The Holocaust

The Holocaust

The Holocaust; was an event that is and will be one of the most terrible incidents in human history ever, the mass murder by the German Nazi regime during WWII of more than six million European Jews as well as members of some other groups, including homosexuals and Gypsies. According to Adolf Hitler the Nazi leader, Jews mainly and almost every other race was an inferior race and a threat to German racial purity and community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were constantly mistreated, an event now known as the Holocaust took place during World War Two, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland; Hitler´s “Final solution”

Adolf Hitler was obsessed with “Aryan” the thought of the superiority of the “pure” German race and with the need for “Lebensraum,” territory, for that race to develop. Hitler during World War I served in the German army and like many “anti-Semites” in Germany, blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918. Hitler wrote a book called “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle), in which he forecasted a general European war that would lead to the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany, which he almost achieve himself. On January 20, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the dead of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler proclaimed himself as “Fuhrer,” becoming Germany´s supreme ruler. He was born in Austria in 1889.

Hitler´s worldview where sustained by the desire to achieve racial purity and spatial expansion and starting in 1993 they would become the force driving his domestic and foreign policy. In March 1933 at Dachau , the first official concentration camp opened and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists. The head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS), Heinrich Himmler was in control of Dachau. By July 1933 to show the power of the party symbolic acts took place such as: publicly burning books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners and huge Nazi meetings. At that time more than 27,000 people were in “protective custody” in German concentration camps.

In 1993 only one percent of the German population which equals around 525,000 people were Jews. From 1933 to 1939 the Nazis took away the clients of Jewish lawyers and doctors, dismissed non-Aryans from civil service and eliminate Jewish owned businesses. In November 1938; the “Night of Broken Glass” occurred, when German synagogues were burned and Jewish shops were smashed; more than 100 Jews were killed and thousands arrested. Since 1935 The Nurember Laws were executed, this laws stipulate that anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated half-breeds. From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained, lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

My September 1939 half of Poland had been occupied by the German army. Thousands of Polish Jews were forced from their homes into ghettoes by the German police, which later gave the confiscated proprieties to “pure” Germans. Ghettoes were places surrounded by high walls and barbed wire designated to host captive city-states. These ghettoes were inhuman places where unemployment, poverty, overpopulation and diseases such as typhus were the principal characteristics.

A terrible event that functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust was the “Euthanasia Program”. It begun in the fall of 1939, were Nazi officials selected Germans institutionalized for mental illness or disabilities to be gassed to death, there around 70,000 victims in that year. By the end of WWII more than 275,000 people considered handicapped had been killed because of that program as they were a shame for the “pure” German race.

During 1940 Hitler´s Empire began to expand; conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. The Polish ghettoes received Jews and Gypsies from all over the continent during the invasion. A group called “Einsatzgruppen” murdered more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others while the German invasion of the Soviet Union which started in 1941.

In 1941 Hitler´s top commander sent a message to the chief of the security service of the SS Reinhard Heydrich, saying that a final solution to “the Jewish question” was needed. This lead to the marking with a yellow star to every Jew in German territory

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