Lesson video

We're going to continue with our unit on 20th century conflict.

We've learned all about the first World War, and how Hitler rose to power.

And we're going to, over the next few lessons, we're going to look at the second World War and then onto the Cold War, the period of history following on from the second World War.

I want to start with a little bit of a warning, because the next two lessons we're going to be learning about a period of history known as the Holocaust or the Shoah.

And this period of history is very upsetting, because millions and millions of people were murdered, but it's important that we do learn about it.

It's important that we remember what happened for lots of reasons.

One is so that we can make sure that we don't ever let anything like it happen again.

The second thing is because these were real people, with real lives and it's important that we remember them.

So over the next few lessons, just make sure that you're looking after your own mental health.

If you need to take a break from the video, then that's fine.

You can pause or close it and come back another time.

But just be aware of the fact that this is going to be upsetting, but that we can learn it together and find out about what happened.

There are thousands and thousands of you out there.

We've had some statistics, and there about 50,000 ESXers across the country watching these lessons on 20th century conflict.

So even though it might feel a little bit like, oh gosh, I'm doing this all by myself.

Remember that there are so many thousands of people out there learning it together.

You're one of them.

So, well done.

Stick with these lessons.

Together, we're all going to learn about all the 20th century conflicts.

You're amazing.

So let's look at today's lesson.

And we're going to start off by learning about anti-Semitism.

Try saying that word, anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is a hatred or a prejudice, or a discrimination against Jewish people.

Okay? Against Jews.

We already know that Hitler hated Jews.

And we're going to look at how anti-Semitism rose in the 1930s, before the second World War began.

How Hitler already began to put anti-Semitism in place.

So this is what our lesson looks like today.

We're going to learn about how the the first concentration camps were put in place in the 1930s and built in the 1930s.

Then Hitler makes anti-Semitism law within Germany.

We'll learn about an awful event known as Kristallnacht and then we're going to have our end of lesson quiz.

Make sure you're well-organized.

You need to make sure you've got a book or a piece of paper and something to write with it, so that when I pause and tell you to write, you're ready to go.

So we're going to start actually, not in the 1930s.

We're going to start in 1944, July, 1944, just after D-Day.

The Soviets, the Russians in the East, had started to move in towards Poland.

The tide was starting to turn.

Germany were losing the war.

And the Soviets, as they moved into Poland, to a place called Lublin, they found a camp called Majdanek.

And in that camp, they found something horrifying and shocking.

They found these ovens.

And thousands and thousands of clothes.

And that's because this was a extermination camp.

It was a camp built by the Nazis to systematically murder different groups of people.

And at this camp alone, 78,000 people were killed.

And over the course of the next year, as the Allies began to take back areas of Poland and Germany, until eventually winning the war completely, many, many, many more camps were discovered.

And the full atrocities, the scale of the murder, became obvious to everybody.

But these camps were not built later in the war.

They actually started to get built in the 1930s.

And it's important to know that there were different kinds of camps.

So you might've heard about some of the extermination camps, the murder camps, the camps designed, actually, to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.

But there were lots of different camps that Hitler started to build for different purposes.

And the first camps that he started to build were prison camps or labour camps for political opponents.

And that's what we're going to learn about first.

So you remember that in the last lesson, Hitler had come to power in 1933.

So Hitler comes to power.

And one of the things that he wants to do straight away is he wants to stop any of his political opponents from taking any power away from him.

And so this man on the left here, he's called Herman Goring.

Hitler puts Goring in charge of a secret police.

So Hitler establishes a secret police that can do all the things that he wants, that can enforce all the things that he wants to be enforced, secretly.

So they don't have to follow any laws or any rules.

And he puts Goring in charge of that secret police.

It was called the Gestapo, the secret police, the Gestapo.

And they could start to round up the political opponents, other the politicians that might say to Hitler, hold on a second.

You're going too far here.

Hold on a second.

What you're doing is wrong.

Goring was in charge of leading a secret police, the Gestapo, to find those politicians, and take them away to those camps.

So I've got a sentence that I'd like you to have a go at completing.

Hitler placed Goring in charge of the Gestapo, or secret police, so they could - What was the purpose of the Gestapo? What was the purpose of the secret police? Why did Hitler do that? Why did he put Goring? What was their plan? Try and write that sentence, starting with that starter.

Write it out in how to lock those new ideas into your head and the new vocabulary into your head.

Pause the video and do that now.

