Saunders - The Holocaust : History in an Hour
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History in an Hour
The Holocaust is the most documented and infamous genocide in human history. It is the name given to the murder of an estimated 6 million Jews in Europe under the Nazi regime, the vast majority of whom were systematically exterminated during the Second World War. Anti-Semitism was by no means a new phenomenon in Germany or, indeed, in wider Europe but when the Nazis came to power in 1933, discrimination against the Jewish people gained an unprecedented, deadly momentum.
Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis during the Holocaust era: as the 1930s progressed and bigoted legislation against the Jewish population gradually developed into physical violence, so too did such persecution extend to other minority groups in German society, including Romani, homosexuals, Jehovahs Witnesses, Communists, Slavs and people with physical and mental disabilities. Hundreds of thousands of people from these groups, which in Nazi eyes threatened the purity of the German race, were murdered or perished in camps alongside Jewish prisoners.
How and why did a cultured European nation allow this methodical destruction of millions of lives? From the early roots of anti-Semitism to the inhumane horror of death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, this, in an hour, is the story of the Holocaust.
Since the first millennium, the Jews of Europe had faced periods of intense persecution. This was partly because they were widely considered responsible for the death of Jesus Christ in 33 CE and partly because they fulfilled moneylending roles in society, a practice known as usury. Early anti-Semitism manifested itself in property confiscation, expulsion and outright violence.
Martin Luthers 1543 treatise On the Jews and their Lies
Jews were massacred on at least two occasions in thirteenth-century England, while under the Spanish Inquisition thousands were forced to convert to Christianity or to leave the country. Martin Luther, whose rhetoric fuelled the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, developed strong anti-Semitic leanings and wrote an influential treatise titled On the Jews and Their Lies. This treatise advocated, among other measures, slave labour for the Jews and the destruction of their synagogues. Luthers sentiments were instrumental in laying the basis for anti-Semitism in Germany for the next 400 years.
Following the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century, Jews began to enjoy greater levels of tolerance in French-governed societies, but were still marginalized in much of Europe, particularly Russia. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, antagonism towards Russian Jews reached new levels as pogroms (organized persecutory actions) broke out with increasing frequency. Attacks on Jews were encouraged by the tsar and in 1903, fifty people were killed in a sustained outbreak of violence in Kishinev. Two years later The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in Russia. This fictional work incited anti-Semitic hatred, claiming there was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination.
Germany became a unified nation in 1871 and less than 1 per cent of the newly united population was Jewish. Anti-Semitism was still a tangible force, though since Luthers era its focus had shifted steadily from religion to race. The views of prevalent European philosophers, who wrote about racial inequality in the nineteenth century, were adopted by many Germans, who defined their own race in linguistic and cultural terms. Jews allegedly did not share these traits and were thus deemed alien and subordinate. It was this concentration on the supposed racial inferiority of the Jews that would develop further and culminate in the atrocities of the 1940s.
Although anti-Semitism was, to an extent, ingrained in the consciousness of many gentile Germans, by the turn of the twentieth century a large proportion of the Jews living in Germany were nevertheless fully assimilated into society. Across the nation, Jewish philosophers, composers and artists had long been at the forefront of a flourishing cultural scene.
For many Jewish families, Germany had been their homeland for generations, and regular attendance at synagogue and maintaining religious traditions did not compromise their sense of German identity. Indeed, the majority of German Jews were not strictly Orthodox, instead practising a more liberal Judaism that did not necessitate keeping a strictly kosher household or having a fluent command of Hebrew.
However, nationalism was a thriving sentiment in the newly formed Germany and by 1908, Jews were banned from the Pan-German League. As a nationalist organization that supported the idea of a German empire, this exclusion demonstrated that neither Orthodox nor liberal Jews were considered racially equal to ethnic Germans. As in Russia, explicit expressions against the Jewish population were rising in Germany.
That many Jews still considered themselves German and integrated in spite of such prejudices is demonstrated by the fact that 100,000 Jews served the Fatherland between 1914 and 1918, with 12,000 dying for their country during the conflict. In the years following the First World War, these statistics were often conveniently forgotten by right-wing nationalists.
On 11 November 1918, an armistice brought the First World War to a close. In the aftermath of the conflict Germany plunged into an economic depression, partly due to the unfavourable terms of the Versailles peace treaty. Among many politically right-wing Germans, a rumour was propagated that Jews and Bolsheviks were to blame for the loss of the war. In February 1920, the German Workers Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or DAP), which would later become the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP), drew up a programme that included a declaration that Jews should not be citizens of Germany. Among the men who drafted this manifesto was Adolf Hitler.
Hitler, an Austrian by birth, had fought for Germany in the First World War and was bitterly disappointed when his beloved nation did not emerge victorious. His political views verged on the radical and he was a firm believer in the Dolchstosslegende; the stab-in-the-back legend that the Jewish population had somehow betrayed the Fatherland in the closing days of the war. He became leader of the NSDAP in 1921.
While in prison in 1924, following a failed attempt to overthrow the government, Hitler began writing Mein Kampf. This autobiographical work, first published in 1925, showcased his obsession with racial purity and outlined his virulent anti-Semitism, with Jews referred to throughout the text in derogatory terms such as vermin and parasites. Whether this was a blueprint for the mass exterminations that took place in the 1940s is debatable, but Hitlers stance on the Jews was clear: he believed their presence posed a threat to Germany and was a problem to be solved by radical means.
As the 1920s progressed, Germany slowly began to climb out of the economic depression that had engulfed the nation in the aftermath of the First World War, aided by short-term loans from America. The Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929, however, rendered Germany economically unstable once again, as America halted its financial assistance.
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