The event of Holocaust - Research Paper Example

?Holocaust When one examines the history of the 20th century, many human sufferings and even massacres and large-scale cold-blooded executions come into mind but the most outstanding of them all is the holocaust. The holocaust was the massive destruction or the genocide of about 6 million European Jews and other ethnic minorities during the World War II giving a total of approximately 10 million deaths. This event was the most inhuman 20th century happenings and it marked greatest murder and theft in the history of mankind. Some critics claim that the holocaust never took place while those who admit it’s happening blame the Jews for it. This paper explores the events surrounding the holocaust to reveal whether the holocaust really took place and who is to blame. Target groups Adolf Hitler and the Nazi government targeted ethnic minorities residing in Europe and this included the Jews, the Romani, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, the Sinti and the Polish. They also extended their hatred to homosexuals, political and religious opponents, Jehovah’s witnesses and the disabled regardless of whether they were of foreign or German ethnic origin. Of all these groups of people, the Jews were the main target and they comprised almost half the numbers killed. Out of the nine million Jews who lived in Europe at that time, approximately six million of them died inclusive of close to 1 million children. Description of the event The holocaust was a state-sponsored murder propagated by the Nazi government and it basically involved the killing of the various target groups. The event took place in the Nazi-occupied territory. This persecution and removal of German Jews begun almost immediately the Nazis came to power. This was in January 1933. The holocaust killings were driven by the idology that represented Nazi’s illusion that there was an international Jewish conspiracy to rule and control the world. This made this event such a large scale event in the history of man in that the murders were conducted in almost territories of Nazi which represent 35 separate European countries. Four main distinctive features about the genocide are institutional collaboration, scale and ideology, use of extermination camps and medical experiments. The genocide was carried out in stages starting from 30th January 1933 to 8th May 8, 1945 and the killings were conducted through various ways. Concntration camps were set up for confining the Jews. The Jews who were forcefully being moved from their homes were put together in these camps. The inmates were then used as slaves until they died of exhaustion. In these camps, they received no medical attention and some of them died of disease. Initially, these camps were to act as temporary residence for Jews awaiting relocation to areas outside Europe including former colonial powers and Africa. In some places like Poland, they were places for containing the Jews so that they could give labour force to the German war industry. Despite this, the Germans had a plan of eliminating the Jews finally and so the camps were set near railroads. Here, thousands died from disease, starvation, maltreatment and starvation. There is therefore no doubt that forced labour was an extermination tool. A model of destruction through work. Since the emergence of Third Reich, the concentration camps turned into incineration places or extermination camps. The Third Reich required the Romani and the Jews to be assembled and confined in overcrowded ghettos awaiting from where they were transported by cargo or freight train to extermination camps. These journeys were horrific and many of the died on the way. Many of those who survived the journey were systematically murdered in gas chambers. These camps were equipped with several gas chambers for conducting mass extermination and this is one unique feature of the holocaust. By 1942, 6 large extermination camps had been set up in the Nazi-occupied Poland and as many as 15,000 camps and sub-camps in the Germany occupied nations. Another group of Jews and political opponents were murdered through mass shootings when Third Reich conquered regions in the Eastern Europe. These murders were conducted by specialised units refereed to Einsatzgruppen. The same took place when Germany conquered the Soviet Union and Einsatzgruppen emphasised on the participation of the locals. Browning and Jurgen (214) explain that they justified their killings falsely on the grounds of anti-bandit or anti-partisan operations. These killings were conducted publicly unlike other murders. The holocaust was characterised by the highest ever level of institutional cooperation. The Nazi govrnment was highly involved in every logistic that led to these murders as well as the killing process turning Third Reich into a holocaust state (Berenbaum 107). For instance, the government transport offices made plans for the trains for deporting the Jews to the extermination camps. The German Post Office services knowingly delivered denaturalisation and deportation orders, the Interior Ministry and parish churches gave out birth records for identifying the Jews. German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs using cam prisoners. Germans fired Jewish employees to make them stranded and easy to note because they would be thrown out of their houses for not paying rent. Another unique feature of the holocaust was the extensive use of human experimentation as a way of extermination. Many people were forcefully used as human subjects for conducting medical experiments and this was conducted in concentration camps. These experiments included sterilisation, poison mustard gas, seawater, incendiary bomb, malaria, sulphonamide, high altitude, nerve, bone and muscle transplantation, head