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Kids learn about the biography of Adolf Hitler, leader and dictator of Germany during World War II. His Nazi party committed the Holocaust.

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Kids learn about the history of the Holocaust during World War II. Jewish people were killed by the German Nazi Party.

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Hitler was born in Austria in 1889. He developed his political ideas in Vienna, a city with a large Jewish community, where he lived from 1907 to 1913. In those days, Vienna had a mayor who was very anti-Jewish, and hatred of Jews was very common in the city.

During the First World War (1914-1918), Hitler was a soldier in the German army. At the end of the war he, and many other German soldiers like him, could not get over the defeat of the German Empire. The German army command spread the myth that the army had not lost the war on the battlefield, but because they had been betrayed. By a 'stab in the back', as it was called at the time. Hitler bought into the myth: Jews and communists had betrayed the country and brought a left-wing government to power that had wanted to throw in the towel.

By blaming the Jews for the defeat, Hitler created a stereotypical enemy. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the defeated country was still in a major economic crisis. According to the Nazis, expelling the Jews was the solution to the problems in Germany.

This political message and the promise to make Germany economically strong again won Hitler the elections in 1932. After he had come to power, the laws and measures against the Jews increased all the time. It ended in the Shoah, the Holocaust, the murder of six million European Jews.

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Hitler used antisemitic ideas that had been around for a long time. Read more about Hitler's hatred of Jews.

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When we think of Nazi evil, we think of Auschwitz: the deadliest Nazi camp and the deadliest Holocaust site. But there was more to the history of the camps and the Holocaust than Auschwitz.
The SS operated over 25 concentration camps during the Nazi dictatorship (1933-45), and over 1,100 attached satellite camps. These camps did not all operate at the same time, however. The SS system changed all the time, and so did the prisoner population, the conditions and the buildings. There was no typical concentration camp.

The history of the camps begins in 1933, seven years before Auschwitz was even set up. In the wake of the Great Depression, German democracy (the Weimar Republic) was destroyed. Its place was taken by the Nazi dictatorship, led by Adolf Hitler. Although the Nazi party had lots of popular support - it gained almost 44 per cent of the vote in the last multiparty elections in March 1933 - millions of Germans still rejected it.

The new rulers brutally attacked real and imagined opponents. Many victims were taken to early camps. In 1933, most inmates were political prisoners, above all German Communists. Many faced abuse and violence. Deaths were still rare, however, and most prisoners were released after a few weeks or months. Fear of the camps helped to break the anti-Nazi resistance. As a result, fewer opponents ended up inside, and by October 1934 only 2,400 prisoners were left in concentration camps. Some observers thought the camps would disappear completely.

But Adolf Hitler wanted to keep the camps: he saw the benefits of lawless terror, without courts and judges. And so Hitler supported the creation of a permanent concentration camp system under SS leader Heinrich Himmler. When war broke out in autumn 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, this SS system included six purpose-built camps holding 21,400 prisoners.

During the Second World War, concentration camps spread through much of Nazi-occupied Europe. Auschwitz, set up in 1940 to crush the Polish resistance, was the first of many new camps. Conditions inside camps, always poor, now became deadly. Many inmates died from illness and starvation. Many more were executed or died during horrific medical experiments.

From 1942, the camps participated in the Holocaust. Most of the six million European Jews murdered by the Nazis died outside concentration camps, shot or gassed on the killing fields of eastern Europe. Still, the single most lethal site of the Holocaust was a concentration camp: Auschwitz. Here, the SS killed some one million Jews; most were murdered on arrival in gas chambers.

In Auschwitz and other concentration camps, prisoner numbers grew fast during the second half of the war. Those regarded as fit for work by the SS (Jews and non-Jews alike) were used as slave labourers. Prisoners toiled for many hours each day, building roads, digging tunnels, breaking rocks, and more. Inmate numbers reached over 700,000 in early 1945. By then, the SS held most prisoners in satellite camps, which had sprung up near factories and building sites.

The end came in the first months of 1945, when Allied troops conquered what was left of the Third Reich. But liberation came too late for many concentration camp inmates. Between January and May 1945 (when Germany capitulated), an estimated 300,000 prisoners died. Victims of disease, starvation and execution, they died inside the hellish compounds and on death marches away from abandoned camps.

