In the early years of the 21st century, the Sudanese Government organised militia, which killed about 400,000 ethnic Darfuri people in the Darfur region.
Assessing Your Learning
1. Which of these sources listed above are primary sources: Anne Frank’s Diary; Artefacts on display in the Holocaust History Museum; Lilly Appelbaum Malnik’s description of the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen? Explain your answers.
2. Complete this sentence: Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large number of people …
3. What is the meaning of ‘deliberate’? 4. What ‘large number of people’ does genocide refer to?
5. Put the genocides listed above in order of the number of people killed, beginning with the largest number.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
What Were Causes of the Holocaust?
What was the Holocaust? The Holocaust was the systematic or organised killing of millions of Jews by the Nazis during World War II.
What caused the Holocaust? 1
Nazi racial theories 5
The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
4 Nazi conquest of Europe 1 Nazi racial theories
Hitler and the Nazis were strongly influenced by racial ideas or racism. They said all human characteristics (features), such as intelligence and creativity, were handed down through race. ● The Nazis said the Germans were the Master Race, and the creators of a ‘high culture’.
● They claimed they were the superior Aryan race. 328 What is anti-Semitism?
Anti-Semitism is the term used when people are prejudiced against Jews just because they are Jewish. Anti-Semitism is a modern racial term that was invented in 1879 by a German journalist called Wilhelm Marr. However, anti- Jewish feelings are much older than that.