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Watch the video. Then answer this question: What was the "Final Solution"?

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Read about Anne Frank. Then comment with 2-3 interesting facts you know about her.

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Anne Frank, in full Annelies Marie Frank, (born June 12, 1929, Frankfurt am Main, Germany-died February/March 1945, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Hannover), Jewish girl whose diary of her family's two years in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands became a classic of war literature.

Early in the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, Anne's father, Otto Frank (1889-1980), a German businessman, took his wife and two daughters to live in Amsterdam. In 1941, after German forces occupied the Netherlands, Anne was compelled to transfer from a public school to a Jewish one. On June 12, 1942, she received a red-and-white plaid diary for her 13th birthday. That day she began writing in the book: "I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support."

When Anne's sister, Margot, was faced with deportation (supposedly to a forced-labour camp), the Franks went into hiding on July 6, 1942, in the backroom office and warehouse of Otto Frank's food-products business. With the aid of a few non-Jewish friends, among them Miep Gies, who smuggled in food and other supplies, the Frank family and four other Jews-Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son, Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer-lived confined to the "secret annex." During this time, Anne wrote faithfully in her diary, recounting day-to-day life in hiding, from ordinary annoyances to the fear of capture. She discussed typical adolescent issues as well as her hopes for the future, which included becoming a journalist or a writer. Anne's last diary entry was written on August 1, 1944. Three days later the annex was discovered by the Gestapo, which was acting on a tip from Dutch informers.

The Frank family was transported to Westerbork, a transit camp in the Netherlands, and from there to Auschwitz, in German-occupied Poland, on September 3, 1944, on the last transport to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz. Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen the following month. Anne's mother died in early January, just before the evacuation of Auschwitz on January 18, 1945. It was established by the Dutch government that both Anne and Margot died in a typhus epidemic in March 1945, only weeks before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, but scholars in 2015 revealed new research, including analysis of archival data and first-person accounts, indicating that the sisters might have perished in February 1945. Otto Frank was found hospitalized at Auschwitz when it was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945.

Friends who searched the hiding place after the family's capture later gave Otto Frank the papers left behind by the Gestapo. Among them he found Anne's diary, which was published as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (originally in Dutch, 1947). Precocious in style and insight, it traces her emotional growth amid adversity. In it she wrote, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart."

The Diary, which has been translated into more than 65 languages, is the most widely read diary of the Holocaust, and Anne is probably the best known of Holocaust victims. The Diary was also made into a play that premiered on Broadway in October 1955, and in 1956 it won both the Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize for best drama. A film version directed by George Stevens was produced in 1959. The play was controversial: it was challenged by screenwriter Meyer Levin, who wrote an early version of the play (later realized as a 35-minute radio play) and accused Otto Frank and his chosen screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, of sanitizing and de-Judaizing the story. The play was often performed in high schools throughout the world and was revived (with additions) on Broadway in 1997-98.

A new English translation of the Diary, published in 1995, contains material that was edited out of the original version, which makes the revised translation nearly one-third longer than the first. The Frank family's hiding place on the Prinsengracht, a canal in Amsterdam, became a museum that is consistently among the city's most-visited tourist sites.

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Anne Frank | Biography, Age, Death, & Facts

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Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl whose diary captured the horrors of Nazi persecution during World War II, remains an enduring symbol of resilience and hope in the face of adversity.

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Short biographies of Holocaust victims and survivors 

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Short biographies of Holocaust victims and survivors 

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Read about one individual in the Holocaust and post a brief (2-3 sentences) summary of what you learned about them.

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Watch the video. Then, write a definition for the word Antisemitism in your own words.

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Antisemitism | past and present | Explained | Anne Frank House

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View this site and post 2-3 things you learned.

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Racism fueled Nazi ideology and policies. The Nazis viewed the world as being divided up into competing inferior and superior races, each struggling for survival and dominance. They believed the Jews were not a religious denomination, but a dangerous non-European "race." Nazi racism would produce murder on an unprecedented scale.

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Racists believe that innate, inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior. In the early twentieth-century, such views on race were widely accepted in many parts of the world. In fact, race is not biologically based, it is a cultural classification of groups.

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According to Nazi theories of race, Germans and other Europeans had perceived superior physical and mental traits. They considered European peoples to be "Aryans," descended from the ancient Indo-Europeans who settled throughout the European continent as well as in Iran and India.

3
Racial antisemitism is the prejudice against or hatred of Jews based on false scientific theories. This aspect of racism was always an integral part of Nazism.

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Racists are people who believe that innate, inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior.

The doctrine of racism asserts that blood determines national-ethnic identity. Within a racist framework, the value of a human being is not determined by his or her individuality, but instead by membership in a so-called "racial collective nation." Many intellectuals, including scientists, have lent pseudoscientific support to racist thinking. Nineteenth century racist thinkers, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, exerted a significant influence on many in Adolf Hitler's generation.

Racism, including racial antisemitism (prejudice against or hatred of Jews based on false biological theories), was always an integral part of German National Socialism (Nazism).

The Nazis perceived all of human history as the history of a biologically determined struggle among people of different races. The Nazis held that political movements such as Marxism, communism, pacifism, and internationalism were anti-nationalist and reflected a dangerous, racially based Jewish intellectualism.

