Why The Jews Essay Research Paper Why

The second question is harder to answer. While Hitler’s hatred was the motivating factor of the Holocaust, we are not sure why it was allowed to progress to the extermination of the Jews and the others that Hitler hated. Hitler was helped in his planning of the Holocaust by the fact that antisemitism was acceptable in Germany and few spoke out against it, but that is not a complete answer. We must look instead to the fact that the Nazi philosophy permeated all aspects of life in Nazi Germany until there was no one left to protest the Holocaust.

At the Nuremberg Trial, where the surviving leaders of the Nazi party were tried for their crimes, two of witnesses were asked whether the Holocaust was an inevitable result of Nazi philosophy. Otto Ohlendorf, an SS officer who commanded a group which murdered Jews, thought that the Holocaust was not a necessary result of Nazi philosophy. A few days later Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a three-star general in the SS who had fought in the invasion of the Soviet Union, disagreed. He stated: “If for years, for decades, a doctrine is preached to the effect that the Slav race is an inferior race, that the Jews are not even human beings, then an explosion of this sort is inevitable.”

At The Holocaust History Project, we believe that both the horrors of the Holocaust and the reason it was directed at the Jews were the direct result of Hitler’s antisemitism. We believe that the Holocaust stands as a warning of what can happen when leaders of a country are motivated by hate, and use that hate to supply simplistic answers to the problems of their country.