Abstract
The European Jews were the primary victims of the Holocaust. During the Holocaust over 6 million Jews from all over Europe were annihilated by the Nazi death machine. The paper questions why European Jews allowed themselves to be led to their death, despite their innocence of wrongdoing and why they not resist. The paper examines two responses to this question. One response includes psychological, historical, religious and tactical reasons. A second response is that in fact there were instances of resistance and the paper uses the uprising in Sobibor death camp as an example of Jewish resistance.

From the Paper
"The inmates interred in the camps as workers were almost totally focused on simply surviving; chronic starvation robbed concentration camp inmates of their physical strength. There were uprisings in the camps, but they were rarely successful. Those attempting to resist faced almost impossible odds. It was much more difficult for resistance fighters to organize themselves and engage in armed resistance activities because they were completely exposed to the camp administration, the guards, and unofficial collaborators among the concentration camp inmates. The Nazis also used the principle of collective responsibility against the concentration camp inmates, punishing groups of inmates for the acts of one or a few individuals in a group."

Tags:Belzec, Treblinka, sonderkommando, Alexander, Pecherski, kapo

Abstract
This paper studies the process of elimination the Jewish ghettos in World War Two Europe. It explains the "logic" behind the concept of the ghetto and how they finally became unmanageable. The writer looks at how the elimination of the ghetto Jews fit into the overall aim of the Nazis to wipe out the entire Jewish population of Europe. Ghettos mentioned are Lodz and Warsaw. It shows how they were sent to concentration camps and finally to their death.

From the Paper
"In 1939, a decree was issued by the Chief of the German Security Police, which outlined certain procedures for the treatment of all Jews in the German occupied territories. Through this decree, all the Jews were to be isolated, identified, and contained in ghettos, primarily to be used as slave labor, but with the ulterior motive of their mass execution. Hence, a pre-planned and systematic strategy was adopted by Hitler's regime, which not only identified and segregated all the Jews, but their property and the German State seized assets. Since most of the Jews populated the rural country-side, they were systematically brought to the cities to live in these newly created ghettos. These ghettos were usually cut off from their surroundings by barbed wires or high walls with mounted guards. These ghettos eventually became overcrowded, and lacking the basic facilities of water, sanitation, fuel, and constant threat of epidemics, the Jewish population began to suffer from a high mortality rate within the walls of their new surroundings."

Tags:world, war, two, lodz, warsaw, treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Maidanek, Sobibor, germany, europe