Overall, some 2.3 million men, women and children were taken to concentration camps between 1933 and 1945. Their fate was shaped by many factors, such as age, gender and nationality. There were many different prisoner groups, including Jews, political prisoners (from Germany and abroad), homosexuals, criminals, Gypsies, Soviet POWs and Jehovah's Witnesses. They all experienced the camps differently. Inmate relations were often tense, but there was also much comradeship and resistance.

The SS ruled the concentration camps with an iron fist. It enforced brutal rules and rigid schedules. But just as there was no typical camp and no typical prisoner, there was no typical perpetrator either. By no means all men and women in the Camp SS were depraved murderers. But most of them quickly got used to the abuse of prisoners and upheld SS terror to the end.

Liberation was no happy end. Most prisoners had died before the Allies arrived. And the camps left a bitter legacy for survivors. They suffered from injuries and haunting memories, while most perpetrators got away unpunished. Meanwhile, ordinary Germans often pleaded ignorance. They did not know about the SS crimes, they said. This was one of many lies about the camps. After all, the camps had been public knowledge during the Third Reich. To combat such lies, and to learn lessons from the camps, we need to understand their complex history.

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When we think of Nazi evil, we think of Auschwitz: the deadliest Nazi camp and the deadliest Holocaust site. But there was more to the history of the camps and the Holocaust than Auschwitz. The SS operated over 25 concentration camps during the Nazi dictatorship (1933-45), and over 1,100 attached satellite camps.

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Kids learn about the causes of World War II including fascism, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, the Treaty of Versailles, appeasement, the Great Depression, and Japanese expansion.

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The hierarchic structure of the concentration camps followed the model established in Dachau. The German staff was headed by the Lagerkommandant (camp commander) and a team of subordinates, comprised mostly of junior officers. One of them commanded the prisoners' camp, usually after being specially trained for this duty. Male and female guards and wardens of various kinds were subordinate to the command staff.

The prisoners had a hierarchy of their own. Prisoner-supervisors (kapos) were considered an elite that could wield power. The prisoners had different opinions about them: most Jewish supervisors tried to treat their brethren well; some were harsh towards the other inmates.

The appel, the daily lineup that took place every morning after wakeup and each evening after returning from labor, was one of the horrific aspects of the prisoners' lives in the camps. They were forced to stand completely still, often for hours at a time, exposed to the elements in the cold, rain, or snow and to the terror of sudden violence by SS men, guards or kapos. The camp routine was composed of a long list of orders and instructions, usually given to all but sometimes aimed at individual prisoners, the majority of which were familiar yet some came unexpected. All of one's strength had to be enlisted to overcome the daily routine: an early wakeup, arranging the bed's straw, the lineup, marching to labor, forced labor, the waiting period for the meager daily meal, usually consisting of a watery vegetable soup and half a piece of bread which was insufficient for people working at hard labor, the return to the camp, and another lineup, before retiring to the barracks.

Despite their terrible conditions, cultural and religious activity continued in the ghettos, labor camps, and even concentration camps. Literary and artistic works that survived the war reflect the Jews' lives, agonies and efforts to maintain their human and Jewish identity. These works are direct and authentic testimonies and depict the Jewish victims' daily life during the Holocaust. Writing a diary on scraps of paper, producing drawings and illustrations of camp life, making jewelry out of copper wire, writing a Passover Haggadah, and conducting prayer services on the eve of Rosh Hashanah are all manifestations of the tremendous psychological strength maintained by these frail, starving people. Even at the end of the grueling days they had to endure, they refused to abandon their creative endeavors. Prisoners in concentration and labor camps exhibited heroism and resourcefulness in their daily lives, struggling to sustain not only the ember of physical life but also, and primarily, their humanity and basic moral values, friendship and concern for others - values that facilitated their survival.

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The hierarchic structure of the concentration camps followed the model established in Dachau. The German staff was headed by the Lagerkommandant (camp commander) and a team of subordinates, comprised mostly of junior officers. One of them commanded the prisoners’ camp, usually after being specially trained for this duty