Mentality In The Holocaust

“Was German ‘Eliminationist Anti-Semitism” Responsible for the Holocaust?” is a fascinating and somewhat discouraging debate that explores the question of whether German anti-Semitism, instilled within citizens outside of the Nazi Party, played a vast role in the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust . Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of “The Paradigm Challenged,” believes that it did; and argues quite convincingly that ordinary German citizens were duplicitous either by their actions or inactions due to the deep-seeded nature of anti-Semitic sentiment in the country. On the other hand, Christopher R. Browning, who has extensively researched the Holocaust, argues that the arguments of Goldhagen leaves out significant dynamics which were prevalent throughout most of Western and Eastern Europe during this period of history.

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

The Nazis weren’t the only people who treated Jews like inferior beings; anybody who has the power can treat anything lower than themselves. “…a present whose abnormality suddenly becomes routine.”(Langer 6). The gypsy considered himself as the superior of the group so he could strike anybody he wants (Wiesel 39). When the gypsy’s life becomes too important for him, he has adopted to the way of the Nazis. As the Allied forces advanced, the Nazis led death marches as their last resort because they had concerns about their own lives. “...life becomes too much for man and death assuming the throne in the human imagination” (Langer 6). S.S made Jews run for hundreds of miles nonstop (Wiesel 85). They, the SS, were frightened that their cruel ways dug up, decided they had to bury the evidence which explained that they could not believe what the inhumane actions they engaged in with other people. People had the potential to manipulate other people in mass numbers but the second they think for themselves, they will find out what is right and what is not.

Summary: This article was an introduction to the Holocaust. The German Nazi’s thought that the Jews were a community. Not only the Jews were targeted, anyone with a racial inferiority was targeted. For example, although the Jews were the main threat the gypsies, Jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals and the disabled were also targeted. The Holocaust was a way to decrease the Jewish population; the final solution was to murder the Jews of Europe or anyone that was a threat to their German culture. Many died of incarceration and maltreatment. During the war they created ghettos, forced-labor camps between 1941 and 1944 the Nazi German Authorities would deport the Jews to extermination camps where they were murdered in gassing facilities. May 7, 1945 the German armed forces surrendered to the allies.

A common misconception about the Holocaust is that the world was naïve of the atrocities happening under the Nazi’s rule. The horrors of the Holocaust were not left undocumented. Unfortunately, many saw these malicious acts as insignificant to the global population; people only start sympathizing when the hindrance affects them. Hitler, with the help of his many allies, achieved to murder millions of innocent men, women, and children. After spending this semester studying the Holocaust, I have realized that the Nazis’ greatest ally was neither an individual nor a country; Hitler’s greatest ally was indifference.

I asked Karl Boem-Tettelbach how it was possible in the 1930s that someone could respect Hitler and what he was doing for Germany when Jews were forced to lose their jobs and leave the country. In his reply spoke, I believe, for millions of other Germans: "That never came up. Everybody thought the same, that you were in a big team and you didn't separate from the group. You were infected. That explains it a bit." (2) And as for actual officers, during the Nuremberg Trials, a Commandant named Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess had this to say of his indifference, "Don't you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; it never even occurred to us. And besides it was something already taken for granted that the Jews were to blame for everything….It was not just newspapers like Sturmer but it was everything we heard. Even our military and ideological training took for granted that we had to protect Germany from the Jews….We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking that the thought of disobeying an order would never have occurred to anybody." (3) So there is a delicate balance between conscious and unconscious actions of every individual of Nazi Germany. The majority was bewitched by the charismatic Hitler who not only gave them a reason as to why they were suffering with ubiquitous propaganda, but also promised to strengthen Germany until she was beyond restored. (4) For some it was an underlying hatred that had finally found a vent. For

In 1933, Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, the beginning of the end for the Jewish. As soon as Hitler was named Chancellor he began passing laws that hindered the Jewish. It started with the Nuremberg Laws, which stated the Jewish couldn’t marry German citizens. Soon after, the Jewish were being openly thought of as ‘less than human’. The Jewish now had separate schools, hospitals, and even different park benches: “The Nazi persecution started with hateful words, escalated to discrimination and dehumanization, and culminated in genocide.” (ushmm). This quote shows how hateful words and indifference can have grisly consequences on the underdogs of the situation.The Jewish had to wear stars to show that they were Jewish so they could be avoided. Parades of anti-semitism were now common entertainment. German media was helping by spreading propaganda, in which they blamed the Jewish for all of their misfortune. The Jewish would be tortured in aforesaid ways for five years in silence before Kristallnacht, also regarded to as ‘the Night of Broken Glass’; for all the glass that littered the streets from Jewish businesses, which had been vandalized. Unfortunately, these acts were only the first of a myriad of adversities that the Jewish would have to suffer.

