Hta 211/311 Europe At War

However despite this loyalty to their homeland, The Jews were still seen as a Sub-Human and inferior race that needed to be neutralised.

It was the strong belief in the supremacy of “German Blood” that guaranteed Germany’s victory in the struggle for racial domination. The Nazi’s were also convinced that this supremacy justified whatever treatment they found it necessary to impose on the inferior races.

Such Propaganda was constantly being churned out warning Germany of a so-called Jewish threat. The German SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps was a publication that was full of anti-Jewish propaganda. In one edition it stated that ‘that any people weak enough to let Jews into their country would suffer from racial mixing, loss of racial consciousness, and inevitable decline’. The newspaper also ‘accused the Jews of maintaining their goals of ruling the world and destroying the nordic people’.

Another edition of Das Schwarze Korps proclaimed that ‘The Jews must be driven from our residential districts and segregated where they will be among themselves, having as little contact with Germans as possible…Confined to themselves, these parasites will be reduced to poverty. The German people are not in the least inclined to tolerate in their country hundreds of thousands of criminals, who not only secure their existence through crime, but want to exact revenge’.

The Nazi’s decided that they desperately need to stop this so-called Jewish threat, if Germany was to succeed in becoming a dominant country on the world stage. The Nazi’s ‘Final Solution’ was a plan to exterminate the Jews in all Nazi occupied territory. This was achieved in various ways.  Firstly all Jewish people were hunted down and then sealed in ‘Ghettos’. After they had been held in the ghettos for some time, they were then deported to what is now known as the infamous Nazi labour and death camps. Quality of life at these concentration camp was sub-standard, to say the absolute least. Whilst at these labour camps the Jews were forced to work incredibly long days for very little food and were made to sleep in extremely overcrowded, cold bunkhouses. Once members of these camps became to weak too work or were too young or too old they were to be executed. The system by which the Jews were killed was so simple. A train of “resettlement workers” arrived at the camps and then were dragged out and forced to surrender their possessions. They were told they had arrived at a transit camp en route to the east. They were made to take off their clothes in an undressing station and walked naked along an S-shaped path bordered by high barbed-wire fences covered in ivy. Entering gas chambers that were disguised as showers, they were killed in fifteen to thirty minutes by carbon monoxide poisoning. The corpses were then burned in open-pit fires. 

Some of these concentration camps also had set up facilities for scientific medical research, in which doctors performed horrendous medical experiments on human in the hope of advancing and breeding the so-called "Aryan" race of perfect Germans.

Within just years over six million Jews had been almost been completely annihilated from Germany. Germany had truly found the solution to their Jewish problem.

 As Leni Yahil stated, ‘There is no denying that during the period of the exterminations, the Jewish people suffered a crushing defeat, and there is no evading the painful question of why this tragic defeat occurred’. Although there are many people that have been thrust with the blame for the Holocaust, the answer has never been resolved as to exactly who or what caused such large-scale slaughter.

The most common person that is blamed for the atrocities that occurred in Germany is Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a radically patriotic man that held felt very strongly about the power if his country Germany. At first Hitler appeared as ‘the apostle of peace in Europe, whose sole aim was to recoup losses unjustly suffered by Germany at Versailles’. However it later became evident that Hitler’s intentions stretched far beyond heroically reviving the struggling Germany, he had many more sinister plans.

Hitler consistently brainwashed the German public with passionate hatred for Jews, and upon becoming of Leader of the radically right-wing Nazis in 1933, he ‘seized the opportunity to begin to bring about his ideal of a world forever freed of Jewry and made the leap to genocide’. 

Evidence showed in his propagandist attempts, Hitler would  publicly blame Jews for Germany’s failures and economic problems.

Hitler was adamantly convinced of  “the conspiracy of world Jewry”, the belief that Jewish-led international finance could do Germany great harm.  He believed that it had lined up the forces of the world against the Kaiser, it had created the Diktat of Versailles, it had excluded Germany between the wars from her natural markets, and by an unholy alliance with Bolshevism it had cheated her of her lawful territorial claims. 

Hitler also held a strong belief of ‘Sub-human Jewry,’ which was the fear of the proletarian Jewish masses, spreading westwards from the reservoirs of Eastern Europe, which had contaminated German blood and would still do so’.

