By early 1942, annihilation of the Jews had become the formal policy of the Nazis. The confirmation of the covert plan (Operation ‘Reinhard’) to ‘liquidate’ the 2 million Jews under Nazi control in occupied Poland was approved. This would begin with the deportation and murderof those living in ghettos. The extermination of all Jewish people in Europe is the ultimate goal. This requires immense logistical organisation and complicity not just from the Nazis, but commercial companies and hundreds of thousands of individuals across occupied Europe. James Bulgin is the lead curator for the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museums.The new galleries at IWM London explore the history of how these events happened.This video is part one of an introduction to this complex history. The so-called Reinhard camps, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II, were the final destination of approximately 1.75 million men, women and children. Located within occupied Poland,they were designed to be discreet and efficient. People were told that they are being processed for work ’in the east’, but will need to be showered before this procedure. The showerswere actually gas chambers that pumped carbon monoxide into the sealed rooms.The process was brutal, barbaric, and routinely inefficient. Lauren Wilmott: "So this is a tile or part of a tile from one of the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp. It's most likely a wall tile and we know this from the limited survivor testimony that's in existence that describes the colour of the wall and the floor tiles in the gas chambers, and the reason that I say limited testimony is that there were very few survivors from the Treblinka death camp. It was a camp designed specifically for mass murder. Between July 1942 and September 1943 approximately nine hundred thousand Jews and two thousand Roma were murdered at the Treblinka death camp. To hide all traces of what had happened at Treblinka, the Nazis demolished the camp and turned it into a farm. Because of this it had been assumed that there was nothing left to find at Treblinka but in 2014 there was a large excavation. This tile was one of the artifacts found during this excavation so it's some of the only physical evidence in existence that was once witness to what happened in the gas chambers at Treblinka." JB: "Hitler's head of propaganda Joseph Goebbels created a whole ream of propaganda to support the ideology of their regime and this was manifest in all different types of media: in radio broadcasts and cinema broadcasts people were encouraged to believe that Hitler was leading a massive Germanrevival which would lead to a massively improved way of life for everybody within the Reich and foreverybody who was allowed to be part of it. This propaganda is really really important here and to Goebbels of course in shaping the way that people consider what the Nazis can do for them."

Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Nazi persecution of Jewish people started from the very beginning of their regime.In the months and years that followed, laws were introduced that restricted opportunities for Jewish people. In 1935, a significant moment came with the introduction of the Nuremberg Lawsthat formally recognised who was and wasn’t a German citizen and what rights they had. The genocide now known as the Holocaust was the state-sponsored mass murder of six million Jewish men, women and children. There was nothing inevitable about the decision of the Nazis and their collaborators to attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews, and hundreds of thousands of people were complicit. The Nazi regime came to power in 1933, which saw the spread of their insidiousideas of racial ideology. Persecution and violence towards Jewish people living within the Reich became sinister and overt. Jewish people were initially pressured to emigrate, and many escaped from the Reich. But thousands were left behind. War was declared on 3 September 1939. The eventsthat followed eventually led to the Nazis’ plan for the extermination of Europe’s Jews. After you finish reading this book, you will know who planned the Holocaust, where and when it took place, and how it was carried out. But one thing you won't learn is why it happened. ...For a long time we thought about whether or not to publish a book about the Holocaust. ...But we decided it was such an important event that not including the Holocaust in the series would be wrong. The few survivors of the Holocaust are very old now. When they are no longer alive, it will be up to books to tell the painful story of what happened" (Connor, editor). JB: "The First World War left Germany in complete chaos. There was a lot of displaced anger because Germany didn't expect to lose theFirst World War, the people of Germany being encouraged to believe that this was a war that they were set to win, and when they didn't it left people feeling angry and frustrated and needing someone to blame, and a lot of these young men who'd been part of the military found that they had all this displaced anger and nowhere to direct it so politics became very volatile and very incendiary, and this was a landscape in which extreme politics and extremist politicians found some real ground to manoeuver."From the mid-1930s until the end of the Second World War, the Nazi regime carried out a campaign of sustained antisemitic persecution that developed into a coordinated programme of massmurder. This genocide is now known as the Holocaust. Millions of Jewish people were killed,many different communities were shattered – and not just people were destroyed but entire ways oflife. The scale of the Holocaust is such that it has become a foundational part of Western culture and is a fundamental part of the history of the Second World War. But how did this atrocity happen? What was happening in Germany in the 1930s that saw the rise of the Nazi Party? As well as their use of violence, intimidation and new laws propaganda wasessential to the Nazis’ consolidation of power and the spread of their dangerous ideologies. The camps were liberated from July 1944, and footage of the scenes that Allied soldiers encountered were witnessed across the world. The conditions are so badthat many prisoners continued to die after liberation due to malnutrition and disease. For those prisoners that did survive, liberation was not the end of their suffering. From the beginning of 1942 these massacres were consolidated into a programme of co-ordinated annihilation. Millions of Jews were deported from ghettos or holding camps to be killed. Most were sent to a small number of purpose-built killing centres called death camps, but as the war developed, thousands more were sent to concentration camps to be worked to death in service of Germany’s deteriorating war effort. This Nazis were central to this process, but they did not act alone and relied on the support and complicity of hundreds of thousands of people across Europe. I thought this might have been a coincidence, but seeing as this book was published in 2017, the "Could Germany be great again? Yes!" line was a bit... on the nose. Don't get me wrong, I hate Trump as much as the next socialist, but this might keep some parents from letting their children from reading this book, and I feel that every child should, and then allow themselves to find their own parallels between the Hitler's Nazi Party and any other current political party and its leader.

