Introduction
The Holocaust, a Greek work, meaning 'killed by fire', refers to the systematic mass persecution and genocide of the Jews executed by the Nazi Party under the leadership of Adolf Hitler throughout Germany and German occupied territories across Europe. Jews were not the only victims of the holocaust, which claimed the lives of millions other including disabled people, gypsies, homosexuals and the war prisoners. Infamous for bringing the Jewish race near extermination, the holocaust accounts for the loss of the lives of "eleven million innocent victims" in total, including about 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jewish Nazi victims. The mastermind behind the execution of the holocaust was Adolf Hitler, the notorious warmonger chancellor of Germany, who changed the direction of the religious anti-Semitism towards racial and ethnic anti-Semitism, manipulating the mass sentiments against the Jews in order to satisfy his diabolical desire for mass slaughter. Very meticulously and systematically, Hitler carried out the execution of the holocaust, maintaining as much secrecy as possible. Given the fact that the current world is so well-connected with information readily available at the tip of one's finger over the internet, it just makes us wonder at times how was it possible for the holocaust to take place without causing a stir. The holocaust was, indeed, made possible because of several reasons, including Hitler's exploitation of the anti-Semitic mass sentiments, poor wartime conditions and the Great Depression, and anti-Jewish policies and the strategic execution of the extermination programs.
Anti-Semitism and Hitler’s Exploitation of Mass Sentiments
The holocaust was made possible because of the feelings of anti-Semitism existing in Germany and Europe over several centuries. It is erroneously believed that anti-Semitism was an invention of Hitler in Germany. The anti-Semitic sentiments were rather present in Germany long before the appearance of Hitler in the political arena. The Jews were always accused for the death of Jesus Christ by the Christians. In the 19th century, anti-Semitic ideas were rife in Germany. In the mid-19th century, German journalists and nationalists often accused the Jews of creating trade slumps and recessions. Despite the presence of anti-Semitic feelings in Germany, it was not an anti-Semitic country as the feelings of anti-Semitism were restricted to a local level serving the interests of a handful of social groups. The first signs of anti-Semitic feelings taking the shape of a national phenomenon appeared during the First World War.
The first sign took place in the politics in which a right-wing anti-Semitic party known as the German Fatherland came into existence during the World War I. This party formed by the union of various anti-Semitic, conservative, and racial forces preached a racial anti-Semitic ideology, and the formation of this party was indicative of the rise of a national level anti-Semitic culture. The anti-Semitic feelings that existed in Germany prior to war on a local level, thus escalated into a national level radical anti-Semitic mass movement. Though more than 100,000 Jews took participation in the First World War on behalf of the German militia, they were still blamed for the defeat of Germany in the WWI. Many Germans cherished the belief that had not the Marxists and Jews betrayed Germany by signing the November 1918 armistice, Germany could have won a victory in the WWI. This feeling that the Jews had undermined the war efforts and caused the defeat of Germany in the WWI fuelled the growth of anti-Semitic feelings further, contributing to the rise of many radical nationalist groups and leaders like Hitler.
Though the racial hatreds against the Jews thrived after the WWI, the anti-Semitic feelings harbored by the radical political groups of the Weimar era were, however, in check. The most hardline and fundamentalist anti-Jewish people like those belonging to the DNVP or the German National People’s Party were always kept outside the ruling parties of Germany. However, as the influence of Hitler intensified in Germany, these radical bigots entered the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) or the Nazi Party, but Hitler very tactfully controlled the activities of these fanatical anti-Semites in the early years of the formation of the Nazi Party as he did not want to draw negative publicity or invite problem from the influential Jewish business houses because NSDAP was a small association at that time. Hitler's objective was to eliminate the Jews permanently from the soil of Germany and not merely beaten by the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. He did not want the Nazi anti-Semitism led by momentary emotions and fickle. He wanted it to be organized and systematic in its execution.
