5.04 Holocaust and Pol Pot

5.04 Holocaust - Honors
The Holocaust and Pol Pot in Cambodia were both horrible events in history. They were both similar and different in many ways. In both events victims were sealed from the outside world. Women, men, and children were being overworked and starved. And even after all the hard work thousands of them were being killed. Both leaders had different plans, but one thing they both had in mind was genocide.
In both events the victims were being sealed off from the outside world. In Cambodia, Pol Pot wanted all culture and religion to be extinguished. He would ban the use of foreign language. Newspapers and televisions were all shut down, and radios and bicycles were seized. Anything that could be of use for communicating was confiscated or curtailed with. In Europe, Nazi troops were gathering up Jews and sending them away to concentration camps.
In Cambodia, women, children, and men were all being overworked. A typical work day for them started around 4:00 a.m. and was not over until about 10:00 p.m. . One day off from work was given every ten days. It was crucial that mistakes weren’t being made during work due to the fact that officers were eager to kill anyone that made a mistake. As Jews were forced into ghettos, thousands of them died from hunger in crowded walled in ghettos.
In both Europe and Cambodia mass murder was taking place. Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews. In the beginning trucks were being made into portable gas chambers in order to kill the Jews. The quickest method the Nazis for killing people were mass shootings. 1942 marked the beginning of mass murder for the Nazis, which is when they started using gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. In Cambodia, Pol Pot wanted a new beginning. He decided he wanted to eliminate the “old society” so he started killing lawyers, teachers, police, ex soldiers, and anyone he thought to be disloyal to him.
Both events mark a very important time in history and both tried to eliminate groups of people. Jews and peasants in Cambodia were both sealed off from the outside world but in different ways. Women, men and children were often worked to death and even starved. But the most horrific was the amount of people being killed and tortured in large numbers. These events are to be studied, compared, and remembered in history in order to prevent it in the future.