Nazi Essay, Research Paper
Nazism is known for the crimes of the Holocaust but I believe that contempt for humanity is the most enduring and poisonous legacy. The catastrophic violence off World War I and the subsequent economic distress spawned the movements of the despair — Communism and Fascism. Both movements are based on contempt for the average man. Communism assumed that man is a consuming creature, without spiritual needs. Nazism, assumed that man is like an animal, subject to Darwin’s laws of survival of the fittest, and guided by the herd instinct. Both movements robbed man of his human dignity and the divine spark. The notion that one leader is embodied with supernatural wisdom and power, can rule without common sense, and is based on the contempt for the average man.
Holocaust and contempt for humanity. A very common question that many people ask is what made the Holocaust possible? Adolf Hitler flooded Germany with slave laborers and converted Germany into one big concentration camp. The air was poisoned with suspicion, fear and indifference. Similarly, Hitler had a contempt for the victims and for the bystanders Nations. And in order to prevent another holocaust in the future, we must fully understand what led to this horrifying destruction in all of man-kind. In this essay, I will attempt to identify the role of bystanders and the aftermath of being a bystander in a time of crisis, when so many people cried for help.
The Germans conducted the war against the Jews with military precision, using an array of weapons like starvation, deliberate cruelty, pervasive terror, dehumanization. Extensive psychological pressure and deception were used to demoralize the victims, to kill their will to live and change them into an amorphous mass, easily pushed into the gas chambers. In the Warsaw Ghetto, for example, volunteers for the “resettlement” were offered 5 kilo of bread and one kilo of sugar, and people were lining up to get into the death trains. The war against the Jews was very successful. In Poland alone about 98% of the Jewish population was executed. Despite their military might and organizational skills, the Germans needed help from local population. The thorough liquidation of the Jewry, killing of millions of people without resistance and disturbances, required strict secrecy. Secrecy was required to keep the German population uninformed about the insane, criminal activities and it was also imperative not to alert the victims about their impending doom. In addition the Germans required help in identifying, isolating and demoralizing of the Jews. Secrecy was of the utmost importance, because when in 1939, Hitler started to gas the retarded Germans, he was stopped by the protests of the population and denunciations by the clergy. The Germans constituted Hitler’s power base, and there was always a danger that they might raise their voices in defense of their Jewish compatriots. To keep a tight lid, Rheinhard Heydrich invented a new language of euphemisms: mass murder , called Final Solution, killing – liquidation, people – pieces, pogroms – resettlement, gassing – processing, etc. In addition to maintaining the secrecy, the Germans needed the help of the local population in identifying, isolating and humiliating the Jews. Runaway Jews had to be identified on Aryan papers, flushed out from the bunkers, or caught in the forests. It is sad, but in the war against the Jews, the Germans got all the help they needed. Hitler was he
It is tragic, that for the satisfaction of the whim of one man, a whole nation was crucified and the world, conditioned by two thousand years of anti-Semitism, looked on in silence, indifferent. Nothing was done to stop the killings.