Immediately after Hitler rose to power in 1933, he initiated the organized legal campaign against the German Jews vehemently. He made use of the anti-Semitic feelings to provoke the common mass of Germany against the Jews. At that time, many Jews were quite rich and influential in Germany controlling the business section. Though only 1% population of Germany was Jewish during the period between 1871 and 1933, they were overrepresented in private and public service, business, cinema, theatres, press, and commerce. Their presence in the private banking sector in Berlin was especially noticeable. In 1923, Berlin had 150 private banks that were Jewish as opposed to 11 private non-Jewish banks. 41% of iron and scrap irons firms and 57% of other metal businesses were owned by the Jews. They were very active in the stock market. In 1928, in Berlin, 80% of the leading members of the Berlin stock exchange were Jewish. In Germany, overall 50% of the theatre directors were Jewish, and the same was 80% in Berlin. As per the estimation, the per capita income of the Jewish population in Berlin in 1929 was twice that of the non-Jewish other Berlin residents. 25% of the medical and law students in Berlin were Jewish, and a quarter of instructors and professors at German universities were Jewish. In comparison, the conditions of the native Germans were pathetic.
The hyper-inflation that prevailed in Germany during that period took its toll on the native Germans who suffered from the throes of unemployment and poverty. Hitler took a great advantage of this situation to spread the propaganda of anti-Semitism. He began projecting the Jews as a race inferior to the Aryan Germans. He bought the opinions of the fellow Germans in his favor by propagating that Germans being pure bred Aryans were the ones deserving of wealth and power and not the Jews. Within no time, the Jews were stripped of all their citizenship rights as they were entitled to being German citizens. Hitler portrayed the Jews as the main culprits of the then poor economic situation of Germany labelling them as greedy and scheming. They were labelled as child molesters and rapists. A falsified picture was drawn of the Jewish businessmen who were projected as being unscrupulous and untrustworthy selling counterfeit products to the Germans in order to make quick profit. Jewish artists, singers, producers, and theatre owners were portrayed as saboteurs plotting to sabotage the Christian and moral values of the Aryan Germans. Jewish bankers and financiers were projected as extortionists trying to steal the hard-earned money of the Germans in order to impede German prosperity.
With the Nazis keeping the flow of information, press and propaganda under its manipulation, anti-Semitic campaign grew stronger than ever before. The Jews were blamed for any anti-social activity that occurred in the German soil such as rape, murder, theft, begging, prostitution, street violence, pollution, selling of alcohol or illegal drugs, and every imaginable and unimaginable crime. In 1923, one of the hardline advocates of anti-Semitism, Julius Streicher started a weekly journal named Der Sturmer, which featured anti-Jewish cartoons, fabricated stories of Jewish crimes, conspiracies and conduct. He also published books for children, filled with shocking anti-Semitic stories. One of such books popular among children was Der Giftpilz or 'The Toadstool' that warned and brainwashed young minds against the Jews by portraying the latter as a poisonous breed. After the Nazis came into power, this book was included in the syllabi in German schools and was taught as a way to recognize the Jews.
Thus, Hitler was able to generate a mass hatred for the Jews by holding rigorous anti-Semitic political campaigns, and this common hatred towards the Jews led to solidarity among the Germans, which ultimately helped Hitler carry out his mission of the Jews extermination.
Hyperinflation and Wartime Conditions
Psychologists believe that decisions taken under non-stressful situations are often logical whereas decisions taken under duress are often emotion driven. Probably, if the political and economic conditions of Germany remained normal, the holocaust would have never happened. But Germany during the 1930s was anything but normal. After the First World War, Germany was made to sign the Treaty of Versailles according to the terms of which Germany was to bear the responsibility of Germany and the allied powers for causing all the havoc during the war. Germany was made to pay financial reparations to the allied forces. As estimated, the total amount of these reparations was 132 billion marks or $31.4 billion USD then. Due to the imposition of such huge financial reparations, the situation turned worse in Germany by 1923. In order to pay the striking workers in Germany, the government made the printing presses print money round the clock, giving rise to an unnatural condition of inflation. The inflation escalated into a state of hyperinflation when the exchange rate, which in 1921 was 75 marks to the dollar, became 5 trillion marks to the dollar. The condition of the German common people reduced to a state of absolute poverty.
With a larger population of Germany being without jobs, Germany was in a state of complete chaos. The Great Depression, which engulfed the world at that time, aggravated the conditions of the Germans further. It was a time when Germany was in need of a leader who could wiggle the country out of its misery. Germans were not convinced that the left wing or the democratic leaders could bring them change. They wanted a leader who could take the country to the top again quickly. When Great Depression and high unemployment rates put the common people in Germany through immense suffering, Hitler appeared as a messiah, who with his strong rightist ideology of “Aryanization” of Germany and a strong agenda against the Jews, bred hope in their minds for a brighter future. The common people in Germany were not in a situation to judge the right or wrong. The hyper-inflation, the national shame and lost pride caused by the defeat of Germany in the WWI, massive unemployment, the astronomical amount to be paid as reparations and a growing sense of insecurity made the Germans blind in their judgment. They got hypnotized by the dream Hitler showed them of creating a Germany that would rule the world. They thought that if the Jews were taken out of the equation, they would become the superior race once again.