Super; so hopefully you've written something like, so they could secretly begin to arrest and imprison political opponents.

So now Hitler has built these camps.

He's putting all of the political opponents in there.

That's not the only thing he does.

He passes a law called the Enabling Act.

And the Enabling Act said that he could be completely in charge.

His party, the Nazi Party could be completely in charge.

So a one party state.

No other politicians need to be consulted.

And Hitler, early on in his rule, we learn about some of the social and the economic aspects of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Politically, he's consolidating power and he's getting rid of any kinds of opponents.

He puts another man in charge of the SS, called Heinrich Himmler.

So the SS was Hitler's own personal protection squad.

They were like his body guards.

And they were a group of very, very elite, very brutal soldiers, military people, police officers, who would be just in charge of looking after Hitler and doing whatever he wanted them to do.

And he put Himmler in charge, because he really trusted Himmler.

So Himmler was in charge of the SS.

There was another man here called Ernst Rohm.

And Ernst Rohm was in charge of, he was in charge of another group.

He was in charge of a group, sometimes called the the SA or the Stormtroopers.

Now the Stormtroopers, they were kind of like the military wing, or the paramilitary wing, of the Nazi Party, and Ernst Rohm and Hitler had been friends since the Nazi Party began.

Because it was Hitler who was in charge of giving the speeches and the politics.

Rohm was in charge of the violence.

He was in charge of the protests.

He was in charge of having, like a mini army for the Nazis.

Hitler became increasingly worried about Rohm.

He thought he had too much power.

He thought that the SA Stormtroopers were actually too powerful and they could be a threat.

So even though Rohm had been Hitler's friend, he actually had him murdered.

In an event called the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler sent Himmler and some of his other high-ranking officials, he sent them in the middle of the night to get Rohm and arrested him and accused him of treason, 'cause he was worried that Rohm had become too powerful.

And so said to Rohm, that's it, you're out now.

And in fact, began executions.

And Rohm, because maybe because he was his friend, they didn't kill him straight away.

They actually gave him, Hitler said, give him a gun and give him 10 minutes, and tell him that he has to kill himself.

And Rohm didn't do that.

He ripped his shirt open in defiance.

And so when the rest of the Nazis, Hitler's SS went in, they shot and killed Rohm, even though he was their friend.

So that then Himmler could become in charge of the SS Stormtroopers.

So Hitler again, throughout the 1930s, consolidating his power.

So a little bit of a task for you.

Let's match up these.

You know some Nazi leaders now.

We know some of the leaders in the Nazi Party.

Let's see if you can match these up.

You've got this person here, this person here, and this person here.

One of them is in charge of the Stormtroopers.

Who's that? One of them is in charge of the SS.

Who's that? One of them is in charge of, one them is called Goring.

One of them is called Rohm.

One of them is called Himmler.

And one of those in charge of the Gestapo.

So see if you can match up those names with what they were in charge of.

Pause the video and write down the name with the group that they were in charge of.

Okay, great, so hopefully you have said that Himmler was in charge of the SS.

Goring was in charge of the Gestapo.

And Rohm was in charge of the SA until he was executed by Hitler in the Night of the Long Knives, where he killed all of his political opponents.

He gave them one-minute trials.

So, the SS would burst in, take his political opponents.

They would have one minute where they would say you're guilty of treason, and then they would be shot.

And that's what Hitler started doing in the 1930s.

It's not all he did.

He also made anti-Semitism become law.

And there was nobody to stop him now, because he'd killed all of his political opponents or sent them to the camps.

So Hitler made a law called the Nuremberg Law, and you can see at the top there: Nuremberg.

Have a look.

So if you want to pause the video, you can pause the video.

Have a close look at this picture here.

What do you think it is? So this picture is actually showing people.

So what you can see here is you can see each circle represents a person, and it's Hitler trying to show, trying to work out how pure somebody's blood is.

So here, this is a pure blood German as far as Hitler is concerned.

Now we know that Hitler was a racist, and we know that he wanted, what he called the pure blood Aryan race.

There's no such thing, but that's what Hitler believed.

That's what he wanted.

And so he had this chart to try and show you people whether they were pure blood.

And these ones at the top here, you can imagine, this is the sort of the grandparents, or great grandparents.

And he said, if both of your grandparents were pure blood Germans and your parents were pure blood Germans then you're pure blood, and you're fine.

You can marry another pure blood German.

