The World of Anne Frank: Through the Eyes of a Friend
1 Anne Frank and the Holocaust Introduction to the Guide This guide can help your students begin to understand Anne Frank and, through her eyes, the war Hitler and the Nazis waged against the Jews of Europe. Anne's viewpoint is invaluable for your students because she, too, was a teenager. Reading her diary will enhance the Living Voices presentation. But the diary alone does not explain the events that parallel her life during the Holocaust. It is these events that this guide summarizes. Using excerpts from Anne’s diary as points of departure, students can connect certain global events with their direct effects on one young girl, her family, and the citizens of Germany and Holland, the two countries in which she lived. Thus students come to see more clearly both Anne and the world that shaped her. What was the Holocaust? The Holocaust was the planned, systematic attempt by the Nazis and their active supporters to annihilate every Jewish man, woman, and child in the world. Largely unopposed by the free world, it resulted in the murder of six million Jews. Mass annihilation is not unique. The Nazis, however, stand alone in their utilization of state power and modern science and technology to destroy a people. While others were swept into the Third Reich’s net of death, the Nazis, with cold calculation, focused on destroying the Jews, not because they were a political or an economic threat, but simply because they were Jews. In nearly every country the Nazis occupied during the war, Jews were rounded up, isolated from the native population, brutally forced into detention camps, and ultimately deported to labor and death camps.
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