The intended audience for this article was towards readers who don’t recognize what is actually happening with the Jews and Anti-Semitism, and what could occur from it. This forms a teacher/student relationship between the author and her readers because she is teaching them from her own experience, and what she knows about the Holocaust and Jewish mistreatment. I will use this article to answer my GRQ because I believe it provides me with clear and concise evidence, and connects the treatment of Jews in modern day to the time of World War 2 efficiently. This article specifically relates to my GRQ by providing me with an evident answer for my question on how the treatment of Jews has evolved since World War 2. The author does this by saying “The horror of the Holocaust cleansed our society of anti-Semitism at the official level but the simmering resentment of a group that is different, that maintains its identity, that has been pilloried throughout history by religious and political leaders, remains” (Rebrik

The Holocaust is widely considered one of the darkest hours in world history. People of Jewish descent were imprisoned and confined to brutal conditions in concentration camps. Author Elie Wisel captures many of the atrocities of these detainments in his literary work, Night. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs describes the needs and motivation of people (Boeree). In Night, Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs has a direct impact on the lives of the Jews and their relationships with each other.

With authorization from the Nazi party allocated to its soldiers, troops confiscated Jewish property, pillaged numerous synagogues and stores, and murdered Jews in a short period of time. Reliable assistance to the suffering Jews was hard to find because of the Nazis’ brainwashing of the nation through abundant propaganda. This kind of widespread discrimination inhibited the Jewish people’s ability to speak out against this obvious prejudice. While these attacks were just the tip of the iceberg in comparison to later deeds committed by the Nazis, they were still fundamental to the eventual extermination of the Jewish race.

First of all, the Nazis used false information about Jewish people and utilized negative Jewish stereotypes to legitimize the horrific acts of violence during the Final Solution. The Nazis were evil towards the Jews. Movies, newspapers, and posters were only some of the ways anti-semitic messages were thrown out into the public. A newspaper called Der Sturmer pumped out stories devoted to showing Germans how dirty Jews were (Marcovitz 15). Things like “Jews are immoral, indecent, dishonest, ugly, fat, not human, cannibalistic”, and “Jews eat their children and drink their blood”, were common headlines (Marcovitz 15). Jews were not humans. They were on the same level as bugs and needed to be exterminated from Germany and all of Eastern Europe. Also, stereotypes from 100’s of years ago were still alive and well. Jews were tax collectors a long time ago, and some people still hated them for it. Some people could not let go of old derogatory lies and the Nazis loved this. Hate towards the Jews was stronger than kindness and the Nazis fed off of this. If people saw the propaganda and the heard old stereotypes, then maybe they would hop on board with the Nazis.

The Holocaust was a disturbing unique element of European history; it refers to the period from 30th January 1933 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany to 5th May 1945 when the Second World War officially ended. “The Nazis, who came into power believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.” The Holocaust was responsible for murdering six million of the Jewish residence in Europe, the deaths represented two-thirds of the European Jewish population; the Jewish public was the Nazi regime’s primary target and the regime sought to wipe out the entire Jewish populace. The Nazi’s claimed that the Jews corrupted Germany and illustrated Jews as evil, Nazi’s believe that they could justify their treatment of Jews based on their racial theories. The Jewish inhabitants of Germany were murdered with the cruelest methods; they suffered from forced labor, starvation, disease, mass shootings, and the most notorious was gassing. Men and women experienced related traumas, while being held imprisoned in the concentration camps and or death camps; however, women endured incomparable circumstances that we cannot expect men to apprehend.

The Nazis and Hitler used extreme propaganda in attempt for people to accept their actions. Hitler made the Jews out to be a problem and a threat to the purity and perfection of German society (Holocaust Encyclopdia: Nazi Propaganda ). In Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag in September, 1942, he states,

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.

In the tumultuous period leading up to World War II, a series of laws were devised in Nazi Germany that subjected the Jewish people to prohibitory and discriminatory forms of treatment. Although the Jewish people only accounted for 503,000 of the 55 million occupants of the country, Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship preached the incorporation of anti-Semitism into law and practice in order to quell the people he considered to be the enemy of the country.