But you can't marry somebody that's not pure blood because that would mix the races.

And he didn't want the races mixed.

We know that he was into eugenics, the idea of trying to breed humans to make them better somehow.

You might also notice on this side, the black dots.

Guess who they are.

You might see that it says Jude at the top, or Jude: Jews.

And so, he also said there were Jews.

And he said, if you've got Jews as part of your parents or grandparents, then you're not pure blooded.

You've got Jewish blood.

And that means that you're undesirable.

He doesn't want you.

You're to blame.

You're a parasite.

You're a worst race, and he used these laws to strip Jews of all of their rights, to strip them of their citizenship and to strip them of their rights.

So how did he do that? Well, he had another person here.

This person's called Joseph Goebbels, and he was in charge of propaganda.

Propaganda is when you use films or posters or leaflets, or information, speeches, to try to change people's minds.

And very often, you use misinformation.

You lie.

You give what we would now call fake news, to try and turn people to your way of thinking.

Especially trying to blame a sort of group.

And that's exactly what Goebbels was a specialist at.

He travelled around the country in a train telling everybody that the Jews were awful.

And there's this poster here with, a very racist poster here with a stereotypical Jew grabbing money.

Because one of the racist stereotypes of Jewish people is that they're all money grabbing.

That's what racists believe about Jewish people.

It's not true, but it's one of the stereotypes.

And it's one that Goebbels wanted to try and get people to believe.

And so he's got a picture there of a Jew with loads of grabbing money.

And he's got a whip in his hand.

He said, and the Jews are in charge.

The Jews will whip you like a slave.

And there it's called The Eternal Jew.

That's what that red writing there says, The Eternal Jew.

And constantly, the Jewish people would be fed this propaganda by Goebbels and by the Nazi Party, about this evil, Jewish race.

These evil Jews, that are taking your money, that are in-charge.

They are the reason that everything has gone wrong.

And so let's have a little think about the impact of that.

So how would that anti-Semitic propaganda change how ordinary Germans viewed the Jewish community? That's what I'd like you to answer.

Let's try and think back now, to 1930s, in Germany, when these posters and these speeches, and these newspapers and this information, being given by the government and Goebbels, and remember, Hitler has killed all of his political opponents or put them in camps, so they can't give other information.

It's all just coming from the Nazi party.

What sort of an effect would that have on ordinary Germans? You might, I've got a sentence starter there for you to get you started off if you're stuck.

So pause the video and write down your answer to how would anti-Semitic propaganda change how ordinary Germans viewed the Jewish community? Super, I'd love to see some of those answers.

I know that you've been doing a really good job at writing down awesome notes and awesome answers.

Been very, very, very impressed of everything I've seen come through on Twitter.

So ask your parents or carers to send a Tweet with a picture of your work so that I can read it @OakNational #ONAESX.

I'll put that up at the end.

So the last part of our lesson is going to be about an event called Kristallnacht.

So Hitler has sent all of his political opponents to camps or had them executed.

There's been awful Jewish propaganda.

And Hitler is in charge of the SA, the SS, and the Gestapo, the secret police, and these these sort of like brutal army sort of figures.

And he sends them into, across Germany to start to really persecute Jews.

So Kristallnacht took place in 1938, and it was coordinated by the Gestapo and the SS.

And they sent people into towns across Germany and Austria, and told them to burn down Synagogues, where Jews worship, and told them to destroy and loot and steal all of their shops.

And it wasn't only that.

They brutally beat Jews.

They took away all of their things and damaged all of their property.

And they murdered the Jews as well that they found.

And so after Kristallnacht, this night which took place over a single night, there were at least 91 Jews murdered.

And some reports say hundreds more committed suicide, 'cause they were worried about what was going to happen to them during that night.

Over 250 Synagogues were damaged or burned down.

Thousands of Jewish businesses were vandalised and looted.

Over 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to those concentration camps.

So those concentration camps that we talked about earlier for the political opponents, they started to become expanded.

They made them bigger so that they could start sending Jews in 1938.

So they could start sending Jewish people that they'd arrested to them.

And afterwards, after the Jews had been murdered and had their businesses destroyed, Hitler fined the Jews for the damage.

So even though they were the ones who had been attacked, Hitler fined them.

He made them pay a billion marks, Deutsche Marks, which is about, it's about 5 billion pounds today.

He made them pay that to cover the damage.

