the work needs to come from YOU!!
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.