The extermination of the Jews on a mass scale began after the World War II started. The WWII made it easier for Hitler to isolate the Jews in the concentration camps on the pretext of war conditions and kill them in total secrecy. Since during the war, the main focus of the world was on the war and less on the internal affairs of a country, Hitler utilized the situation to his advantage by slaughtering millions of Jews without catching notice. The Jews were mainly killed in the German concentration camps and gas chambers, but to the outside world, they were showcased as either killed or lost during the war. It would have been impossible for Hitler to slaughter 6 million Jews in absolute secrecy without the WWII.
Anti-Jewish Policy and Strategic Execution
Hitler carried out the persecution of the Jews in an organized manner. Within less than three months after Hitler came to power, the atrocities against the Jews started. During the 6 years of the WWII, more than 400 different laws were passed to isolate, deprive and humiliate the Jews. After the anti-Semitic campaigns succeeded, Hitler tried to force the Jews out of the country by forced emigration between 1933 and 1939. Almost two third of the wealthy and younger Jews left Germany and Austria before the WWII started. However, as more and more countries began to restrict the process of Jewish immigration, the Nazis in order to get rid of the Jews in Germany decided to exterminate them. One after another, several regulations were imposed on the Jews preventing them from doing business or working anywhere in Germany. Their citizenship rights were annulled, and their personal properties were expropriated. According to the Nazi, the Jewish property was ‘property stolen from the people’, and hence, the Nazi perpetrators did not feel that their participation in the acts of expropriation as robbery or plunder, rather it was a material redress for the sufferings of the Germans prior to 1933. A banning was imposed on the Jews from marrying a non-Jew or Aryan Germans for the protection of the purity of Aryan blood. On 9th and 10th November in 1938, a nationwide program was launched. The Jewish shops were plundered indiscriminately and destroyed, around 1,000 synagogues were vandalized, and 30,000 Jews were apprehended and sent to concentration camps. The SS and the police force became powerful under the authority of the infamous Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler. Germany's successful invasion of Poland in 1930 resulted in more than 2.5 million Jews, who were residents of Poland, coming under the dominance of the Germans.
Conclusion
The holocaust, which refers to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazi party under the rulership of Hitler, was made possible because of a number of factors. The anti-Semitic feelings existed in Germany long before Hitler came into existence. Hitler, however, added fuel to the anti-Semitic sentiments of the common Germans and took it to a national level of hatred and discrimination against the Jews by holding them responsible for the German miseries. The defeat of Germany in the WWI brought a national shame, and it was believed by many Germans that the Jews had betrayed the country by signing the November 1918 armistice. This intensified the anti-Semitic sentiments of the Germans further. Besides, due to the economic reparations imposed on the country, a hyperinflation ensued as a result of which the economic condition of the common Germans reduced to abject poverty. In comparison with the common Germans, most of the Jews, who formed only 1% population of Germany, were quite rich and influential. Hitler utilized the poor economic condition and mass unemployment problems to strengthen his campaign against the Jews and succeeded to buy their solidarity in the mission of the Jews removal from the country. Within less than three months after he came to power, he introduced a deluge of anti-Jewish laws, more than 400 in total, in a bid to eradicate the very existence of the Jewish people. The wartime conditions when the main focus of the world was on the war also made it possible for Hitler to carry out the holocaust in secrecy. Thus, Hitler's anti-Semitic propaganda, wartime conditions, poor economic conditions of Germany, and an organized execution of the extermination programs made the holocaust possible.
Annotated Bibliography
Stone, Dan (Editor). The Historiography of the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. Web. 1 Oct 2014 <http://www.e-reading.me/bookreader.php/135878/The_Historiography_of_Holocaust.pdf>. This book edited by Dan Stone is a collection of essays written by some of the leading scholars like Tony Kushner, Martin Dean, Jeremy Noakes, and Christopher Browning. This book discusses a variety of aspects of the Holocaust, starting from Nazi Anti-Semitism to Expropriation and Expulsion, Ghettoization, Hitler and the Third Reich, and War and the Holocaust. I have used this book as a primary resource as much of the information used for writing my essay has been taken from here. With the help of this book, I have been able to touch upon the nature of anti-Semitism that prevailed in Germany prior to and after the First World War.
Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Print. The World Must Know authored by Michael Berenbaum gives a chilling account of the human stories relating to the Holocaust. Starting from the stories of the families who got sudden orders to reach the train stations to resettle in the East, this book documents the stories of those Nazi officers who had the power to determine who would live and who would die and of common citizens who at the risk of their lives hid Jewish refugees in their homes. This book has helped me elaborate on how the Holocaust was carried out in a systematic manner by imposing a number of rules and regulations on the Jews, depriving them of the citizenship rights, sending them to the ghettos and then to the concentration camps.
Grady, Tim. The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory. Liverpool University Press. 2011. Print. In this book, the author Tim Grady revives the public memory of those 100,000 German Jews who fought for their country in the First World War. Though a series of literature have been written about the First World War and the Holocaust, no significant mention has ever been done to capture the experience of the Jews soldiers who put their lives on the line at the front. This book is a tribute to those war veterans whose sacrifices were subsumed under the much greater catastrophe that the Holocaust brought about. In my paper, this book has helped me how, despite 100,000 German Jews participating in the WWI for Germany, the Jews as a race was considered a traitor for signing the November 1918 armistice.
Gordon, Sarah Ann. Hitler, Germans, and the Jewish Question. Princeton University Press. 1984. Print. Written by Sarah Ann Gordon, this book investigates the background of one of the most inexplicable evils of the 20th century, the Holocaust, and explores how the Germans reacted to this premeditated mass murder. She discusses how the extreme form of anti-Semitism led to the rise of the Nazis and also gives an account of that small section of brave heart Germans who opposed the anti-Semitic ideas propagated by the Nazis. For my essay, this book has helped me give an account of the overrepresentation of the Jews in all the sectors of Germany in the period between 1871 and 1933.
Koestler, Arthur, Silone, Ignazio, Wright, Richard, Gide, André, Fischer, Louis, and Spender, Stephen. The God That Failed. Columbia University Press. 2001. Print. The God That Failed is a collection of essays written by six writers about their experiences and sympathy with communism and their subsequent disillusionment with the same. Each of the six writers has narrated how in their quest for the betterment of humanity, they were drawn to communism and how they later renounced the ideology owing to personal revulsion and agony. This book has helped me put together the facts related to hyperinflation in Germany after the WWI.
Boemeke, Manfred F., Feldman, Gerald D. and Gläser, Elisabeth. The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years. Cambridge University Press. 1998. Print. This book on the Treaty of Versailles documents the events that took place from the time the November armistice 1918 was signed to the signing of the peace treaty or the Treaty of Versailles in 1991, which forced the Germans to pay financial reparations to the allied forces for the damage caused by the First World War. It further scrutinizes the actions, motives and the constraints faced by the American, French and English politicians who drafted the peace treaty. It also highlights the German reactions to the peace treaty. This book has helped me highlight the importance of the Treaty of Versailles in the German history as the condition of reparations mentioned in its clause led Germany to an economic downfall, hyperinflation and mass unemployment, which ultimately contributed to the rise of the Nazi and the resultant holocaust of the Jews.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Nazi Propaganda. 20 Jun 2014. Web. 3 Oct 2014 <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005274> One of the primary objectives of the Nazis was to spread the Nazi propaganda in order to indoctrinate the ideals of anti-Semitism, national socialism and anti-Bolshevism in the common Germans. This article published in the USHMM website features in detail about the Nazi propaganda and how the Nazis advocated and spread their ideals by publishing journals, books, and newspapers on the same. This article has helped me give some important details as regards the spreading of anti-Semitic ideas by the Nazis.
Campe, Hilmar Von. How Was It Possible: The Story of a Hitler Youth and a Vital Analysis for Today's Times. Top Executive Media. 2006. Print. Authored by Hilmar Von Campe, who was a German soldier and an active participant in the Holocaust, this book gives an autobiographical account of Hilmar von Campe's life. In this book, he has touched upon how Hitler with his Nazi propaganda brainwashed the minds of the common Germans against the Jews in an organized way and kept them in the dark about the actual events that transpired in the concentration camps. This book has helped me put together the facts as regards how Hitler misled the common Germans against the Jews by holding the latter responsible for every untoward social activity that took place in Germany and by publishing books, journals and newspapers filled with anti-Semitic ideas.