And those businesses were then taken away from the Jews, and they were given to other people, more pure blood people, in Hitler's opinion.

So thinking about this, some historians have looked at Kristallnacht, and they've said this was the first step towards the Holocaust.

Remember right at the start of this lesson, we were talking about all of those Jews murdered in that extermination camp.

Historians say this was where it started.

Kristallnacht was where it started.

So how could Kristallnacht, what happened, from what you've learned about what happened.

How could that have contributed towards those events, towards the events of the Holocaust? Write down your answer to that.

Great, you've written down an answer to how Kristallnacht was the first step towards the Holocaust.

Important historical skill: trying to think about cause and effect.

How different things impact, different factors impact different events over time.

So well-done if you've written a sentence there.

So what did people think of this? Well, this was somebody writing in the Telegraph, a British newspaper.

He's called Hugh Greene.

And I'll just let you read that.

You can pause the video and read, and I'll read it afterwards.

So this is an eyewitness account from Hugh Greene in the Daily Telegraph.

And he says, "Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction.

I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating," that means it makes you sick, "as this.

Racial hatred and hysteria seem to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people.

I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the 'fun'".

So what's this source telling us? Well, it's a first hand account from Hugh Greene, a journalist, and he's saying that people just stood by.

They watched, some of them joined in.

Some of them were laughing, or enjoying the fun.

Now we know that the events, they weren't spontaneous.

They didn't just happen randomly.

Hitler planned them.

Hitler sent the Gestapo to start all of that violence and get other people to do it.

And he actually told all the police, and he told the firefighters, don't stop it.

If you see a Synagogue on fire, don't put it out.

That's what he said to the firefighters.

If you see a Jewish business being destroyed, don't stop it.

They argued, the Jews deserve this.

So you shouldn't stop it.

Let's look at a different perspective.

This is from the U.

S.

ambassador to Germany.

And he said, "In view of this being a totalitarian state." So a totalitarian state is where there's just one party in charge, like Hitler's party.

"In view this being a totalitarian state, a surprising characteristic of the situation here is the intensity and scope among German citizens of condemnation of the recent happenings against Jews." If you condemn something, you say it's bad.

So, the U.

S.

ambassador is saying the opposite to what Hugh Greene is saying.

The U.

S.

ambassador is saying, sorry, I didn't show you that there.

The U.

S.

ambassador is saying that actually, lots of ordinary Germans said that this was horrible.

They were disgusted at what had happened to the Jews.

So on the one hand, we've got Hugh Greene for the Daily Telegraph saying everybody was laughing and joining in.

And on the other hand, you've got the U.

S.

ambassador saying, actually, first of all, people didn't really have a choice 'cause it's a totalitarian state.

And second of all, lots of people said it was really awful.

So I'd like you to write down now how these different sources differ, because this is where history gets tricky, guys.

This is where it becomes hard, because it's not just the case of going and finding one source, and then we know what happened in the past.

Different sources could say different things, and we have to take all of them into account as we weigh up the evidence.

So let's practise that now.

I would like you to write, how did these sources differ in how they present the reaction of the German people to Kristallnacht.

Awesome.

Well done for writing that down.

I want to see that.

So please do send it in.

You're working really hard.

These tasks that are designed to make you think hard, and lock the really important knowledge into your heads.

So we're going to end with this quote here.

And this quote here actually comes from, well, let's read it together.

It says, "In respect to the most recent action against the Jews, the populace has divided views.

One segment of the people is of the opinion that the conscious actions and associated arrests and destruction were far too mild.

The other section of the population, by far larger, feels that the destruction was uncalled for.

In this connection, it appears worth noting that the question was repeatedly raised amongst the population as to whether who took part in the action should be punished or not." So this is actually written by somebody November 26th, 1938 on the night.

So this was actually Kristallnacht.

And it's written about later, but it was written by somebody at the time on the night.

And this person was saying, look, there were some people who were joining in, but there were much larger number of people who said this is uncalled for and wanted it to be stopped.

So this might have been the sort of thing that you wrote in your response here.

That there are two different views.

And so maybe both the right in a way.

That there were some people who were joining in, but there were also some people who were saying that it was awful in Germany at the time Together though, this is taken such in 1938, and we can see how systematically Hitler managed to make anti-Semitism rise.

People hate Jews through propaganda and use his Gestapo and SS and Stormtroopers to physically attack Jewish people.

Take away their rights, take away their citizenship, throughout the 1930s.