THE HOLOCAUST
The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s premediated, or structured, state-sponsored subjection and mechanistic murder of neary six million European Jews and at least five million prisoners of war, homosexuals, and other victims. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin. It means “burnt offering.”
prisoners in a concentration camp.
After the death of German president Paul von Hindenburg in 1938, Hitler the then German chancellor assumed power as an absolute ruler by uniting the chancellorship and the presidency. Hitler began an orderly movement to confiscate Jews properties, their jobs in civil service, military, academia and the judiciary were given to non-Jews. Synagogues were degraded and scorched. Jewish businesses were disregarded or abandoned. Laws were passed which prohibited Jews from marrying non-Jews, their citizenship striped off and were denied their political rights.
Hitler hatred for the Jews can be traced back in viena. As a young man he aspired to be a painter, he even applied for admission in the academy of arts but his drawing was so lowly regarded that he was not allowed to take the test. He was convinced that failure in painting was only due to the fact that trade in works of art was in Jewish hands.” One can only guess at the “personal thing” which Hitler claimed motivated his hatred of all things Jewish: perhaps an art dealer or pawnshop operator; perhaps an official at the Academy of Art; perhaps some combination of these things; or even something which lay dormant in the recesses of his mind.
Two of Hitler’s closest friends at the Mannerheim were Jewish—a one-eyed locksmith named Robinson who often helped him and a part-time Hungarian art dealer, Josef Neumann, who took pity on Adolf’s tattered attire and gave him a long frock coat. Hitler “highly esteemed” the latter and once remarked that he was “a very decent man.” He also expressed great regard for the three Jewish art dealers who bought most of his work, and more than once told, his agent, that he preferred doing business with Jews “because only they were willing to take chances.” Hitler himself claimed in Mein Kompf that he had become a dedicated anti-Semite in Vienna upon his discovery that the Jew was the “coldhearted, shameless, and calculating director” of prostitution; that the music and art worlds were controlled by Jews; and, most important, that the Social Democrat press was “directed predominantly by Jews.” More likely these revelations came much later and his prejudice was little more than that of the average Viennese. Almost every gentile in the Austrian capital was an anti-Semite. Organized groups worked tirelessly to spread hate against Jews and young Hitler became an avid reader of the trash literature which filled the newsstands. There is evidence that he was a regular reader of such magazines as Ostara, the creation of Lanz von Liebenfels, a mystical theorist who shared many of Hitler’s own theories and attitudes. The magazine itself was a concoction of the occult and erotic, its editorial policy “the practical application of anthropological research for the purpose of … preserving the European master race from destruction by the maintenance of racial purity.” Liebenfels’ recurring theme was that Aryans must rule the earth by destroying their dark, racially mixed enemies. The latter were damned as inferiors and yet the pages of Ostara abounded in lurid illustrations of Aryan women succumbing to the sexual power and allure of these hairy, apelike creatures. The magazine appealed simultaneously to superiority and fear, featuring such headlines as: ARE YOU BLOND? THEN YOU ARE A CULTURE-CREATOR AND A CULTURE-SUPPORTER! ARE YOU BLOND? IF SO, DANGERS THREATEN
Hitler brother had died of measles and his mother had died of breast cancer. Both were being treated by Jewish physicians. Although Hitler thanked Dr blotch who was treating his mother, this could have also led to his hatred for the Jews. Dr blotch was treating his mother with iodoform which was a very agonizing procedure. Gauze was saturated with iodoform (which had a nauseating, clinging, “hospital” odor) and then folded around the open wound. Not only did the iodoform burn its way into the tissues but once it entered the system the patient could not swallow. Klara’s throat burned and yet she could not quench this burning thirst since all liquids tasted like poison. During this seminal period in Vienna, Hitler wrote a letter to a friend, revealing not only the possible physical effects of such a submerged obsession (“I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of those caftan-wearers”) but a disgust with doctors and a feeling of his own destiny. …It was probably no more than a little stomach colic and I am trying now to cure myself by a diet (fruit and vegetables) since all the physicians are idiots anyway. I find it absolutely ridiculous to speak of a nervous ailment in my case when I am the healthiest of man otherwise. This shows how hitler disregarded Jewish doctors.
It is impossible to know how deep Adolf Hitler’s fear and hatred of Jews ran on the day he was gassed in Belgium. Within a year, however, hatred of all things Jewish would become an overt and dominant force in his life. Hitler was only one among millions of other patriots who learned to fear Jews and Reds (almost as a single entity) during this period. For in these months the country was engulfed by a terrifying series of Marxist-inspired uprisings that threatened to destroy the fabric of German existence. Significantly, the revolutions began while Hitler was suffering the depressing after effects of mustard gas
After two months he was released from the hospital and transferred to a replacement battalion in Munich. He himself forbade publication of what became known as Hitler’s Secret Book and appeared for the first time thirty-two years later. Perhaps he feared it was too philosophically heavy for his adherents, too flimsily transparent for the more sophisticated; perhaps he did not want to reveal the ultimate mass-murder plan that hid behind its terminology. Within the pages also lay clues to his motivation for genocide. They were replete with revealing references: the Jew was a “master of international poisoning and race corruption,” as well as the instigator of the “evil pacifist liquid manure [which] poisons the mentality favoring bold self-preservation.” He referred to the flood of “disease bacilli” now breeding in Russia; and called the crowded working-class districts of Germany (the result of inadequate Lebensraum) “abscesses in the national body” as well as “breeding grounds of blood mixing and bastardization, and of race lowering, thus resulting in those purulent infection centers in which the international Jewish racial-maggots thrive and finally effect further destruction.” This obsession with Jewish poisoning and corruption twice took on a startling personal nature in the book. He referred to the hated Erzberger, who signed the 1918 armistice, as “the bastard son of a servant-girl and a Jewish employer.”
