Gould-Traphagan outlines history of Holocaust

Gould-Traphagan, a history teacher at Chadron Middle School and Nebraska representative of the Institute of Holocaust Education, presented “The Holocaust” Tuesday night in the King Library, as part of the Graves Lecture Series.

“I’m constantly learning and being educated about the subject. Really, most people, including me, have only scratched the surface of Holocaust education,” Gould-Traphagan said.

She began with what she considers the start of the Holocaust, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

Hitler believed in a superior race, Gould-Traphagan said.  He described a group of Indo-Europeans known as “Aryan” as the perfect race, with their blonde hair, blue eyes and superior traits. He illustrated these views in his autobiography, “Mein Kampf.”

While the public had access to the self-penned piece, few read it. Gould-Traphagan believes had the public took interest in the book, the election results would have been different.

“If a lot of the German community had read this book, Hitler would most likely not have been elected to power. It was very telling of who he was as a leader,” Gould-Traphagan said.

In 1933 the first concentration camp opened in Dachau, Germany. The camp was only used for political prisoners who disagreed with Nazi party ideals. Later that year, the anti-Jewish laws are enacted, excluding Jews from citizenship and government employment.

Two years later the government passed anti-Semitic laws known as the Nuremberg Laws.

On Nov. 7, 1938, a Polish man, Herschel Grynszpan, led an uprising that involved the assassination of a Nazi official. The Nazi’s believed this gave them cause to react in an extreme way.

Kristallnacht, commonly referred to as “the night of broken glass,” was a pogrom that took place Nov. 8 and 9. The porgrom, a pre-meditated riot geared against a ethnicity, was aimed at burning Jewish synagogues, homes and businesses, all while collecting them for concentration camps.

Over 25,000 Jews were arrested and put into concentration camps after that night. Over the next three years the Nazis would invade Poland, arrest Jews and create thousands of ghettos across southern European countries.

On Jan. 20, 1942, Nazi officials met in Wannsee, Germany to formulate what they considered the final solution. Gould-Traphagan says the meeting, which orchestrated the details of the systematic genocide of millions, was brief, but thorough.

“It is eerie how businesslike the Nazis were with their planning. The meeting only took 90 minutes, yet they planned the killing of millions of people,” Gould-Traphagan said.

Following the conference, einsatzgruppens or German task forces, raided Jewish communities killing and decimating humans and homes alike. After 1.5 million Jews had been killed, Hitler decided the task force was too inefficient and decided to create “death camps.”

In these camps, prisoners were housed in barracks with no windows, no running water and no heat. They lived on extremely-low calorie diets consisting of water and low-nutrient soups. Working conditions were long and hard, forcing prisoners to work themselves to death.

With the population of prisoners growing, the Nazi party decided to create camps strictly for annihilation and extermination, like Auschwitz and Birkenau, Gould-Traphagan said. At these camps, Zykon B, a poison used for rats, was dropped into ovens hidden as showers, full of thousands of Jews and political prisoners.

Gould-Traphagan shed light on the Nazis initial plan for these camps. 

“They wanted the prisoners to die off slowly and die of natural causes. To them, that route was the cheaper and more cost-efficient. After the camps starting filling up, they exterminated them in numbers by thousands,” Gould-Traphagan said.

After wiping out nearly two-thirds of the Jewish population residing in Europe, the Third Reich was on the brink of defeat. In 1945 the Nazis evacuated the camps.

The Holocaust is a well-documented tragic event in human history. Yet, Gould-Traphagan continues to seek out more education.

“I continue to learn because I believe in the good of people. I saw a film on the Nuremburg Trials as a teenager, and have since been fascinated with the subject. There is so much to know, and so much we will never know,” Gould-Traphagan said.