The Nazi’s Senseless Racism The Nazi’s had much unneeded prejudice towards what they saw as weaker or inferior races, and used tactics that were complete violations of every person’s basic human rights. Nazis did much more than only attack the Jews in World War Two, their hatred and fear spread to many more ethnic groups and cultures than the Jews alone. Jews as well as many Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Homosexuals were ended up being persecuted and killed in concentration camps because of their beliefs. The Nazis had a variety of reasons for the Jews mistreatment and persecution. According to A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust Many of the Nazi leaders viewed the Jews as vermin, and openly talked about their pursuit to exterminate their race from the face of existence (“Statements by Leading Nazis on the Jewish Question"). This shows that Hitler and the rest …show more content…
Documented in A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust the Nazis saw the Romani’s as worthless out cast that sponge off of their superior race. In 1942 over twenty three thousand gypsies were shipped off to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the outbreak from the start of the war was one of the primary factors that caused the Nazis to send all these people to the death and labor camps (“Sinti and Roma”). Like the Jews, the Gypsies had been forced to attach a little black triangle to their shirts as well. The Nazis showed off their extremist views by suppressing these groups of people. They most likely had done this in order try and unite the country of Germany with a common enemy to fight against. The Holocaust Encyclopedia Says that the conditions that the Gypsies were forced to live in was like a petri dish for diseases such as typhus, smallpox, and dysentery, which the Nazis had no intent to keep clean because it too was another way in order to kill of the Gypsy population (“Genocide of European
Jewish people were not the only ones persecuted by the Nazis during this time period. The leading group also captured and killed gypsies, disabled people, blacks, and some slavic people like the Polish and Russians. The discrimination did not stop there, people with different ideological, behavioral, or political ideas were not accepted within the german community either. Between these groups of people were also some communists, socialist, religious groups and homosexuals.
Before the beginning of World War II the Nazi party took over in Germany. At its head was a man named Adolf Hitler. For some reason Hitler hated the Jews, we see this in World War II with the Holocaust. The Holocaust started in 1933 when Hitler rose to power; he made a plan in 1941 which was to eradicate the whole Jewish population. Hitler called this plan the “Final Solution” (An Introductory History of The Holocaust). Why did Hitler and the Nazis single out the Jews for genocide? And in what ways did the Nazis single them out?
Horror struck on January 30, 1933, when Germany assigned Adolf Hitler as their chancellor. Once Hitler had finally reached power he set out to complete one goal, create a Greater Germany free from the Jews (“The reasons for the Holocaust,” 2009). This tragedy is known today as, “The Holocaust,” that explains the terrors of our histories past. The face of the Holocaust, master of death, and leader of Germany; Adolf Hitler the most deceitful, powerful, well spoken, and intelligent person that acted as the key to this mass murder. According to a research study at the University of South Florida, nearly eleven million people were targeted and killed. This disaster is a genocide that was meant to ethnically cleanse Germany of the Jews. Although Jewish people were the main target they were not the only ones targeted; gypsies, African Americans, homosexuals, socialists, political enemies, communists, and the mentally disabled were killed (Simpson, 2012, p. 113). The word to describe this hatred for Jewish people is known as antisemitism. It was brought about when German philosophers denounced that “Jewish spirit is alien to Germandom” (“Antisemitism”) which states that a Jew is non-German. Many people notice the horrible things the Germans did, but most don’t truly understand why the Holocaust occurred. To truly understand the Holocaust, you must first know the Nazis motivations. Their motivations fell into two categories including cultural explanations that focused on ideology and
By 1940, Roma gypsies were rounded up and made to live in encampments. These in time became fenced in ghettos. From these ghettos, many were transported by train to detention camps to await deportation. They were forced to wear black triangle markings for being asocial or a green triangle for being professional criminals. Besides being treated as in the camps, they were also subjected to multiple medical experiments, including “special experiments that were supposed to prove scientifically that their blood was different from German blood.” Many of the gypsy women were sterilized against their will, which included any female child over the age of twelve. This was done so they would not be able to continue their ancestral line, thought to be impure inferior and worthless. Most Roma gypsies were exterminated in the camps.
made them live in “ghettos”, and brought them to concentration camps to work to their death (Introduction to The Holocaust). Nazi’s did not only kill Jews, they also killed people who did not behave correctly to their standards, homosexuals, people with disabilities, their political views, communist, socialist, and Jehovah’s witnesses (Introduction to The Holocaust). Millions of people died during The Holocaust and few escaped the wrath of the Nazi’s (Introduction to The Holocaust).
During the holocaust, the Nazis dehumanized the Jews. The capricious, or impulsive, Nazi soldiers did many horrendous things to innocent Jewish people. They treated them as if they were animals rather than human beings. Personal identities were nonexistent for them. Jews were seen as invalid and insignificant.
The Jews were victimized because “Hitler blamed the loss of world war one on them” (Snyder). Hitler also believed that if you were not German you needed to be eradicated and this is why he killed the poles. Hitler also went after homosexuals because he thought that they were the devil and they needed to be cleansed. Hitler also went after the gypsies because they were nomadic and there religion and lifestyle choices. People with disabilities were targeted because Hitler believed they were unfit to live with “normal” society.
