What Were The Political, Economic, And Social Circumstances That Led To The Holocaust - Essay Example

What were the political, economic, and social circumstances that led to the Holocaust The Holocaust has been the most vicious episodes in world history. The Holocaust was the Nazis' assault on the Jews between 1933 and 1945. It reached its peak when the Nazis enforced the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe.' During the Holocaust, six million Jews were murdered. However, the Jews were not the only victims of Nazism. It is estimated that as many as 15 million civilians were killed by the Nazi regime, including millions of Slavs and 'asiatics', 200,000 Gypsies and members of various other groups. Furthermore, thousands of people, including Germans of African descent, were forcibly sterilized.1 The word holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holokauston, meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering", or "a burnt sacrifice offered to God". In Greek and Roman pagan rites, gods of the earth and underworld received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full. Holocaust was later used to refer to a sacrifice Jews were required to make by the Torah.2 Initially, the Nazis used killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen to conduct huge open-air killings, in some instances murdering as many as 33,000 people or more in a single day, as in the case of Babi Yar. However, by 1942, the Nazi leadership decided to implement the Final Solution, the genocide of all Jews in Europe, and increase the pace of the Holocaust. While concentration camps and labor camps to contain political enemies had existed since soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Nazi leadership built six extermination camps, including Treblinka and Auschwitz, specifically to kill Jews. Millions of Jews who had been confined to diseased and massively overcrowded Ghettos were transported to the "Death-camps" where they were either gassed or shot, usually immediately after they disembarked from trains.3 As the war started, massive massacres of Jews took place, and, by December 1941, Hitler decided to completely exterminate European Jews. In January 1942, during the Wannsee conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question" (Endlsung der Judenfrage). Dr. Josef Bhler urged Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in the General Government. They began to purposely deport Jewish from the ghettos and all occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibr and Treblinka II. Sebastian Haffner published the analysis in 1978 that Hitler from December 1941 accepted the failure of his goal to dominate Europe forever on his declaration of war against the United States, but that his withdrawal and imminent calm thereafter was sustained by the attainment of Hitler's second goal-the annihilation of the Jews.4 The execution of the Final Solution resulted in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust. However, mass killings of over one million Jews had already begun before the plans of the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to eradicate the entire Jewish population that the extermination camps were built and industrialized mass slaughter of Jews began in earnest. This decision to systematically kill the Jews of Europe was made by the time of, or at the Wannsee conference, which took place in Berlin, in the Wannsee Villa on January 20, 1942.5 In addition to the Jews, the Roma and Sinti were also targets of the Holocaust which resulted in about 220,000 deaths in the Holocaust (some estimates are as high as 800,000), between a quarter and a half of the European population. Other groups deemed "undesirable", especially Poles, Soviet military prisoners of war including Russians and other Slavs, the mentally or physically disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists and political dissidents and criminals, were also persecuted and murdered. Taking all these other groups into account, the total death toll rises considerably. Estimates place the total number of Holocaust victims at up to 26 million people, although the number 9 to 11 million is usually held as more reliable.6 Causes of the holocaust No single reason alone paved the way for the Holocaust to occur. It was the combination of many factors: "racism, combined with centuries-old bigotry, renewed by a nationalistic fervor which emerged in Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, fueled by Germany's defeat in World War I and its national humiliation following the Treaty of Versailles, exaggerated by global economic depression, the ineffectiveness of the Weimar Republic, and international indifference, and catalyzed by the political charisma, militaristic inclusiveness, and manipulative propaganda of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, contributed to the eventuality of the Holocaust." (USHMM Teaching Guidebook).7 Political circumstances Defeat in World War I left Germany distracted and on the edge of collapse, making Germany a fruitful ground for Nationalistic movements. Germany did not lose World War I in a decisive way. They recognize the imminent defeat and agreed for a treaty. The treaty that came out of World War I was the "Versailles Treaty." Obviously, no German citizen was contend with it. The French and the English, who had done a big deal of the fighting and bleeding, felt that Germany got off too easy. On the other hand, Germany felt penalized a great deal and unfairly.8 The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 was the peace treaty, which officially ended World War I between the Allies and Germany. After six months of negotiations, which took place at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the treaty was signed as a follow-up to an armistice signed months before, in the forest of