Jewish Faith In Ww2 Essay

At the end of WWI in 1918, Germany’s economy was in ruins. There were very few jobs, and bitterness began to take over the country. According to the text, “Hitler, a rising politician, offered Germany a scapegoat: Jewish people. Hitler said that Jewish people were to blame for Germany’s problems. He believed that Jews did not deserve to live.” (7) This was the birth of Antisemitism--prejudice against Jewish people. Europe’s Jewish people have always been persecuted due to their “different customs and beliefs that many viewed with suspicion.”(7) Hitler simply reignited the flames, and a violent hatred was born.

            The Judenrat began to have negative attitudes towards the resistance and escapes from the ghettos. The Judenrat feared that the Germans are going to blame the Judenrat for not keeping their section under control. As a consequence: “mass escape would make it impossible for the council to negotiate with the germans in order to revoke measures of persecution, or, at least, to save some inmates; Coucil members who were responsible to the germans for the inmates’ behavior be the first to pay with their lives if a revolt took place. The inmates knew about these dangers as well.” (Trunk 462). Both the Jews and councils knew that having a mass escape would eventually cost their lives or be executed, but they lack food and water in order to have a successful, as evidence: “Of an estimated 300 inmates who escaped from Treblinka that day, about 100 survived the massive SS manhunt.” (www.ushmm.org). The quote is from the revolt of a death camp in Treblinka, where a mass escape take place and only a third of the escaped prisoners have successfully escaped.

Non-violent resistance began to evolve as the Jews were transported to the concentration camps. Upon their initial arrival in the concentration camps, inmates attempted to aid each other in various ways, such as by giving those that were extremely malnourished extra food or attempting to lessen the workload on those that were weaker by taking their place; these acts, although not aimed directly against the SS, were simply keeping one another alive. These acts can be considered under Bauer’s definition of resistance in that the groups’ motives in sustaining themselves as a whole was in direct opposition to the central idea of the SS to break down and destroy the Jewish population. These acts also helped lead to the later active, armed resistance in that they helped to keep inmates alive and maintain their strength, as well as providing them with a will to resist.

January 30, 1933 started the calamity that would result in the mass murder of some six million Jews. It occurred in all countries that the Germans, also known as Nazis, occupied during World War 2, including Germany and Poland. Jews were sent to enclosed ghettos where they were given insufficient amounts of food and were in unsanitary conditions. By the time of 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the “Final Solution”, for their plan was to wipe out the Jewish people. Jews were sent to death camps of which they were put into gas chambers and killed. Many died from malnutrition. It was the time of genocide, of mass destruction. To the leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were considered a threat to German racial purity and community. They were an inferior

For the 12 years the Nazi ruled Germany and they condemned the Jews to death and there was no escape. At every stage of the war, the Germans used their military superiority to crush and terrorize the Jews.

Resistance, the refusal to accept or comply with something; the attempt to prevent something by action or argument. From 1933, when the Nazis took power, to 1945 when Hitler’s final solution was initiated, Jews and other people who were not a part of the “superior race” were persecuted and murdered. Hitler and his allies made ghettos and camps to house, work, or kill the Jews, in conditions where every day could’ve been your last. Once Hitler took power in 1933 to when the war ended in 1945, approximately six million Jews were slaughtered. During the Holocaust, Jews retaliated either with arms or with non-compliance in order to preserve their humanity.

During the time of the war Hitler began a terror regime that targeted Jews, political functionaries, and “suspects” in connection with the resistance. The Jews were most of the victim’s during this time. In the first weeks of the campaign Jewish men began getting shot by police and over the next few months they began killing Jewish women and children. By the end of 1941, Five hundred thousand Jews were killed.

Due to the inhumane methods towards the Jews during the Holocaust, many lost their faith and commitment to Judaism. Jews were appalled that God, who was supposed to be their savior, abandoned them in a time where they needed him the most. Although many Jews kept their faith and did not question God’s mysterious ways, many did not have the same outlook. People assume that hard times strengthen people’s faith, but that was not always the case. During great tragedy's, people’s faith may disintegrate and become completely absent from their minds. Many prisoners including Elie Wiesel could not accept God’s silence and rebelled against their religious upbringing during the Holocaust.

Currently America honors those murdered by the Nazis with museums, monuments, and even a remembrance day. However during the Holocaust, under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, America was reluctant to save the Jews from Europe. Six million Jews were systematically murdered through mass shootings, gas chambers, and in death marches. We might expect that as a model democracy, America would have made a great effort to rescue these Jews but that was sadly not what occurred. Due to America’s tradition of isolationism and a singular focus on achieving military victory, Roosevelt's attention to Jewish refugees in Europe during World War II can most accurately be characterized as a mix of missed opportunities and limited achievements.

The citizenship of Jewish people slowly decreased as the German government gained strength and became more anti-Jewish. Jewish people had been normal students, homeowners, and citizens before the start of the Holocaust. Many had even fought for the German Army. Then before they knew it, they were being killed by the hundreds just because they were Jewish. The people who they had been friends with forever, turned on them and were trying to kill them. All Jewish people lost their rights, but many lost their lives.

The best Jews to form a resistance were those who worked at the camps cleaning the gas chambers, cremating the dead, and sorting through belongings (“Resistance”). The Jews who worked in the camp were very familiar with the death process and knew it would eventually happen to them, this thought made some plan escapes (“Resistance”). “Under the most adverse conditions, Jewish prisoners succeeded in initiating resistance and uprisings in some Nazi camps,” (“Jewish

The bulk of the 30,000 remaining residents were hidden away in their prepared bunkers and in the ZOB headquarters. Despite having running water and electricity, these shelters had no escape. The few Jews that were not in hiding, about 1,500 fighters, opened fire on the Nazis with a smorgasbord of weapons killing German officers, destroying tanks, and preventing reinforcements from entering the ghetto (Berenbaum). The ZOB was granted a seemingly miraculous reprieve when the Germans retreated for the night. Unfortunately their reprieve was short lived, the Germans came back the next day with flamethrowers and gas in an effort to get the Jews to withdraw from their bunkers. The day after that the Nazis decided to burn the nearby buildings which sucked the oxygen from basements and bunkers, causing many people to suffocate to death. In spite of this, the resistance held out for a month, 27 days longer than the Nazis expected. The charismatic leader of the organization, Mordecai Anielewicz along with many of the remaining fighters took their lives to avoid capture. However, 20,000 Jews managed to escape from the ghetto. To the Jewish people the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was nothing less than revolution.

The Nazis were intent on annihilating Jewish people and certain minority groups. Millions of Jews were transported to concentration camps, forced to do hard labor, and eventually killed. Resistance against the Third Reich could mean severe retribution, “ people were oppressed and killed as they did not fit in with a dictators belief,

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.

Firstly, the Jews in Europe organized a Jewish military league to resist the Nazi brutality. In Vilna, the first organized Jewish armed resistance arose from the youth movements. After the invasion of the Soviet Union is 1941, two-thirds of the Jewish population of Vilna were deported by the Nazis (“Jewish Combat Organization.”). Those who survived warned the other Jews of the ordeal awaiting them, which paved the way for the “First Manifesto”. This document called out for Jewish resistance and was written by Abba Kovner, a future leader of the ghetto fighters in Vilna. The manifesto was directed at the Jews of Vilna and the youth movements, and explained the fate of the ghetto deportees (that they were all killed), Hitler’s plot to “destroy all the Jews of Europe”, and called for Jewish resistance. This manifesto was significant, as it was the first call for the Jews to arm themselves and resist the Nazis. Not soon after,