January 22-28, 2015, Current Events Lesson Plan
Current Event: Ceremony Marks Anniversary of Auschwitz Liberation
About 300 survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp recently returned for a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. Nazi Germany ran the camp in a region of Poland it occupied during World War II (1939-1945) and used it as a center for forced labor and murdering prisoners. About 1.25 million people were killed at Auschwitz. Most of the people killed were Jews, but some Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war also died there. When Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, they were shocked by what they saw. The Nazis, who had fled before the advancing Soviet army, left behind piles of corpses, prisoners bed-ridden or otherwise too ill or starved to walk on their own, and about 400 children. Soviet troops eventually found about 7,000 surviving prisoners at Auschwitz. The remaining prisoners who had been held at Auschwitz, some 60,000 people, had been forced by the Nazis to march westward toward Germany. Many people, days away from liberation, died on these “death marches.”
Objective:
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II. The Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler wanted to eliminate all Jews as part of his aim to conquer the world. By the end of the war, the Nazis had killed about 6 million Jewish men, women, and children—more than two-thirds of the Jews in Europe. In addition to Jews, the Nazis systematically killed millions of other people whom Hitler regarded as racially inferior or politically dangerous. Historians estimate that perhaps as many as 11 million people were killed in total. Many of the Holocaust victims were killed in specially constructed gas chambers, and their bodies were then burned. The word holocaust comes from a Greek word that means a sacrificial offering that is completely burned. The Behind the Headlines news story and related World Book articles explore Auschwitz and the Holocaust.
Words to know:
Discussion Topics:
1. Ask your students to name military and political leaders of World War II. (Students might say Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, Dwight Eisenhower, Hirohito, Adolf Hitler, Douglas MacArthur, Benito Mussolini, George Patton, Erwin Rommel, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin.)
2. Have your students debate the question, “When is war justified?”
3. Have your students debate the question, “How would the world be different today if World War II had never been fought?”
4. During World War II, the Allies found out about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Some people called for the Allies to bomb Auschwitz and other concentration camps, claiming that by destroying the concentration camps fewer people would be killed in the Holocaust. Other people argued that bombing Auschwitz would divert resources needed to win the war as quickly as possible, and some people believed that bombing Auschwitz would have made the Allies guilty of the deaths of the prisoners they would have inevitably killed. The Allies decided to not bomb Auschwitz. Ask your students to debate: “The Allies should have bombed Auschwitz during World War II.”
5. Ask your students to use World Book’s Timelines feature to view or add to the Holocaust timeline. (Students may wish to use World Book’s “Holocaust” article for help.)