Compigne (which had put an end to the actual fighting). The treaty required that Germany claim full responsibility for causing the war, and pay large amounts of compensation (war reparations) to the allies. Germany also lost territory to many surrounding countries, had its military forces severely limited and was stripped of its overseas and African colonies. Representatives of the new German government (Weimar Republic) were forced by the victors to sign the treaty; otherwise fighting was threatened to begin anew. Germany's foreign minister, Hermann Mller, undersigned it on June 28, 1919. The treaty was ratified by the League of Nations on January 10, 1920. In Germany, the treaty caused a shock - often referred to as a trauma or anti-Versailles-complex - which eventually contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933 and Adolf Hitler's rise to power.9 The political climate in Germany then became tremendously unstable. The writings of Trotsky and Lenin reveal the efforts that the 'communist international' was gaining grounds in Germany. Many thought that Germany was the next country to go communist. In this climate, suddenly, small nationalist folk parties started to spring up. All of them had similar agendas on their platform: Democracy had to go to get some law and order back again. These parties claimed that it was not that Germany lost World War I; rather, the boys on the front lines had the rug pulled out from under their feet.10 Economic circumstances Damaged by World War I, the German state was already in bad shape economically before the outbreak of Depression in the 1920's. Reparations demands further weakened the country's infrastructure which led to inflation and unemployment. The democratic institutions artificially established by the Allies and a feeling of global alienation as a result of a guilt clause and land seizures in the Treaty of Versailles exacerbated social turmoil and left Germany looking for someone to blame.11 One of the conditions was that Germany had to pay $23 billion in war reparations. This was a fraction of the actual damage, which totaled more than $200 billion. However, considering that Germany was $100 billion in debt at the end of the war with its resources mortgaged for the next 20 years, it was an impossible demand and it broke the economy. As a result, Germany went into hyperinflation, unemployment soared out of control, and the country went wild with rival factions fighting in the streets.12 The Weimar Republic, a weak democracy, never effectively governed Germany and therefore was not much of a match for the Nazi party when it gained power.13 Social circumstances Socially, three factors could have attributed to the holocaust. These are the consistent anti-Semitism sentiments, racism, and the rise of Nazism. Anti-Semitism Anti-Semitism (alternatively spelled antisemitism) is aggression towards or discrimination against the Jews, which can range from personal hatred to institutionalized brutal persecution. The highly unambiguous ideology of Adolf Hitler's Nazism was the most severe example of the phenomenon. With the rising views of the Jews as a malevolent "race" generated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that the Jews, as a group, were plotting to control or otherwise influence the world.14 The ideas and emotions that lay behind the Holocaust were not new, nor were they uniquely German. The Nazis were the heirs of a centuries-old tradition of Jew-hatred, rooted in religious rivalry and found in all European countries. When the Nazis came to carry out their genocidal program, they found allies in all the countries they occupied, including governments that enjoyed substantial public support. Most people drew the line at mass murder, but relatively few could be found to oppose it actively or to extend help to the Jews.15 From the early notorious Russian literary hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published by the Tzar's secret police, a key element of anti-Semitic thought has been that Jews influence or control the world. In a recent incarnation, extremist groups, such as Neo-Nazi parties and Islamist groups claim that the aim of Zionism is global domination; they call this the Zionist conspiracy and use it to support anti-Semitism.16 Anti-Semitism, the new racist version of the old Jew-hatred, viewed the Jews as not simply a religious group but as members of a 'Semitic race', which strove to dominate its 'Aryan' rivals. Among the leading ideologues of this theory were a French aristocrat, the Comte Joseph de Gobineau, and an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Anti-Semitism proved convenient glue for conspiracy theories - since Jews were involved in all sorts of ventures and political movements, they could be accused of manipulating all of them behind the scenes. Thus, Jews were blamed for Communism and capitalism, liberalism, socialism, moral decline, revolutions, wars, plagues and economic crises. As the Jews had once been demonized in medieval Europe, so the new anti-Semites (including many Christians) found new, secular ways of demonizing them.17 This position is associated with fascism and Nazism, though increasingly, it is becoming a tendency within parts of the left as well.18 Anti-Semitism was widespread in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (though its roots go back much further). Adolf Hitler's obsessive brand of racial anti-Semitism was laid out in his 1925 book Mein Kampf, which, though mainly ignored when it was first printed, became a bestseller in Germany once Hitler gained political power. This Anti-Semitism was reflected by Nazi groups such as the Sturmabteilung by songs like "When Jewish blood drips off the blade" and the rallying cry "Juda verrecke" (Perish the Jew).19 The Rise of Racism On April 1, 1933, shortly after Hitler's accession to power, the Nazis, led