Origin of the Holocaust in Germany
The search for German cultural identity began march toward genocide
The problem of why the Holocaust happened has generated more debate and controversy than any other event in history. The definitive answer has remained elusive.
What can be known are the mindset of the time and the chronology of events that led German anti-Semitism to its culmination in the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht. The further abomination of systematic genocide is another matter entirely. Anti-Semitism has existed in various forms for many centuries, but the unique German brand that developed in the early part of the 20th century, particularly during the years of the Weimar Republic, was of a different mind.
Prior to the mid-nineteenth century the Jew was seen by the German as merely an outsider. Persecution took the form of limiting the economic, social and political activities in which Jews could participate. In the century before German unification in 1871, this “traditional” anti-Semitism began to undergo a transformation initiated by a rapidly growing “Volkish” ideology riding the rising tide of national consciousness. Within a disunited Germany many people longed for ties that would bind them together, the idea of the German Volk (pronounced with an “f”) did just that.
The word Volk, which in its simplest translation means “the people,” is not quite adequate in this context. The Volk became an eternal, unchanging ideal, which encompassed the whole of the German people. One of the early proponents of this ideal was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who saw the eighteenth-century German as living in an artificial reality; an industrialized, increasingly urban, structured society.
The concept of the Volk stood in contrast to the urban creation. Herder and others longed for a return to the true Volkish life, a return to the Medieval, agrarian past. They saw in the Volk moral values such as honesty and uprightness. To them, all those “Volkish Ideals” needed to become common in Germany. This view of morality and society accompanied Volkish thought throughout the 19th and early-20th centuries.
The Jew stood outside the metaphysical entity of the German Volk-soul. To Volkish proponents, the Jew was at once materialistic, urban, cosmopolitan, and rigidly intellectual, all in direct opposition to the Volk. They were, in short, a threat to German society. The concept of Verjudung, the Jewification of culture, gained popularity in Germany because it expressed the fears of many intellectuals of emancipation and the breakdown of the legal safeguards that had kept Jews and non-Jews separate.
The beginnings of a march toward Holocaust had thus been established. Even with the approaching of the 20th century, not even the staunchest of Volkish ideologues could have envisioned that a Holocaust Memorial Museum would stand as a reminder of the millions who died at the hands of their successors.
Read the next article in the series, Propaganda, Fear Lead to Holocaust.
