The Atrocities of WWII: The Holocaust, Japanese Internment, & the

The Atrocities of WWII: The Holocaust, Japanese Internment, & the Atomic Bombs

The Holocaust • Mass, planned extermination of 11 million people the disabled, homosexuals, Roma, Communists, union members • 6 million were Jews • Driven by Hitler and Nazi’s obsession with creating a racially-superior Third Reich Auschwitz

Progression of Extermination • 1933 = Jews banned from government jobs & universities • 1935 = Nuremberg Laws removed German citizenship, forbade marriage with non-Jews, segregated from hospitals, theatres, athletic fields Auschwitz

Kristallnacht, November 7, 1938 • Arson, looting, murders of Jews across Germany • 119 synagogues destroyed, 7,500 shops, 35 Jews killed • 20,000 – 30,000 Jews sent to Concentration Camps • Rest forced to wear Yellow Star of David • Turning point in world’s awareness of plight of Jews

Jewish Migration? • By 1939 = 300,000 Jews fled Germany, 200,000 fled Austria • US did not allow Jewish refugees in • June 1939 = 900 Jewish refugees arrived on St. Louis ship in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida & sent back to Germany • 700 of the 900 died in concentration camps

Japanese Internment • Issei: First generation Japanese Immigrants (37,000 interned) • Nisei: U.S.-born Japanese Americans (75,000) • FDR’s Executive Order 9006 = February 1942, all Japanese on West Coast forcibly removed from homes

Internment Camps

• $2 billion in property & belongings lost • Supreme Court upheld constitutionality of internment policy, Korematsu v. US (1942) • 1982 = US government admitted internment “not based on military necessity” • 1988 = $20,000 given to 62,000 survivors

The Atomic Bombs • 1939 = Einstein warned US about German development of Abomb • Manhattan Project began in 1941 between only US and Britain • 2 bombs completed in Los Alamos, NM • July 16 1945 = Alamogordo, NM test bomb exploded

• US threatened to drop bomb if Japan did not surrender by August 3, 1945 • August 6, 1945 = Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” over Hiroshima • August 8, 1945 = Bock’s Car dropped “Hiroshima” over Nagasaki • September 6, 1945 = Japan surrendered

• Hiroshima = 60,000 died immediately, 75,000 later from radiation and burns

• Nagasaki = 30,000 died immediately