The Argument For Genocide In Nazi Propaganda

“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

From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in one of the deadliest genocides in history, which was part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazi regime. Every arm of Germany 's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics and the carrying out of the genocide. Other victims of Nazi crimes included Romanians, Ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah 's Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled. A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were used to concentrate victims for slave labor, mass murder, and other human rights abuses. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. Every person designated as a Jew in German territory was marked with a yellow star making them open targets. Thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR. Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz and many more. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust. Beginning in late 1941, the Germans

Hitler believed that propaganda from the allies was the main reason that the Germans lost during World War I and felt that this form of warfare needed to be a primary tool in modern warfare. He spoke of this belief in his book Mein Kampf well before the start of the second World War. Hitler felt that the public needed to be inundated with the ideology of the state at all times and through all mediums (Jowett and O'Donnell 2). "To do this," he said "everything from child's story-book to the last newspaper, every theater, every cinema and every advertisement must be brought into the service of this single mission" (qt. in Qualter ix). This onslaught of propaganda led to the Holocaust by leaving no other option open to the German people

In the pre-war years, the Nazi Party wanted to find a solution to the “Jewish question” – meaning what to do with them (“Final Solution” Learning). On July 31, 1941, Heydrich submitted the “draft of the measures he proposed to undertake ‘to implement the desired final solution of the Jewish Question’” (“SS”). In the fall of 1941, the Nazi soldiers implemented the plan and began to effectuate it by experimental gassings in the Auschwitz extermination camp and then moving forth to surrounding camps (“Final Solution” Learning). Between then and 1945, the top SS soldiers continued to give the orders to torture, mass shoot, gas (especially in constructed extermination camps), enforce murderous labor, and other means (“Holocaust”). The ideas, which were thought of by Himmler, Eichmann, and Heydrich, are what allowed for this brutality to cause such a large scale genocide. Despite the eleven million

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.

Another fact in support of Browning is that Hitler almost didn’t talk about his hatred of the Jews in public, so anti-Semitism didn’t play the main role in bringing him to power in 1933. After his election, German population was basically divided in two groups; people who strongly supported anti-Semitism and people for whom it was not a priority. Those who radically supported anti-Jewish laws passed by National Socialist Party, were violent toward Jewish population of Germany. Series of pogroms against Jewish-owned businesses were conducted in 1938, around 100 Jews were killed and 33.000 were sent to concentration camps. The Nazi political party gained more supporters during that time, because anti-Semitic measures looked like the only option to stop violence among German population. Another aspect of World War 2, according to Brwoning, that proves that anti-Semitism was not the main moving force in killings of Holocaust is that German soldiers killed millions and millions of none-Jewish people all around the Europe. German handicapped, Polish upper class, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies; all these groups of people were targeted during Nazi regime. So Brwoning argues that Jewish people were no different from other victims of Nazi genocide during years of World War 2. According to Christopher R. Browning, Germans soldiers who carried out the Final Solution

In the 1940s, while many of the people focused on the Second World War, Hitler and many of the Germans under his influence killed numerous groups of people that tainted the German or Aryan superior 4race. These people included Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, people with disabilities, prisoners of war, and communists. The Final Solution, or the Holocaust as it is known now, was a plan made by the top of the Nazi party and was executed primarily by Hitler's followers. Holocaust, the word now brings living fear to those who experienced the tragedy and those reading the survivors' accounts. Night by Elie Wiesel, a memoir using logos and pathos at a high efficiency, and Schindler`s letter by his Jews, excels at providing creditability, are two accounts that have ample amounts of rhetoric.

Hitler and the Nazis used propaganda to suppress the Jews’ freedoms and human rights. Films portrayed Germans as powerful and mighty while showing the Jews to be “subhuman creatures” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 1). German newspapers portrayed Jews in their cartoons as anti semitic caricatures while radios played Hitler’s manipulative speeches all over Germany. By dehumanizing Jewish people through propaganda, Hitler was able to encourage Germans to support the Nazis and look down on the Jews. Without propaganda, less people would have been motivated to support Hitler.

Nazi propaganda played an important role in the Holocaust, the extermination of millions based on race, religion, and ethnicity. It successfully secured the acquiescence of the general public to the crimes committed by the Nazis. The Nazi Party used their control of the media to fuel anti-Semitic belief and to persuade Germans to support the Nazi cause throughout the Holocaust and World War II.

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

What would make a group of people ignore their country’s own genocide? In Nazi Germany, the answer was propaganda. From the end of World War I, the German leaders knew how important propaganda was. By the time Hitler had complete control of the military, the powerful propaganda film Triumph de Willens was already being produced . By the time the second offensive started, they had already launched an international propaganda magazine called Signal. Both of these are prime examples of the purpose of German propaganda. Like earlier British propaganda, it had two primary roles. First, the control of the people. Gobbels’ propaganda about “national enemies” made it seem as if the Nazis were the only alternative to a loss in national security. The second goal was scaring foreign powers. Through international magazines and radio broadcasts such as Signal, German power and victories were highlighted and shown to the world. The three key issues are the attacks on Jews and Communists, the origins of these methods, and the uses of these methods to create a powerful Nazi government. Through slandering and suppression of the opposition of the Nazis, Hitler’s media soon became the voice of the country. The Nazi Party used propaganda to gain power out of fear for national security.

Genocide, usually due to discrimination of some sort, can be due to one’s surroundings during childhood. For instance, Adolf Hitler grew up in an anti-Semitic neighborhood. A child’s mind is easily manipulated by his/her surrounding family and friends, so he was bound to believe the same. Hitler had also fought in World War I and blamed Germany’s loss on the Jews despite there being over 100,000 Jews fighting. He believed Jews were ruining German society and he became determined to “purify” Germany in any means necessary. That is what started the Holocaust. Jews weren’t the only ones involved in the Holocaust, though. Gypsies and homosexuals were also deemed as “impurities” and were rallied into camps. While Hitler’s main influence to participate

and getting rid of the Jews was that they were able to steal from the

German Attitudes Toward the Jews and the Final Solution There are those that claim that Hitler’s conscious personal hatred of the Jews, his unique and central role in the rise of Nazi Germany were fundamental in the development of the anti-Jewish policies that emerged leading to the final solution. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that the anti- Jewish feeling in Germany reflected a much stronger, widespread support amongst its people and this essay will examine the role and attitudes of the German people towards the Final Solution. On the 1st of April, 1933, the boycott of Jewish businesses reflected evidence of widespread anti Jewish feelings amongst the lower bureaucracy of the