His simmering hatred of Jews had been activated by what he himself had witnessed on the streets of Munich. Everywhere Jews in power: first Eisner, then anarchists like Toller, and finally Russian Reds like Leviné. In Berlin it had been Rosa Luxemburg; in Budapest Béla Kun, in Moscow Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. The conspiracy Hitler had previously suspected was turning into reality. Before embarking on their duties, he and his fellow political agent.
In the German army desertions multiplied. Everywhere there was talk of mutiny and revolt, and when the British launched a surprise attack near Amiens in early August the German lines caved in practically without resistance. The Kaiser’s men surrendered in masse at times to a single enemy infantryman. Retreating men shouted to reinforcements coming up to the front, “Strikebreakers!” Yet it was not the end. The Germans retreated but the line held. For every defeatist there still were hundreds of soldiers ready to do their duty. But at home faith was fading. There were numerous strikes and everywhere in the cities radical socialists were talking revolution. To stout spirits like Hitler the secure and unmolested home front, its laggards, its profiteers, its malingerers, its traitors, its Jews who had no love or respect for the German Fatherland, had betrayed the fighting front in its gravest hour. In fact, it was Ludendorff who lost his nerve and pressed the civilian government for an armistice. Even at this late hour, the ardent spirits like Hitler were convinced that some solution, if not victory, was possible so long as resistance continued. The front had not broken and was retreating in an orderly fashion. It was these profiteers, these malingerers, these Jews who would bring defeat from within.
Sight also brought Hitler hope and renewed interest in the events of the day. Berlin itself was in a state of virtual siege as the new Chancellor urged the Kaiser to abdicate so that an armistice could be signed. Hitler had heard stories of rebellion throughout Germany but discounted them as rumor until a delegation of Red German sailors burst into his ward early that November in an attempt to convert the patients to the revolution. Hitler’s detestation of Bolshevism was heightened by the fact that three of the leaders were young Jews, none of whom, he was sure, had been at the front. “Now they raised the red rag in the homeland.” Indignation was followed by shock. Hitler took to his bed. “I lay there broken with great pains, although I did not let on how I felt; for it was repugnant to me to cry out at a time when you could feel that the collapse was coming.” A little later, on November 9, a dignified elderly pastor arrived at Pasewalk hospital to confirm news of the uprisings. Revolution had even broken out in Munich.
Hitler used the Jews to gain political mileage. As stated in his book, we cannot bargain with the Jews, only present them with a hard ‘either-or.’ But I was now resolved to become a politician.” And in his role as politician it would be his mission to solve the Jewish question with radically harsh methods—and in the name of God. “Therefore, I am now convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator by fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.” To the growing army of racists in Germany, the pages of Mein Kampf were an inspiration and their author the personification of their struggle against all enemies at home and of Prometheus and Lucifer. Hitler believed that the Jews had occupied Germans living space. He believed that Germany had been robbed of her power factors by three abominations: internationalism, democracy and pacifism. Hitler then linked this evil trinity with racism. According to hitler the Jews were the creators of democracy, pacifism and the interactionism.
By the end of the summer of 1928 Hitler had finally come to the realization that his two most urgent convictions—danger from Jews and Germany’s need for sufficient living space—were entwined. If the Reich failed to acquire essential living space it would perish. If the Jewish menace were not stemmed there could be no struggle for Lebensraum, no culture, and the nation would decay. This, in all likelihood, marked Hitler’s point of no return and was the essence of his Weltanschauung. Now a dual task lay before him: to conquer new living space in the East and to annihilate the Jews. What had seemed to be two separate if parallel courses were a single road. It was as if for months he had been observing the twin mountain peaks from his villa on the Obersalzberg, both of which he wanted to climb— and only now realized that the same trail led to both. He had seen the light. Martin Luther and all the other anti-Semites before Hitler merely talked of eliminating the Jews but with his new blueprint for the future he hoped to materialize their dream—and become Haman II.
Hitler’s loath for the Jews led to cataclysmic corollaries. His slanted world view and chauvinism flagged the way for the Holocaust, a gruesome event that caused the lives of 6 million Jews during World War II. The Holocaust has left an ineffaceable mark on human history and powered an ongoing search for identification of the ancestries of such hatred.
adolf hitler.