Hitler was a man that had the ability to exercise great power over his people. His charisma and powerful speaking skills are crucial elements to his election and the power that he held over his people. These qualities that Hitler had were constantly exploited at every possibly moment and ultimately gave him the ability to achieve the power he dreamt of. Hitler was a strong believer in ‘the dream of Germany ascending to zenith of world rule’. This universal dream was ‘one of the strongest and most pronounced drives of man members of the Nazi movement’. 

But According to Hitler, in order to maintain supremacy and to achieve world domination ‘Germany would have to eliminate the Jews, for if Germany did not eliminate the Jews under their control, the Jewish Satan, still residing in Germany, would eliminate the German people.

 Through passionate speeches, exertion of his strong sense of leadership, and by ‘using totalitarian control of German institutions and his charisma, Hitler began conditioning the nation in hate and uninhibited destructiveness’

Despite Europe’s previous underlying history of racism, it was essentially Hitler that proactively brought Anti-Semitism to the fore. Before Hitler took power Jews had been the subject of humiliation and violent attacks. But these attacks could in no way be on the same scale as the violence that Hitler was to launch upon them. Hitler’s threat of total annihilation in language that was also far more explicit that that of his predecessors. Hilberg also proclaimed that ‘Hitler was not only a propagandist but also the head of a state; he disposed not only over words and phrases but also over an administrative apparatus; he had power not only to speak but also to act’. It was this power and overwhelming influence that allowed Hitler to construct public opinion and rally the people of Germany to share with him the hatred of the Jews.

However, Hitler was not the first and only person to express great hatred of the Jews.

Anti-Semitism and racism had deep roots in early European history as stated by Raul Hilberg. He believed that ‘the idea of killing the Jews had its shrouded beginnings in the far-distant past’. 

Given the fact that Hitler was such a public figure and held ultimate authority, he became the figurehead of the demolition of the Jews. In fact there is no written evidence to suggest that Hitler gave explicit orders or even had knowledge about the precise means by which his broad ideas were to be carried out. However, there were many of Hitler’s Nazi party counterparts that played a vital role in the planning of and carrying out ‘The final solution’.

Nazi figures such as Heinrich Himmler also played in integral part of the murder of the Jews. Himmler held the position of the Reich SS Leader and the Chief of the German police. In this capacity, Himmler was responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution.

 It has been said that ‘Himmler was an easy man to underestimate. Part of the reason lay simply in his physique: short, pudgy, unatheletic’. Because Himmler did not have had the charisma or other physical traits such as Hitler, his extremely active participation in the Nazi campaign of terror seemed to go fairly much unnoticed.

Another main argument as to who is responsible for the holocaust is that of the common German people involved in the killings holding the main responsibilty. Many German citizens agreed with Hitler's goals and were supportive of the racist views and prejudices expressed by the Nazi party.There is no reason not to suggest that the racist ideals of the Nazi Party just added fuel to the hatred and discontent toward the Jewish community that already existed in the German society. Did these overriding popular belief in the Jewish inferiority give common Germans a way to justify murder. The blame for the holocaust cannot rest solely on Nazi leaders, as it is obvious that those common German citizens who blindly served Hitler caused just as much pain and suffering as any Nazi affiliate.

It may in fact be convenient to solely blame Adolf Hitler for the Jewish Holocaust. However the blame for such a horrendous act of inhumanity has to be distributed amongst other members of German society, one man cannot murder six millions Jews with his own hands. It is true and people argue that a strict and authoritative government can be a great influenced on the behaviour of people and there were in fact penalties imposed on those German citizens that showed even the slightest signs of being sympathetic towards Jewish people. But participation in the Murder of these innocent citizens was not mandatory, and there was very little resistance against the horrific murders. There can be no definitive answer as to who or what is responsible for the Holocaust. Rather it can be seen to be a combination of factors such as the blind willingness of German society to follow and the growth of the sinister Nazi party that enacted the anti-Semitic tendencies that existed with Europe.

Reference list

Lane, Barbara Miller and Rupp, Leila J, Nazi ideology before 1933 : a documentation (Manchester, Eng. 1978.)

                                                                          

Vinen, Richard, A history in fragments : Europe in the twentieth century (London , 2002.)

        

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