This is a very tasteful yet honest way on how to inform children about the Holocaust. As non-biased as they usually are, they made sure to keep the same non-biased tone while not giving a trace of doubt that Hitler was any sort of decent man. You could tell the author was so badly wanting to throw vulgarity after vulgarity at him, just being shy of calling him a loser. I sincerely appreciate the Who Was/What Was authors including the Holocaust in their series. The book starts with two letters to the readers stating the importance of remembering this time in history.I particularly liked the full-scale map of Auschwitz Birkenau, and I feel it was important to include the illustration of the gas chambers. For whatever reason, this is the part conspiracy theorists like to target, and I have no tolerance for this nonsense whatsoever and was encouraged by seeing the author/illustrator speak plainly and show these atrocities. I understand it may be hard to think of these things actually happening, but I think the author says just enough and puts it plainly so this is still appropriate for young children/middle schoolers. I would argue it is not just appropriate- it is essential! (Yes, I am passionate about this point!) My daughter and I love to read together at bedtime still, and now that she is older the books she is interested in have more complex topics. This book was a natural next option after she read the Who Was Anne Frank book. This book about the Holocaust presents the facts of what happened to the Jewish people and others not in Nazi favor in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. While there was plenty left out in what many victims endured and suffered at the hands of the Nazi's, the cruel facts of the genocide are not sugar coated while being presented in a very age appropriate way. Photos that are included do not show the worst of the worst, but definitely depict the suffering and cruelty. LW: "So what we have here is the wedding dress worn by Gena Goldfinger on her wedding day to Norman Turgel in October 1945, and what's so special about this dress, about this story, is that Gena and Norman met when Norman entered Belsen concentration camp upon its liberation, and thetwo met and were engaged within a week, and they got married a few months later, and this is thedress that Gena was wearing. It's made of British parachute silk and made into a dress by a localtailor. So Bergen-Belsen was liberated on 15 April 1945 and the conditions at that time werecatastrophic, it was in a state of absolute chaos. The British soldiers upon arrival found almost 60,000 prisoners so it's severely overcrowded, and typhus was running rampant throughout the camp.This wedding dress tells the story of Gena who survived the Holocaust. She was forced toface a future and rebuild her life, but it was a future that she had to face without her family, the majority of whom didn't survive, without a home to go to and without any possessions." The author, Gail Herman, did a good job of explaining and listing all the problems the Jews went through. He also made it clear on the important points. For example, when Hitler got into power, life got even worse for the Jews. "And they blamed Jews for all the country's problems"(18). However, Hitler only disliked the Jews that much because he thought "the Jews of Germany were not real Jews"(18). It started with dislike and then turned into hatred because he started believing that they were the only reasons for his failures. This is when the real story began. We’re in the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum in London.What we’re looking at here is a concrete tile that has recently gone on display. It’s a small object that tells one part of the devastating history of the Holocaust.

