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The Holocaust was of the most heinous crimes in history. Thousands if not millions of people have tried to explain how it took place.
As countless books and articles have argued the explanation for the Holocaust taking place has to start with Adolf Hitler. It was Adolf Hitler that had an extremely rabid hatred of Jews and had the power as well as the opportunities to launch the final solution of the Jewish Question as the Nazi Party leadership described the Holocaust. Put simply Adolf Hitler made the Holocaust happen because it was what he wanted to do. It was Adolf Hitler who made the Holocaust take place, as only he was able to order the use of mass resources of the German State to carry out mass murder. Hitler may never have given a written command or instruction to start the final solution yet nobody involved in the process doubted that they were carrying out the Fuhrer’s wishes. Nazi Propaganda and Anti-SemitismHitler’s Nazi regime would be the one to take its extreme racial doctrines to the most sickeningly logical extremes, resulting in the deaths of millions of people that were unfortunate in that they did not fit in with the racial traits the Nazis wished to promote above all others. The Nazi regime was intending to produce an untainted race and a German nation, which was to be racially pure, superior above all other countries within Europe itself. The Nazi regime produced a great deal of propaganda to justify its actions to promote racial purity via social, legal, often excessively violent and eventually murderous means. The Second World War and The Onset of the HolocaustThe outbreak of the Second World War meant that the racially based Social Darwinist notions espoused by the Nazi regime in Germany were spread further across Europe, in a similar way to how war had spread the ideas of the French Revolution. The success of Germany’s military campaigns between 1939 and 1942 gave Adolf Hitler the opportunity to radically alter the racial, ethnic, and political shape of the parts of Europe that the Germans managed to occupy. The Second World War provided the Nazi regime with plenty of victims for their genocidal objectives of redrawing the ethnic, racial, and nationalities map of Europe especially in relation to its Jewish populations and the occupied territories in Poland and the Soviet Union. Entire Jewish communities were removed from all over Europe to the concentration camps where the majority of the Holocaust’s minimum of six million victims were murdered as part of Hitler and Himmler’s final solution of the Jewish problem which also included forced labour camps and cruel yet pointless medical experiments. As well as the Holocaust the Nazi also conducted mass extermination of civilian populations in Poland, Czechoslovakia, parts of Yugoslavia, and most brutally in the Soviet Union. Bibliography Bullock A, Hitler and Stalin – Parallel Lives, Harper Collins, (London, 1991) Fulbrook M, The Fontana History of Germany, 1918 –1990 – the Divided Nation, Fontana, (London, 1991) Hawkins M, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought 1860-1945, Natural as model and natural as threat (Cambridge, 1997) Hobsbawm E, Age of Extremes, the Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, (London, 1994) James H, Europe Reborn – A History, 1914 – 2000, Pearson Longman, (Harlow, 2003) Judt T, Post-war – A History of Europe since 1945, Pimlico, (London and New York, 2007) Overy R, The Dictators – Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Penguin, (London, 2005)
The copyright of the article How to Explain the Holocaust in German History is owned by Barry Vale. Permission to republish How to Explain the Holocaust in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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Nov 17, 2008 5:23 PM
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