injury and freezing experiments and experiments on twins. Typically, these experiments either resulted to permanent disability or death. Causes and reasons In November 1938, Herschel Grunspan, a Jewish minor assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a Nazi German diplomat in Paris. The Nazis capitalised on this incident in order to find a way of extending their actions from legal reactions into large-scale physical violence against the resident Jewish Germans. The Germans attacked the Jews and vandalised their property. Over 7000 shops and 1,668 synagogues were brought down on that day. Some of the Jews died during this November pogroms or the Night of Broken Glass and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps. Someone could be tempted to think that the Jews triggered their own killings or that the holocaust was a self-inflicted death upon the Jews. However, the actions of Grunspan was not the main reason behind the holocaust. In fact, what the Nazis therefore claimed as public outrage was actually a wave of killings/polgroms ordered by the Nazi party and accomplished by members of Sturmabteilung (SA), a group that functioned as military organisation working for the Nazi Party/the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Wolfgang 97). Years before the outbreak of the World War II, the Nazi government had enacted a number of legislation by the name Nuremberg laws which aimed at removing the Jews from Europe. This therefore was the basis for setting aside the concentration camps where the Jews were later confined and tortured to death. The Nazi government believed that the Jews living in Germany were the cause of the economic turmoil experienced by the country and it therefore gave them out to the public as a scapegoat for its actions. Buchheim (372) explains that the Nazi government also formed a mentality in its citizens that if they were not siding with it, then they were against it. They even made the German children believe that the Jews were killers of Christ in order to make them hate the Jews as they grow up. Another evidence that the holocaust was a political issue is the killing of Jews in other countries. During the world war II, Germany invaded other countries and the Nazis used this chance to elevate the Jewish murders. The invasions increased the number of Jews under the control of the Nazi. Initially, they wanted to eliminate the Jews out of Europe by moving them to Poland and other ghetto areas. However, it became clear that this was not going to bring quick success and so the Nazi leadership moved to formulate a “Territorial/Regional Solution” to the “Final Solution”. By this, they were referring to the holocaust. Hitler can also be said to be one of the main causes or drivers of the holocaust. In one of his speeches of 1939, he made a public statement saying “If international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" (Berenbaum 57). This statement became the reference for making a conclusion on The External Jew, a Nazi propaganda movie that was developed to provide a blueprint and rationale for eliminating the Jews in Europe. This caused many Jewish intellectuals to flee because the German government was not in a position to shield them from mood of the German public. A deep analysis of Hitler’s actions reveals that the holocaust events unfolded as Hitler’s own vision of cleaning his homeland of every undesirable, and most abundantly, the Jews. Generally, Hitler and the Nazi government wanted to rule and wipe out of existence everyone they considered as inferior. They believed in and desired a Master Race and thus they gathered up entire families of people they considered as not fitting into the ideals of what people should be. Public reaction The general reaction of majority of the Germans towards what was happening to the Jews can be described as passive complicity. It would be false to say they were majorly indifferent as witnessed by the large numbers of Jews fired and exposed by the Germans including churches. Many of them were national conservatives yet the Jews were against the Nazi regime. Buchheim (372) explains that no one was forced to kill the Jews and those who killed them did so out of free will. Some the Germans used this period as a chance to prove themselves as strong and devoted National Socialists. Conclusion The holocaust really did happen and it was not a self-inflicted thing to Jews or any other target group. Instead, the Nazi government and Hitler are all to blame for it. The holocaust was part of the larger Nazi campaign to clear the world of what they often termed as “Jewish bolshevism.” It did not therefore begin with a startle in reaction to any particular incident like the killing of Ernst vom Rath. The idea had been birth long before this later years was just a period of rapid development. Fear, pain, tears and agony is the mark left behind by the horrific holocaust and although the battle is over, some wounds will never heal. The hatred inside a small section of people led to the death of up to 11 million innocent people and all humanity should join hands to ensure that no such a thing ever happens because not even a million reasons can give a justification for intentional massive destruction of human life. Works Cited Berenbaum Michael. The World Must Know. New York. United States Holocaust Museum. 2006. Buchheim Hans. “Command and Compliance" pp 303–396 from The Anatomy of the SS State, New York. Walker and Company. 1968. Browning Christopher and Jurgen Matthaus. Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939 -March 1942. Jerusalem. University of Nebraska Press. 2004 Wolfgang Benz. Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen- das dritte Reich. (The 101 Most Important Questions: The Third Reich.) (2nd Ed). Munich. Beck. 2007. Read More