Nazis' Attempts to Eliminate Jews in Europe from 1941 Onwards

Jews undergoing the selection process on the Birkenau arrival platform known as the " ramp"

The Holocaust was the Nazi attempt to wipe out the Jewish race (Rossel 12). The Holocaust took place from 1933 to 1945 (Rossel 12). The Holocaust took place in Europe, mainly Germany (“Introduction” par 3). Mainly Jewish and Nazi people were involved in the Holocaust, as well as some Gypsies (“Introduction” par 2, 3). The Holocaust was the persecution of 6 million Jews and millions of others forced to live in ghettos, deported to camps, and systematically annihilated until the Allied forces liberated the remaining survivors.

A horrid event known as The Holocaust took place in 20th century Germany. It all began when Adolph Hitler was appointed as chancellor of Germany on January 30th, 1933. Soon after, Hitler gained a numerous amount of followers and rapidly developed his Nazi Germany. Led by visions of racial purity and spatial expansion, the Nazis mainly targeted Jews. In addition, Nazis also targeted Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and disabled people along with anyone who resisted them. This tragic event lasted a total of 12 years.

Hitler’s next plan on his agenda was to exterminate all Jews using extremely inhumane methods. Hitler crossed all merciless boundaries when it came to extermination tactics. Hitler went to drastic measures in order to massacre all Jews as quickly as possible. From mass killings upon arrival through the use of gas chambers, innocent Jews were victimized by Hitler’s sadistic actions. Thus, six million Jews fell victim to the Holocaust (Novick, “To Bigotry No Sanction”).

This essay is going to discuss the ways in which the Nazi’s persecuted the Jews between the years of 1933 to 1938. Through the rise of Nazism, Nazi beliefs and propaganda, Nuremberg laws and the Kristallnacht in which will be explained in detail, I will provide a knowledge based analysis of pre-war life and the initial lead up to the war.

There are so many remarkable people who have gone before us and shaped the world into what it is today. With the passing of yet another Veterans Day, people were reminded of the extraordinary sacrifices made by ordinary men and women who were unfortunate enough to have lived during times when their nations were at war. Many ordinary citizens lost their lives as a result of the war, just as soldiers did. While some survivors simply lived out their post war lives, others survived and influenced the world. One person who survived the atrocities of the Holocaust during World War II and used his experiences to improve social, political, and religious conditions throughout the world, is Elie Wiesel. Through the words of Elie Wiesel, the public can witness the evils of war, keep these memories alive in the collective recall of future generations, and take action upon witnessing injustices of its kind.

In his novel, Night, Elie Wiesel recounts the horrific experiences that he faced as a survivor of the Holocaust during World War II. The following passage presents the impossible struggle to maintain a decent quality of life in the face of war:

At the foundation of Nazi ideology is a strict adherence to the racial purification of the ‘Aryan race.’ Nazi propagandists and racial fanatics created ways to limit the rights of people who were deemed racially inferior; the majority of such policies focused on solving the ‘Jewish Problem.’ In an effort to increase pressures on the Jewish population of Europe, the Nazi regime imposed laws and edicts to remove any legal rights of Jewish citizens. In order to purify the German race, the Nazi regime went a step further and implemented legislation to separate the Jewish and Aryan populations; a separation of these groups would provide a quicker way to racial purification. In the mid-1930s, laws, like the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, were enacted to inhibit marriage and sexual relations between people of Jewish and Aryan descent. This particular law focuses on the purification of German blood, the Jewish-German marriage policy and the display of Reich symbols. Looking at its historical context, however, we see that this law is only a small piece of the Nazi policies focused on the persecution of Jews.

I know it was war but was it also racism? Judging through the fact Germany was also the enemy, why didn't the U.S bomb them if they were also our enemy in WW2? This is all I have to say. Thousands of innocent Japanese people died which surely ended the war but those people who died also had family and friends. There are hundred of different ways to end the war that is better than killing thousands of innocent people. Not to be mean but the U.S used similar killing strategy that the Nazis used to kill the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Have you ever wondered or thought about what happened to the Nazis that helped with different parts of the Holocaust after World War II ended? Well, I thought about it and I did some research about the famous trials that happened between the years 1945 through 1949. These trials were made up after a man by the name of Adolf Hitler wanted world domination and he treated the jews horribly. This event solved a lot of problems from establishing an International Court and knowing what to do with the men that helped Hitler with the Holocaust. The charges were among many things but mostly crimes against hummanity was the most used charge. There was also a lot of controversy about the laws that were made in the court and before the trials even

In October, 1941 SS General Odilo Globocnik was authorized to institute a plan to systematically murder all Jews residing in the Generalgouvernement. This project received the code name of Operation Reinhard. To accomplish this elimination of approximately 2 million

During World War II, the world witnessed unspeakable acts of violence, particularly that of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a mass genocide primarily of, but not limited to, the Jewish population in Germany, and other countries that were controlled by Germany. From 1941 to 1945, the Jews were targeted and methodically murdered because of Hitler’s views of his Utopian society made up of an Aryan a race. Hitler fought to create this society through creating an anti-Semitic movement, his motivation and thirst for power and through his rituals of violence used to purge society of the undesirable races.

“The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.” That’s how The American Heritage Dictionary describes the murder of 6 million European Jews during the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the horrible true story of how one group’s hate turned into one of the darkest periods in world history.

Nazi forces had started the mass bloodshed of Jews as early as 1939, when Germany initially attacked Poland. By 1942, the supposed 'Final solution' began developing, as the killings turn out to be progressively efficient and Hitler pushed his subordinates to quicken the procedure. Amid the earlier year, S.S. leaders had explored different avenues regarding distinctive routines, and gas chambers ended up being the solution of choice.

In the events leading up to, during, and following the Holocaust there are no easy answers, and the questions are often times even more difficult. Each individual event was a part of a complex and irrational chain of development. In that sense, it is very difficult to point one event or year of the Holocaust and determine that it was a critical turning point in the development of the Nazi policies towards the Jews. It is difficult to say what would have happened had one of these events been thrown off course, and what the impact was of events historians never found out about. That being said, based on information that exists today an argument can be made that 1941 represents the most critical year in the development of Nazi policies towards the Jews. The culmination of that year is represented in the Wannsee conference, which was arguably the most significant marker of a shift of policies towards the Jews, “In particular, one of its aims was to work out a viable definition of who was to be treated as a Jew.” (Gerlach, 761). This was the year where the murder “gathered pace” (Matthaus, 219), the policies shifted from anti-Jewish to murderous and these sentiments are officially declared at the Wannsee Conference in January, 1942.