A common question asked by many is why was the Jewish community targeted for the Holocaust? According to the holocaust-history website it is said that, the Jewish people were targeted by Adolf Hitler because Hitler believed that the Jews caused the Germans to lose in World War I. Hitler told the German people that the Germans could have won the first war if Germany had not been “stabbed in the back” by the Jewish community and their conspirators. Additionally Hitler also hated the homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, according to the Holocaust encyclopedia.
Historically, the hostility against Jews was present in the ancient, medieval, and modern world following World War I. From the crusades to the Age of Enlightenment, hatred for the Jews was common amongst the diversity of European culture. The only action that was unprecedented was the death camps. Adolf Hitler is often seen as responsible for the Holocaust. Many believe that without Hitler, there would not have been a Holocaust. Adolf Hitler was primarily motivated by the lust for power and domination. To acquire this power, he needed to find a way to unite the disparaged people of Germany. He used the historical dislike and mistrust of Jews and blamed the problems of Germany on them. He accused the Jews of wanting to overrun German society and destroy the German state: "The Jew, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether he wishes it or not, undermines the platform on which alone a nation can stand."[2] With this preface, the only way for Germany to survive and thrive was to get rid of the Jews.
To begin, the Gestapo and Hitler treated the Jews horribly. Anyone who supported and helped Hitler treated the Jews as if they were not even humans. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum said “Hitler and other Nazi leaders viewed the Jews not as a religious group, but as a poisonous 'race,' which 'lived off' the other races and weakened them”. Hitler thought of Jews not as people, but as poisonous, inhuman, and
First main reason that the Jews were singled out for extermination was anti-Semitism, particularly, by Nazis and Germans who were influenced that the Jewish public was sinful. For starters, in 1933, the Nazi regime concluded that “traditional religious and economical forms” would be based on anti-Semitism, hostility and prejudice against Jews (Wegner 4). Therefore, many Germans started to view the Jews as malicious and greedy. This had increased immensely in which the Jews were dehumanized and perceived as parasites, and normally when people think of parasites, they feel the need to exterminate them before they increased. Germans had the right to eradicate Jews, for they were “life unworthy of life” (Wegner 4) based on the scientific perspective of Germans. This indicated that the Jewish (also Gypsies) were viewed as racially undesirable. In religion perspectives, the Lutheran and Catholic Churches practiced on Anti-Semitism, and the Jews were outcast for not converting to Christianity and for murdering Jesus (theory) (Wegner 5). All forth, the Germans weren’t the only country that regarded the anti-Semitism (Wegner 5), but were the only ones to act upon it immeasurably such as to abhor the Jewish population with much intensity.
The Nazis, throughout their control of Germany, attempted to rid themselves of what they considered weak in their army. Weakness to them was any sort of free thinking, defiance, mercy, and anything they deemed inferior to their ideals. To drive their army to rid their idea of weak, the Nazis provoked emotions of shame and fear in those associated with weakness. Which can be seen in Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi when Hans is just a child in a Hitler Youth school and answer what he felt about a fox eating a rabbit. When Hans says “thee poor rabbit” he is then promptly yelled at and sent to sit in the corner while wearing a dunce cap. This humiliation along with his peer’s answers of “the world belongs to the strong…the rabbit was a coward and deserved to die” (Geronimi, Education for Death) influenced Hans into hating the rabbit for being weak. These instilled ideas of weakness in the German children led them to attempt and weed out the weak by putting them through humiliation or death. All the Light We Cannot See displays the Nazi ideal of driving out the weak during Werner’s time at the training school. While Werner was attending, there was periodic checks by the schoolmaster asking who was the weakest in their group. During so, schoolmaster’s would says “Just as we ask you to each drive the weakness from your own bodies, so you must also learn to drive the weaknesses from the corps” (Doerr 168). The schoolmaster presents just how important strength is to the
The Nazis dehumanized Jews in many ways. One of the ways Jews were dehumanized was by transporting them to places in cramped cattle cars like if they were some type of animals. They were called animals and made less of. An object was valued more than they were. The Nazis took all their rules and mortalities including
The Holocaust is most well-known for the organized and inhumane extermination of more than six million Jews. The death total of the Jews is this most staggering; however, other groups such as Gypsies, Poles, Russians, political groups, Jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals were targeted as well (Holocaust Encyclopedia: Introduction to the Holocaust). The initial idea of persecuting select groups of people began with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. In January 1930, Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany after winning over its people with powerful and moving speeches. From this point forward, it was a goal for both Hitler and his Nazi Party to rid the world of deemed “inferior” groups of people (Holocaust Encyclopedia: Timeline
The Nazis attitude towards the Jews is explained in these sources many different ways. One was through the tone used by key witnesses, another way was simply in the images. In source 2.52, Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist, expresses his feelings and the horror he observed. He was one of very few who stepped in and saved many Jews. The Nazis would do anything to gain power over the Jews. In sources 2.56 and 2.57, the Jews most valuable possessions were confiscated and those who needed glasses were left blind. The Nazis took glasses off anyone who needed them and issued them to German soldiers.