Historical Context

The diary of Anne Frank starts in Nazi Germany, one month after the Nazi Invasion of the Netherlands on June 12th 1940.

The German Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler rose to power during the Great Depression in the early 1930's. Hitler was named chancellor in 1933, and quickly set about turning Germany into a totalitarian state. He and the other Nazi's passed anti-semiotic laws, restricting rights of Jews eventually sending them to concentration camps. In the years leading up to WWII, they occupied the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. In the first years of the war, they took most of Poland, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands.

Auschwitz the "best" Nazi German concentration camp where over 1,096,000 people were deported, and where 960,000 were killed. The Nazis would use different killing tactics such as dynamite, shootings, and then they found the "sweet" spot which was gas or zyklon b then to get rid of the bodies they would cremate the bodies. Meaning they would throw dead people in giant furnaces in order to save space. When the American soldiers marched into concentration camps as punishment they would have the Nazi soldiers dig up the bodies as punishment.

Holocaust-History

A cattle car shown here was used to
transport prisoners to concentration camps

The biggest of all the holocaust killings was at Babi Yar Ravine just outside of Kiev, Ukraine, where more than 33,000 Jews were killed in only two days. There were over 1.1 million children killed in the holocaust, children were one of the biggest targets because if they grew up they would be able to teach that the Nazis were the enemy and the Nazis may be destroyed, in reality most children died from suffocation in cattle cars but if they reached the camp they would almost be immediately gassed. Even after prisoners were liberated from the camps thousands died only a week later due to malnutrition and disease, the prisoners bodies could not take all of the food and nutrients so they just threw up until they died. During the Nazis power over 150 billion dollars worth of items and positions were seized and sold for money. Some prisoners were used as science experiments to test things like high altitude the body can handle, freezing temperatures, atmosphere pressure and even were injected with diseases such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, and malaria.

Many experiments of all different
kinds were tested on prisoners

In one experiment 5 men were offered their freedom if they did an experiment for the Germans. The experiment was about how long these men could stay awake continuously without sleep for 90 days, they would be put on a gas to keep them awake. The gas could be used on German soldiers so they could work 24 hours a day. All men agreed and were sealed in a chamber where they were put on gas. After about 30 days everyone fell silent and when German soldiers tried to get the prisoners out they were murdered and the experiment ended in a horrific scene.


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                                                            Sources

• History.com
• FactRetriever.com