The Dangers Of Crimes In The Holocaust And Rwandan Obedience

Once, Adolf Hitler said, “It’s not the truth that matters, but victory.” Obviously, this quote shows that Hitler’s mindset was directed towards winning, and not his moral values. He made false accusations about the innocent Jews, killing over six-million of them. These false accusations were simple, repeated, and, eventually, people believed it. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party affected how people viewed the Jews at the time. To begin, events in Adolf Hitler’s life lead to his viewpoints and affiliations. Secondly, the creation of the Nazi Party was critical to the formation of Germany’s point of view. Lastly, Jewish people had been used as scapegoats for the loss of World War I and Germany’s economic crisis.

For years, Rwanda has been a hotbed of racial tension. The majority of the Rwandan population is made up of Hutu's, with Tutsi's making up the rest of it. Ever since European colonial powers entered the country and favoured the Tutsi ethnic group over the Hutu by putting Tutsi people in all important positions in society, there has been a decisive political divide between the two groups. This favouring of the Tutsi over the Hutu, and the Hutu subjugation as an ethnic lower class resulted in the civil war and revolution of 1959, where the Hutu overthrew the Tutsi dominated government, and resulted in Rwanda gaining their independence in 1962.

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

Throughout history, there are different examples of how races were being oppressed, while the higher power does not intervene, and would almost act as a bystander, except that they have the power to stop it, and the point is that the higher power, should be the one to advocate on behalf of the oppressed. Some examples would be the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, in which the higher power, or the government, would not interfere with the injustices really when they should have since a whole race could have been killed off. I do however, understand that some believe that the bystander, or the others that are standing by as this happens, should be the ones to stop it. Although this may be true, the others, for example civilians who are standing by, do not have as much power as let us say, governments who have the resources and the power to make a change to other countries in need.

Rwanda is a country located in the middle of the African continent. The two ethnic groups present in the country lived in peace under their monarch until the arrival of Europeans. The Belgians arrival into Rwandan is what split the two ethnic groups of the Tutsi and Hutus, making them identify themselves with ID cards. This caused tension between the two groups as the Belgians favored the ethnic Tutsi, and made them the head of the government. Decade’s later Hutu extremists would take over the government and have revenge on the Tutsi. The new government would send out broadcasts calling on Hutus to kill their friends and neighbors. The Rwandan genocide would become the worst genocide to ever happen in Africa and one of the worst in the world. Today Rwanda’s recovery is surprisingly fast with the help of multiple nations and organizations. Rwanda’s recovery is nothing short of a miracle and is an amazing story of a war between two peoples.

On April 7th, 1994 in the small East African country of Rwanda the darkest and most brutal tragedy occurred, the Rwandan genocide. 800,000 Tutsi’s and Rwandan men and women were grossly slaughtered by the Hutu government. This was one of the worst genocides in history and yet not many people spoke about it, why? I believe many people did not say anything is because they were scared that they would be caught and then killed. A man by the name of Philippe Gaillard was a part of the Red Cross international committee in Kigali. He was one of the few people who spoke up about the tragedies occurring in Rwanda. He told his friend who was a news reporter for the BBC in France and published his story. By Gaillard not “shutting up” about the situation it made the Hutu extremists embarrassed and this lead to the Hutu government allowing the Red Cross committee to have safe passage throughout Rwanda. “America, the beautiful America, the brave”, was what America was known for being, but after the ethnic cleansing of the Rwandan people it changed.

When discussing The Holocaust, our minds tend to jump straight to the genocide of the Jewish populations of Europe. This is because of the approximate 11 million people killed during The Holocaust; roughly 6 million of them were Jews. Many people are now left to wonder why Hitler and the Nazi Party specifically targeted the Jews for genocide. The main reason was because the Nazi Party took the idea of nationalism to an extreme, new level. Hitler also thought the Jews were responsible for Germany losing World War 1. Hitler may have been influenced during his childhood on the ideas of anti-Semitism. According to A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust, the opposition and discrimination of Jews is known as

Escaping is a pleasure to some people and to some it was a necessity, like to Jack Werber, “Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald.” This quote by Jack Werber is inspiring to some people. Jack Werber did live long enough to tell his story, like a lot of Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide. The Rwandan Genocide impacted not only the Tutsis, but the world.

“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.” -Wiesel. The Holocaust, the killing of ;Jews, homosexuals, other races, and prisoners of war had horrible conditions that people went through, and how much hatred one person could have. The Holocaust was the mass murder of more than 6 million Jews, the Nazis killed more 11 Million people. One thing that I learned is that Hitler thought the Jews were the ones who caused World War I. He thought that if he killed people who he thought caused World War I, there would be more money to go around Europe.

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.

The Holocaust, original meaning “sacrifice by fire,” was a German ideology in which six million Jews were slaughtered in different ways by Nazis (“US Holocaust Memorial Museum”). Adolf Hitler believed that Jews were an inferior race to Germans and in order to ensure the safety of the German people, all Jews needed to be eliminated. Hitler also believed that Jews were Communists and that they would oppose German rule by all means necessary (Modern World History, ch. 16). Following this false ideology, Hitler and soon the Nazis, began to promote the idea that, every Jew is a “mortal enemy of the German people,” (Modern World History, ch. 16, sec. 5). Following this ideology, Jews were considered targets early on in the war and that policy became

“The sweetly sickening odor of decomposing bodies hung over many parts of Rwanda in July 1994: . . . at Nyarubuye in eastern Rwanda, where the cadaver of a little girl, otherwise intact, had been flattened by passing vehicles to the thinness of cardboard in front of the church steps,” (Deforges 6). The normalcy of horrible images like this one had cast a depressing gloom over Rwanda during the genocide, a time when an extreme divide caused mass killings of Tutsi by the Hutu. Many tactics such as physical assault or hate propaganda are well known and often used during times of war. Sexual assault and rape, however, during times of war is an unspoken secret – it is well known that rape occurs within combat zones and occupied territories, but

The 1990 's was a grim time in history all across the globe, its epicentre being Rwanda. In April of 1994 the Rwandan President Habyarimana was shot down from a plane. In consequence, immediate war was struck and the goal of extermination of the Tutsi was commenced. This genocide was the result of conscious choice of the elite, therefore, president Habyarimana to promote hatred and fear to keep itself in power. Rwanda’s political elite blamed the entire Tutsi minority population for the country’s increasing social, economic, and political pressures. Tutsi civilians were also accused of supporting a Tutsi-dominated rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Using hateful propaganda, reading out names of people that must be killed and articles on newspapers. Tutsi and people suspected of being Tutsi were killed in their homes and as they tried to flee at roadblocks set up across the country during the genocide. Leaving an unimaginable 800,000 people dead. Mothers and daughters raped, children, boys and men slaughtered with machetes (United Human rights coucil,2015). How did it get this far? What was the worlds reaction to this gruesome mass murder?

The Rwandan genocide saw hundreds of thousands of Rwandans murdered in a matter of 100 days by the Hutu government, and was the motivating factor for articulating the “responsibility to protect. The whole notion of genocide occurring and the inability of governments and other organizations to halt it, has generated a lot of soul searching throughout the world. Thus, the responsibility to protect was highly motivated by the Rwandans genocide.

The school year was amazing I learned a lot of new things in many subjects such as English,Math,Science, and Social Studies and etc. I learned a lot of interesting history in World Cultures, the russian east asia, south asia, africa content history and many ot the contents. The most interesting part o history i learned in World Cultures was the Rwanda Genocide. Therefore in this essay, i will tell you why the Rwandan Genocide was the most important and interesting content of history i learned in World Cultures.