Research on the Holocaust

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and Germany’s unadulterated hatred toward the Jewish people is beyond compare. One must wonder what could cause one man (Hitler), and an entire country (Germany) to hate an entire population of people to the point of genocide. There has been a great deal of speculation on this question, but most agree that whether it was a false perception or delusional, Hitler and Germany needed a scapegoat. Germany needed somebody or in this case, the Jewish population, to blame for the loss of WWI and the economic state that Germany was in after the war. Hitler was the man who drove this obsession and hatred into the people of Germany. The Doctrine of Fascism reveals this was made possible because “Never before have the peoples thirsted for authority, direction, order, as they do now” [8]. Fascism beliefs also fueled the aggressiveness of the people of Germany according to Mussolini’s statement of “I believe that if a people wish to live they should develop a will to power, otherwise they vegetate, live miserably and become prey to a stronger people, in whom this will to power is developed to a higher degree” (Speech to the Senate, May 28, 1926) [8]. It is believed that since the Jewish people were already severely discriminated against, it was very easy for most of Germany to be persuaded by Hitler to share his viewpoint of the Jewish people. This hatred and discrimination against Jewish people is also known as Anti-Semitism. According to Leni Yahil’s “The Holocaust” a summary of Uriel Tal underlying concept of the Nazis’ racist ideology is “ The Jewish character, was not only corrupt and evil; it was the essence of corruption and the principle of evil…”[10]. Furthermore, history has documented a great deal of research that validates this exact false ideology of the Jewish race. In fact, according to Richard Overy, “The German war became a remarkable one-man show in which intuition displaced rational evaluation, and megalomaniac conviction ousted common sense…” [9]. Because Germany was so caught up in Hitler’s concepts of what a “perfect world” would be many doctrines were adopted that laid firm groundwork of exactly how a Jew should be treated. One of the more mentioned pieces in history according to Yahil which was used to discriminate against the Jews was “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This document was actually a fictitious story written by the Russians with the help of the French to make claim that the Jews were trying to rule the world” [10].

In addition to the outward hatred toward the Jewish, Hitler’s obsession with exterminating them was more than alarming. According to David Crew Hitler commanded “If a prisoner attempts to escape, he is to be shot without warning.... If a unit of prisoners’ mutinies or revolts, it is to be shot at by all supervising guards. Warning shots are forbidden on principle"[2]. There was no justice system in place for the Jewish people. They were not accused of any crime, other than being a Jew, and with no trial or any other legal process, they were convicted and sentence to death solely based on the heritage. Hitler continued to instill fear into the very souls of the Jewish community, and continued his reign of terror throughout his entire position of power. In fact, this terror is still symbolized today. According to Crew, “The words "Gestapo" and "Auschwitz" and symbols like the swastika and the lightning bolts of the SS still strike fear into the hearts and minds of people today. In short, Nazism was, is, and may well forever be the defining example of terror and destruction in world history” [2]. Even after Hitler succeeded in exterminating millions in the Jewish community, his obsession and hatred toward the Jew continued. In fact, according to “The War against the Jew,” author Lucy Dawidowicz reveals that this obsession continued up until the day of his death, and Hitler’s last words to the German people were “above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry” [3]. Therefore, evidence proves that Hitler’s hatred against the Jewish people was unsurmountable, and he wanted to ensure that the annihilation of an entire race would continue even after his death.

Lastly, we will discuss the “Final Solution” in Hitler’s master plan. This Final Solution was actually a euphemism used by the Nazi Party to disguise what they actually intended, and that was the total annihilation of all Jews. According to Nora Levin, renowned author and expert on events of the Holocaust “Under the rule of Adolf Hitler, the persecution and segregation of Jews was implemented in stages. After the Nazi party achieved power in Germany in 1933, its state-sponsored racism led to anti-Jewish legislation, economic boycotts, and the violence of the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") [6]. The “Night of the Broken Glass” occurred in November, 1938 and refers to the destruction caused by Nazi storm troopers who looted, burned, and utterly destroyed Jewish business and synagogues within the Reich. It is said to have been started because a German official was executed by a Jewish teenager in Paris. Many Jews died during the altercation, and the day after, thousands were arrested for the crime of being Jewish. The term “Kristallnacht” comes from all the glass that had been broken and littered the streets from the storefronts after the mass destruction occurred. As a direct result, of this event, “ghettos” sprang up across the land, and were used as temporary housing with very poor conditions. The ghettos were a means to keep all Jewish people in a contained area until they could be transported to their ultimate death. According to Berenbaum, “To a ghetto’s inhabitants, it became a way of life, a place to live until what they did not know…once their killers knew what to do with the Jews and how to do it, ghettos became a place to contain the Jews until the mechanisms of the “Final Solution” could be put in place”[2]. More documented evidence of the Final Solution is found in letters by Hugo Höppenerner revealing “the most humane solution might not be to finish off those of the Jews who are not employable by means of some quick-working device… Jewish women, from whom one could still expect children, should be sterilized so that the Jewish problem may actually be solved completely with this generation” [5]. Hitler wanted to make sure that his solution to Jewry was the last that would be needed. To be more concise, Hitler wanted to make sure that not one Jew survived to go on to repopulate the Jewish people.

In addition to the ghettos, concentration camps were also devised as a way to keep Jews detained.