Joel Erskin
Sheila Sholhtalab
World history from 1500 section 003
November 28, 2012
Compare and contrast Hitler's race theory with the realities of the Holocaust. How did expansion contribute to these theories?
Nazism developed several theories concerning races. The Nazis claimed to scientifically measure a strict hierarchy of human race. Once firmly in power, Hitler’s plans for the ending of the struggle between the Aryan race and the “inferior races” was set to work. These races feared as a biological threat to the master race purity. At the bottom of this hierarchy were “parasitic” races which were perceived to be dangerous to society. Hitler’s Nazi theory also claimed that his Aryan race is superior to all other races, that a
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The Nazis also adopted the social Darwinist take on Darwinian evolutionary theory regarding the “survival of the fittest.” For the Nazis, survival of a race depended upon its ability to reproduce and multiply, its accumulation of land to support and feed that expanding population, and its vigilance in maintaining the purity of its gene pool, thus preserving the unique “racial” characteristics with which “nature” had equipped it for success in the struggle to survive. Since each “race” sought to expand, and since the space on the earth was finite, the struggle for survival resulted “naturally” in violent conquest and military confrontation. Hence, war even constant war was a part of nature, a part of the human condition. Hitler and the Nazi party outlined their racial enemies in clear and unequivocal terms. For Hitler and the Nazis, the Jews represented a priority enemy both within and outside Germany. Their allegedly racial and inferior genetic makeup spawned the exploitative systems of capitalism and communism. In their drive to expand, the Jews promoted and used these systems of government and state organization, including constitutions, proclamations of equal rights, and international peace, to undermine the race-consciousness of superior races like the German race and to
Hitler, in 1934-1945, believing in the works of Charles Darwin, made concentration camps for the jews. He discriminated against the Jews, and declared The Aryan race to be superior. The killing of the Jews was both out of fear and pride for Hitler. He feared the fact that the Jews might spoil the pureness of the Aryans. He took pride in the fact that his race was superior, and so wanted to maintain his race’s superiority to keep his pride intact.
The Nazis believed in ‘Aryan’ superiority, this belief contributed to the Holocaust. In the years of Nazi rule before World War II, The Nazi group organized policies of discrimination and separation targeting especially German Jews. The Nazi political group believed in one race Aryans, they believed the Aryans were superior to all races. Hitler was an anti-Semitic, he believed Jews were the main corrupter of culture, society and Germany. Non-Aryans were seen as impure and evil.
By blaming the Jews for the economic crisis that Germany was suffering through as well as their defeat in WW1, Hitler targeted the Jews as the country’s main enemy. According to him, the Jewish were directly responsible for Germany’s problems. Hitler hated the Jews leading up to the Holocaust because he believed that the Jewish financiers were responsible for sending the world into its first World War, causing the deaths over 100,000 Germans. According to the Nazis the “Aryan race” was the best and strongest race. Jews were of another inferior race. In fact so inferior that they were not considered to be “people” by the
This view of social dominance and evolutionary superiority is very in line with the views of the Nazi Party and ordinary Germans. This hate for the Jews starts with Hitler’s Ant-Jewish propaganda and the implementation of the Nuremberg laws. In “Perish the Jew,” Hitler puts his views of racial superiority into writing, “The Aryan regards work as the basis for the maintenance of the national community as such; the Jew regards work as a means of exploiting other peoples” (Hitler 223). With this writing and other propaganda, Hitler successfully spread a hate for Jewish people across the country. Hitler then created the Nuremberg Laws, which slowly but successfully stripped the Jews of all their rights and made them second-class citizens in Germany. The Jews slowly became, in the eyes of the German people and the SS, people who could be consciously oppressed and turned into slave workers.
According to Main Online, “It was the explicit aim of Hitler’s regime to create an “Aryan” race”. Hitler’s goal was to get rid of anyone who went against his beliefs or ideas. He also wanted to dispose of anyone who was not to his “Aryan” standards genetically of
From 1933 to 1945, Germanyś government was led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. During this time, they carried out a method to onslaught all European Jews. Because the Germans placed themselves as the superior people, they decided that Jews would be punished only because of their religion/race. In Hitlerś eyes, the only way for survival was to be a part of the ¨master race¨. The ¨master race¨ was to always stay ¨pure¨ in hope that one day, they would take over the world.