In 1931, the SS ( Schutzstaffel; the elite guard of the Nazi state) established a Race and Settlement Office to conduct race "research" and to determine the suitability of potential spouses for members of the SS. After the Nazis came to power, they passed the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935, which codified a supposedly biological definition of Jewishness.

Nazi racists viewed the mentally and physically ill as blemishes upon the genetic landscape of the so-called master race and, when they reproduced, as a biological danger to the purity of the Aryan race. After careful planning and data collection during the last six months of 1939, German physicians began to murder disabled residents of institutions throughout Germany in an operation that they euphemistically called "euthanasia".

According to Nazi theories of race, Germans and other northern Europeans were "Aryans," a superior race. During World War II, Nazi physicians conducted bogus medical experiments seeking to identify physical evidence of Aryan superiority and non-Aryan inferiority. Despite killing countless non-Aryan prisoners in the course of these experiments, the Nazis could not find any evidence for their theories of biological racial differences among human beings.

Once in power, the Nazis implemented racial laws and policies that deprived Jews, Black people, and Roma (Gypsies) of their rights. During World War II, the Nazi leadership set about what they referred to as an "ethnic housecleaning" in the occupied Eastern territories of Poland and the Soviet Union. This policy included the murder and annihilation of so-called enemy "races," including the genocide of European Jews and the destruction of the leadership of the Slavic peoples.

Nazi racism produced murder on an unprecedented scale.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

Discussion Questions

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Series: Victims of the Nazi Era

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Nazi Racism Victims of the Nazi Era

Critical Thinking Questions

Despite overwhelming scientific data to the contrary, many people still believe in the superiority of certain races. Why might individuals hold onto a belief that has been discredited?

How can racism keep a party or political group in power?

What information do racists use to justify their beliefs? Jewish people are not a racial group, and yet the Nazis and others believed Jews were a racial, existential threat. How can radical beliefs, like these, be challenged and countered?

How can knowledge of the events in Germany and Europe before the Nazis came to power help citizens today respond to threats of genocide and mass atrocity in the world?

Further Reading

Back, Les, and John Solomos, editors. Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.

Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Hutton, Christopher M. Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropology, and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.

Mosse, George L. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Wistrich, Robert S. Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred. London: Thames Methuen, 1991.

Thank you for supporting our work

We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors.

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Learn more about Nazi racism and racial antisemitism. These prejudices were at the core of Nazi ideology, policies, and practices. They led to murder on a mass scale.

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What were some significant events leading up to the Holocaust?

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After exploring this source, report 2-3 main beliefs the Nazi party of Germany believed.

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

In order for a house to burn down, three things are required. The timber must be dry and combustible. There needs to be a spark that ignites it. And external conditions have to be favorable-- not too damp, perhaps, some wind.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Almost no societal wildfire begins in a vacuum. Conditions must exist that provide inspiration and opportunity.

It's really important also, though, to think about the role of Hitler himself. You know, sometimes people say, No Hitler, no Holocaust. But I think it is really important to think who strikes the match, who throws the spark that brings that potentially combustible situation into flames.

There's lots of volatility around us. It doesn't always erupt into genocide. The leadership is extremely important. And Hitler's leadership is very, very important.

So for Hitler, I think, one of the crucial things to understand is that he did have an ideology. By the time he became chancellor in 1933, they were quite firm. The way to remember that is to think of those two terms-- race and space. It's two interconnected pillars of Hitler's world view.

The idea of race was the notion that humanity was divided into discrete groups, separate groups, and that they were locked in struggle with one another. It's a very Social Darwinian view-- the idea that you don't have this one group of human beings but rather the separate and competing groups. Supposedly, they're competing for space, land.

Why do you need land? Because you got to grow food. Why do you need food? To have more children. Why do you need more children? So you can conquer your neighbors.

So the idea of race and racial superiority is automatically linked in to the notion of space, land, and conquest. And for Hitler, these two things were linked. On the one hand, the notion of something that he and others called the Aryan race. Those terms were based on sort of linguistic notions.

So even people within Germany, they understood that there was something sort of fabricated and made up about this notion of the Aryan race. But it was a label to imply a sense of entitlement, that somehow there's a group of people who deserve to rule over others. And how would they prove that they deserve to rule? Through their success in defeating others.

And for Hitler, the so-called Aryan race was locked in mortal combat with the Jews. There were other racial enemies, too, that were trying to, supposedly, bring down the Aryan domination. But the idea was that somehow Jews were the anti-Aryan.

If you think about this Nazi view of race and space, you can see that it's a view that not only accepted the possibility of war but that, in fact, hinged on necessity of war. How was a racial group supposed to expand? It had to conquer its neighbors through war.

At the same time, in this paranoid world view of Hitler's, any race that wasn't expanding was doomed to disappear. So it's a kind of dynamic of constant expansion, growth, conquest, destruction of others. That's what the notion of racial superiority is based on. So the idea of conquest, racism, it's really intertwined.

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Hitler's Ideology: Race, Land, and Conquest

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Scholar Doris Bergen discusses the ideologies of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

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People often view the law as a guideline for good behavior in society. But sometimes laws are unjust and cruel. View these laws and then answer this question:

Is it wrong to disobey a law if it is morally unjust?

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Watch/listen to part of this documentary and write a comment below with your reaction or a question you have.

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A survivor of Auschwitz returns to explore his past, and unlocks a secret.

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Choose a podcast to listen to all or part of, on this website:

https://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/podcast

Then write a comment describing which one you chose, why, and what you learned.