The Holocaust In The Mid-20th Century

The world’s history is stained with a multitude of genocides and long standing prejudices against a peoples. One of the most notorious of these calamities was unfortunately one of the most recent, occurring in the mid-20th century: The Holocaust. This event is often defined as the systematic killing of Europe’s Jewish population, in Nazi-Germany occupied territories, and of other groups, including Gypsies(Roma and Sinti), homosexuals, and more. In this genocide, it is estimated that approximately 11 million people brutally lost their lives, perhaps more. Nearly 80 years later, it is still a point of discussion in the majority of the world. The Holocaust was and is still an important part of our history because studying it can help future generations

Additionally, the Holocaust ended up affecting the economies of countries. On the 9th and 10th of November in 1938, Kristallnacht took place in Germany as revenge for the death of Ernst von Rath, the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, who was shot on the 7th on the month by Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew. These days were referred to as the night of broken glass, Kristallnacht, because these days involved the legal destruction of Jewish owned homes and businesses. On Kristallnacht, thousands of Jewish homes, shops, and 586 synagogues were destroyed. The irrational destruction of property angered Hermann Goering, not because he thought it was immoral to the Jews, but because the destroyed shops and homes lost a lot of their value. Goering believed that if the owners were alternatively cleared out, Germans would have been much more interested in purchasing the properties. A meeting was then held on the 12th so Goering could explain the negligence of destroying thousands of Jewish properties. Goering decided to issue three laws on the same day as the meeting. One was to force the Jewish owners of the destroyed properties to immediately repair their buildings and pay the price of the repairs. The second was to charge the Jews of German,

These places were where Jews made up the bigger piece of the Russian middle class, before World War II, by having 67 percent of Russian Jews holding white-collar jobs, while only about 15 percent of non-Jews had these jobs in comparison. In some invaded areas, 70 percent of physicians and many workers in high-skill jobs in trade and education were Jews. The mistreatment of Jews had long-lasting effects on the societies left behind because they made up a large share of the of society that was essential to economic and political development. In the 11 Russian oblasts most affected by the Holocaust, the Jewish population declined by an average 39 percent between 1939 and 1959. These areas now have markedly lower per-capita gross domestic product and lower average wages. Average GDP per capita was only $4,555 in 2002, while the nationwide average was