mainly by Julius Streicher, and the Sturmabteilung, planned a one-day boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses in Germany. A series of progressively more brutal racist laws were soon passed in rapid sequence. Under the "Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service", passed by the Reichstag on April 7, 1933, all Jewish civil servants at the Reich, Lnder, and municipal levels of government were immediately dismissed from their duties. This was followed by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which prohibits marriage between any Jew and non-Jew, and stripped all Jews of German citizenships (their official title became "subject of the state") and of their basic civil rights, e.g., to vote.20 The classification of the population into "persons of German kindred blood" and Jews (further subdivided into full Jews, half-Jews even quarter-Jews) was based on pseudo-scientific, racialist considerations and bodily features. In practice, adherence to Judaism and Jewish descent, in case of baptized Jews verified from church records, played an important factor. In 1936, Jews were banned from all professional jobs, effectively preventing them exerting any influence in education, politics, higher education and industry. On 15 November of 1938, Jewish children were prohibited from going to normal schools. By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies either had collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi-German government.21 Racial anti-Semitism reached its most horrific manifestation in the Holocaust during World War II, in which millions European Jews, including their children, were scientifically annihilated.22 The Rise of Nazism Nazism was the ideology held by the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, commonly called NSDAP or the Nazi Party), which was led by its "Fhrer", Adolf Hitler. The word Nazism is most often used in connection with the dictatorship of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 (the "Third Reich"), and it is derived from the term National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus, often abbreviated NS). Supporters of Nazism believed that the Aryan race was more superior to other races, and they promoted Germanic racial superiority and a tough, centrally governed state.23 According to the Nazi ideologists, the Aryan was a superior race that built a civilization that ruled the world 10 thousand years ago. This alleged civilization declined because the Aryan mixed with the inferior races but it left traces of their civilization in Central America , South America, Ancient Egypt and even Tibet. Since then the word has also been used by various European and German nationalist and racist movements, particularly in the ideology of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi), to refer to a supposed "master race" claimed to consist of those of Northern European descent.24 Hitler's Nazi theory teaches that non-Slavic white peoples of Scandinavian and Teutonic descent make up the Aryan race, which is a master race, superior to all other races, and which founded and gave knowledge to all of the greatest civilizations of the ancient Central Asia and the Mediterranean. Alfred Rosenberg's racial philosophy wholly embraced the Aryan Invasion Theory, which traced Aryan peoples in ancient Iran invading the Indus Valley Civilization of India, and carrying with them great knowledge and science that had been preserved from the antediluvian world. This "antediluvian world" referred to Thule, the theoretical pre-Flood/Ice Age origin of the Aryan race, and is often tied to Atlantis theories. Most of the leadership and the founders of the Nazi Party was made of members of "Thule Gesellschaft" (the Thule Society), who romanticized the Aryan race through theology and ritual.25 Nazi ideology was far from a primitive, medieval throwback - it was able to gain the attention of the smart and complicated people. Many high-ranking Nazis had doctoral degrees and early supporters included such eminent people as philosopher Martin Heidegger, theologian Martin Niemoeller, and commander-in-chief of German forces in the First World War, General Erich Ludendorff. Hitler appealed with a powerful vision of a strong, united and 'racially' pure Germany, bolstered by pseudo-scientific ideas that were popular at the time. Nazism was thus an devious and hostile ideology, which always had the prospective for genocide. However, it took some time for an organized killing programmed to evolve.26 Many factors can be attributed to the holocaust. However, Hitler's mental health was the direct cause of the Holocaust. There are circumstantial evidences that could prove that Hitler was afflicted with disease called "General Paresis", causing his paranoia, megalomania, delusions, flight from reality, and all those symptoms that provide the only logical reason for senseless killings. In Vienna Hitler adapted Social Darwinism and the brutal outlook on life, caught the bacillus of anti-Semitism, and were infected with syphilis. Those three elements shaped his personality. His repressed sexuality found an outlet in anti-Semitism that became the focal point of personality. Syphilis developed into general paresis that caused his paranoia, detachment from reality, delusions, blurring the moral restrains. Social Darwinism induced him to seek solutions to his inner conflicts in limitless brutality and senseless killing. The annihilation of Jews became the most important aim in Hitler's life, more important that the winning the war, and the conquest of Europe. Even if we don't accept the circumstantial evidence of the of Hitler's general paresis, all symptoms of extensive paranoia, delusions, megalomania, brutality indicate a mental health problem that abundantly explains the irrationality and absurdity of the Holocaust.27 Endnotes Read More