I could not agree more. Even though I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on the Holocaust, I still learned some new items such as the word holocaust itself means "sacrifice by fire" in Greek (7). If I had learned that, I sadly did not remember it. I also think Gail Herman, the author, did a great job explaining the history of anti-Semitism and Germany's economy and attitude after World War I. This will help explain to kids, to a certain extent, how Hitler came to rise and was granted so much power. As always, there were real pictures included, timelines with important dates at the end, and side bars with additional information (such as about important Holocaust museums) and illustrations and maps (such as a map of all the major concentration camps in Poland and a map of Germany's invasions across Europe). JB: "The Nazis enacted persecution of Jews in a few different ways. First of all they used kind of the formal structures of laws and rules and restrictions, and they also looked for ways in which the population could be coerced into supporting anti-Jewish thinking and anti-Jewish policy. They wanted to create what they call a volksgemeinschaft, a national community of people who thought in the same way and of course it became increasingly clear within this volksgemeinschaft for the people who didn't fit into it there was really no place at all. The invasion of the Soviet Union was a turning point in the course of the war and the Holocaust. As the Nazis occupied Soviet countries in the East, they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of non-combatants that they considered ‘enemies’ within these territories. When Hitler Got out of jail, he made many many more rules for the Jews to follow. He wanted then to wear tags on their chests like an ID that said "Jude." He did this so that the others would know that this particular person is Jewish and not to respect them because of that. As Nazi leader, Hitler saw two main problems: Germany needed to be bigger and stronger. And something had to be done about the Jews" (20). In 1923, Hitler began his grab for his power and he went to the Munich Beer hall on November 8th. He brought along stormtroopers who are armed Nazis known for violence. After some time passed by, Hitler decided to fire a pistol at the ceiling. Then after things started to fall apart and there were many gunshots at the scene. Hitler then got arrested. This was such a big deal at the time. "Hitler lashed out at the Jews"(22). But the worst part about this whole things was, this incident drew even more people to Hitler's part and Hitler himself. While Hitler was in Jail, he wrote a book called "Mein Kampf." In this book, he talked about how he thinks the Jews are plotting on taking over the world.

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Rudi Bamber: "What had been an undercurrent before then became very much public. The streets were full of marching storm troopers who were triumphant because of the electoral victory and a boycott was started against the Jewish shops. Stormtroopers stood outside the shops and wrote slogans on the windows of the shops with Star of David. So it was a very difficult and unpleasant atmosphere and the reaction of my family and Jews in general was to withdraw and to keep out of the streets and the town as much as possible." Separate to the small number of extermination camps, was the concentration camp network. This network had started in the early years of the regime to target all of those the Nazis consideredenemies of the state, including communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexual men. The campnetwork grew rapidly as the war developed and the Nazis' need for additional labour to support the crumbling war effort became increasingly acute. Auschwitz became a centre of this processand by 1944 had become the focal point of both the mass murder and enslavement of Europe’s Jews.

This book went very into detail, showing how gradual the switch was from a mere strict leadership to utter racist totalitarianism. I also appreciated how they called Romanis "Roma people" rather than the g-word, and they didn't shy away from talking about homosexuals, which often get left out of the Holocaust conversation. They even went as far as to include two triangle-sporting men on the cover of the book.The invasion of Poland and the start of the war in Europe provided circumstances for more extremebehaviour from the Nazi regime. Their invasion and occupation tactics were brutal and ruthless.Civilians were on the front line and were not spared. Nazism had become an explicitlymurderous regime. Germany’s territorial expansion also brought about a large increase in the numberof Jews under the control of the Reich. This led to the formation of the first ghettos.