From 1933 through 1945 was a period of history called the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, people were being killed for their looks, race, and disability. About 11 million people were killed in brutal and tragic ways. Adolf Hitler, the leader, wanted to create a pure race. Racism helped Hitler organize the population into the way he wanted. He wanted people to support the cause of making a pure race. If people opposed, they would be persecuted. Racism allowed Hitler to influence the German people into following his leadership even if it meant genocide.
The Nazis followed Darwin’s ideas of natural selection and used his theory “survival of the fittest” to guide their actions.6 This theory suggests that allowing disabled persons to live would eventually lead to the reproduction of additional “unfit” persons. Hitler and the Nazis pushed their propaganda onto the general population, insisting that the disabled placed an unnecessary burden on the country by portraying them as problematic, but also as freaks.7 Disabled persons, including those who were both physically and mentally handicapped, were ordered to mental institutions and the Nazi euthanasia programs began.
With the rise of a fascist regime in 1933 following World War I, and in light of The Depression, fascist sponsors would go on to critically undermine the quality of the parliamentary democracy that governed Germany alongside the corrupt class discrepancies of Western capitalism. In suggestion of a superior system, the advocates of fascism put out the idea of a state ruled by a leader strong enough to resuscitate the nation through acts of military and foreign policies. What followed gave rise to what would be the Nazi regime in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Through Hitler’s powerful methods of propaganda and rhetoric, Hitler reached an audience of people with a preexisting dislike towards the Semitic people. Taking advantage of this irrational aversion of the Semitic people within much of Europe, Hitler would touch upon the extremes and publish in his “Final Solution,” a plan to solve such a problem. In his plan, Hitler promised the complete extermination of Europe’s Semitic population and those others considered inferior. To the surprise of many nations, many reacted with little avail. ("The ‘Final Solution’: Background &
The Nazi used a term called the “Master Race” or the Aryan Race. It was basically a racial term describing an idea of a pure race. The Nazis believed in a concept that Aryans had the most pure blood on the earth.
Hitler believed Germans were racially superior and deemed Jews and other ‘undesirables’ a threat and ‘impurity’ to the community. In 1933, before Nazi Germany came into
Social Darwinism was a concept that emerged later in the nineteenth century suggesting that what applied to nature could also apply to human society – that the strong prevail over the weak, that superior races prevail over inferior races. This concept with its theme of struggle and survival of the fittest appealed to Hitler. “Struggle” wrote Hitler “is the father of all things…He who wants to live must fight and who does not want to fight in this world where external struggle is the law of life has no right to exist”*.
Many religious conflicts are built from bigotry; however, only few will forever have an imprint on the world’s history. While some may leave a smear on the world’s past, some – like the homicide of Semitic people – may leave a scar. The Holocaust, closely tied to World War II, was a devastating and systematic persecution of millions of Jews by the Nazi regime and allies. Hitler, an anti-Semitic leader of the Nazis, believed that the Jewish race made the Aryan race impure. The Nazis did all in their power to annihilate the followers of Judaism, while the Jews attempted to rebel, rioted against the government, and united as one. Furthermore, the genocide had many social science factors that caused the opposition between the Jews and Nazis.
This helped Hitler's Nazi party to be known to German people as a major contender in future. Hitler party had a very clear ideology. The Nazi ideology was based on Darwin's theory of natural selection. Hitler considered Aryans as a race that were born to domimnate.
By quoting many writers and Nazi documents, Bergman creates collective authority to validate an absurd argument. However, by providing readers with detailed interpretations of various quotes from Hitler's Mein Kampf, he successfully illustrates how Darwin’s ideas of ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ were misused to justify for racial discrimination. Hitler used terms such as ‘superior race,’ ‘lower human types,’‘pollution of the race,’ and the word evolution itself-derived from Darwin’s theories of evolution. This clearly indicates Darwin’s theories influenced Hitler. However if these ideas did not exists, the Nazis might have found another reason to justify for the genocide