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The Holocaust: it's the scary-sounding name for that time [Holocaust title]

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between 1933 and 1945 when the Nazi Party of Germany oversaw the genocide of

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6 million Jews. On top of that, Nazis also murdered millions of disabled people,

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gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Romani, or gypsies, as they're often called. There's [Holocaust info]

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a good reason there's a million books, movies, and TV shows about it all, folks.

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If you haven't seen Schindler's List, you should. It was an unprecedented event of

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"ethnic cleansing" that still shocks, even to this day. Of course, [Ethnic cleansing title]

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anti-Semitism, which is a fancy way of saying prejudice against Jews, didn't [anti-Semitism definition]

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just sprout up in World War II. Hatred and distrust of Jews had been simmering

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in Europe for centuries. But in Germany, it hit a boiling point with the rise of [Hitler rises]

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the charismatic Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler. Today, the term Nazi is

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synonymous with pretty much all things evil. It's one of those few things that

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are totally black and white. There's nothing about the mass extermination of [chess game]

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innocent people that will ever be good, right? While anybody worth listening to [video of Nazis]

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agrees that the actions of Hitler and the Nazis were awful, there's debate over

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American and Allied response to the atrocity itself, and it's still a sticky [people debate]

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issue. At first, nobody really knew what was going on. News traveled a lot slower

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back in the day. The world was less connected then, not to mention that it's [slow news]

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hard to get good info from a closed-off dictatorship. Anybody heard much from

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North Korea lately? Hmm? Well, even when rumors started to get out, they were just

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too horrible for many to believe. They were painted as the kind of wildly [words fly in front of war]

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exaggerated rumors that do often swirl around in the confusion of war. Of course, some

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argue that all this was just an excuse to do nothing. America had a super strict

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immigration policy that, for the most part, barred Eastern European Jews from [boat turns around and leaves America]

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seeking asylum in the U.S. Some say that this was partly because America wasn't

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exactly free of anti-Semitism itself. Things weren't Third Reich-level bad, [Statue of Liberty]

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but you know, it's pretty hard to top that. But in general, all outsiders were

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looked at with suspicion. Add that to the fact that America was still buried under [people looking through window]

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the Great Depression, and many Americans were willing to let European Jews fend

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for themselves. It wasn't until 1942 that the U.S. [Holocaust picture]

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State Department caught wise to the fact that the Nazis were actually serious

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when they got fully authenticated reports on the scale and existence of [Nazi report]

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the Holocaust. But surely once it found out, the U.S. immediately stepped up to the

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plate to defend innocent people, right? No, not quite. Well, the general [baseball bat swings]

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position of the Allies was that they could end the Holocaust only by

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defeating Germany. They declared that the Holocaust would stop when Hitler was [people in front of flag]

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stopped, and ultimately America did in fact help directly halt the Holocaust in

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1944 two years after the State Department confirmed that genocide was

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actually going on. Some say that the heroic Roosevelt administration did what [war ends]

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it could in an impossible situation. Others say the failure to take more

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active measures sooner was the worst blemish on FDR's presidency. Others say [FDR pictured with blemish]

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just please stop talking about the Holocaust, it just makes me sad. But sorry

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it has to be remembered. We'd say a joke to end this one, but holocaust jokes, [man shakes head]

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well they just don't happen here around Shmoop. [people at Shmoop]

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