The holocaust is one of the most well-documented genocides in history and singlehandedly the most traumatic event for Jewish people in the 20th century. Millions of people were murdered in just under 4 years. Yet, there is much debate on how and why it happened. People question why others allowed it or didn't resist the nazis. It may seem like there is a clear and cut answer to this but there isn't. It's more complicated and deeper than you think. But I can tell you some of the main causes of this are war, collaboration, political instability, antisemitism, propaganda, and societal pressure.
Scholar Doris Bergen said, “There's really, I think, four key phases for thinking about the Holocaust. And the first one is the German phase. Hitler came to power in January 1933. Until September 1939, Germany was not officially at war. Those six years are a very particular phase of development of the Nazi project where a lot of steps were taken inside Germany to isolate German Jews from the rest of the population, to start measures of sterilizing, isolating, and eventually even to start killing, to rearm Germany to prepare for the war of conquest, but also to cover up that rearmament by talking peaceful intentions publicly so that people elsewhere in the world wouldn't be too alarmed”. I also think that this was a very important stage in the holocaust because without Hitler coming to power the holocaust probably would have never happened to begin with. They also had to prepare to pull off what they wanted to so through a span of six years they were able to prepare and get ready to decimate the Jewish population.
In a BBC article “Why did the holocaust happen”?, they put “He introduced anti-septic laws which discriminated against Jewish people living in the areas he controlled. Some of these laws meant that Jewish children could no longer go to school, keep pets or have a bicycle. In one of their paragraphs, he also put in place some laws called the Nürnberg Laws. “One, the Reichsbürgergesetz (German: “Law of the Reich Citizen''), deprived Jews of German citizenship, designating them “subjects of the state.” The other, the Gesetz zum Schutze des Deutschen Blutes und der Deutschen Ehre (“Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour”), usually called simply the Blutschutzgesetz (“Blood Protection Law”), forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and “citizens of German or kindred blood”, said Michael Berenbaum. These laws were put in place to make sure that Jewish people don't repopulate with German people because Hitler wanted a future without Jewish people. If Jewish people have kids with a German person they will have a baby that is Jewish and Hitler didn't want that. He wanted to make sure the future generation wasn't “tarnished” with Jewish blood.
The Holocaust Explained said that “Hitler had a racist worldview. He believed that people could be separated into a hierarchy of different races, where some races were superior and others were inferior. Hitler believed the German race to be the superior race, and called the German race ‘Aryan’”. He also believed that anyone that was disabled as part of the LQBTQ, POC, and anybody who didn't look German should be killed and be inferior to the Germans. He believed that Germany would have a better future if everybody of a different race, sexuality, and disabled people were eliminated.
Antisemitism was one of the prime causes of the holocaust. Antisemitism attacks against Jews didn’t just start in the 1930s. It had been happening since the middle ages but it started becoming more brutal and expansive when Hitler gained power in 1933. Many wonder why Hitler targeted his attacks towards Jews since he is rumored to have Jewish family members and he grew up in Vienna which had a large Jewish population. However, the years he spent in Vienna and his time on the battlefield are crucial to how his ideology formed about Jewish people.
Doris Bergan said, ”I think you could say a second phase, let's say, September 1939 to June 1941. An extremely important phase of taking Nazi violence and expanding it from outside of Germany into Poland, into Western Europe, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and also Norway and Denmark. And there you see an increase in violence, mass violence against subject populations, people with disabilities, ghettoization”. Without expanding to different countries they wouldn't have been able to kill as many Jews as they had. Expanding to different countries was a huge part of their process.
After the first world war, Hitler and many other Germans started blaming Jews for their problems and being even more anti-Semitic. Hitler fought in the war as an infantryman and then as a private in the 16th Bavarian Reserve infantry regiment. He was injured twice and received several medals for his time in the military. He was in the hospital when he received news that Germany had lost the war and like many other Germans he refused the idea that they had lost on the battlefield. Many thought they had only lost because of enemy propaganda.
The holocaust memorial said, “The Holocaust was caused by many factors, including millions of individual decisions made by ordinary people who chose to actively participate in—or at least tolerate—the persecution and murder of their neighbors”. Without the collaboration of millions of other people, the holocaust wouldn’t have happened or been as destructive. Many people saw that they could exploit the murder of Jewish people because they could gain their property, business, and jobs in the nazi regime which gained them power and money.
The holocaust memorial museum said, “Nazi ideas about “race” and the supposed inferiority of Jews were taught in schools, and the government arrested political opponents or members of the press who criticized Hitler or the Nazi Party and put them in jails and concentration camps”. This means there was a lot of pressure to comply with the nazis because you could be killed if you didn’t. When people are in a situation like that where their life is on the line they usually just comply to save their lives as one would do. As mentioned before, propaganda was taught in school. Children are very impressionable, especially at a young age. Many children started to support and listen to the propaganda and many children also had many adults around in their home life so that encouraged the children to believe the ideology too. There was also a group called Hitler Youth which trained 14-18-year-olds to become more active in nazi ideology. They also had to go through physical training to become more strong before they become nazi soldiers. “The Nazis’ ideology rested on several key ideas, such as nationalism, racial superiority, antisemitism, and anti-communism. These ideas were popular in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, as the economic and political situation fluctuated and then, following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, quickly deteriorated”, the holocaust explained.
Propaganda also played a huge part in the Holocaust. The propaganda about Jewish people that the nazis were creating and putting up played a huge role in getting millions of people’s support during the holocaust. The propaganda was everywhere. It was on the radio, in music, in art, theater, films, books, the stuff used to teach schools, and the press. You could not escape it, the propaganda was everywhere. The propaganda would usually say something along the lines of how the Jews were selfish or greedy and how they were just money hungry. They would say how they were unclean, and also how they were the ones that were provoking war. The propaganda would depict the Jews with large noses, usually balding, fat, and visibly unclean.
There was also a lot of societal pressure to support the nazis and their actions because your social life would be gone. Many people didn’t want to be seen talking to someone who openly supported the Jewish people or people who were against the nazi's action ideology because there was a lot of stigma about Jews that the nazis had created like that they were dirty and they were like rats, lice, parasites, greedy and along many other insults used to dehumanize them and make them seem dirty and selfish. Of course, if you openly supported the Jews someone would make it aware to the nazis that you support them and that would result in you being sent to a concentration camp or executed.
Many people ask why the Jews didn't fight back. However, the Jews fought back and showed their acts of resistance through “personal acts ranging from documentation in diaries to the creation of art and poetry; through the organized dissemination of information about German crimes via underground newspapers, pamphlets, and photographs; by organizing revolts and providing aid and assistance through committees, food drives, and soup kitchens in ghettos; through such sacrifices as a rabbi’s courageous commitment to forgo safe passage to remain with those left behind; and through the armed resistance of those called partisans, who established fighting camps but also family camps that were a haven for young warriors as well as the elderly and the very young”, according to facing history and ourselves.
The holocaust happened 76 years ago yet it still continues to affect our society today. Even with so much documented history, there are many people who even deny its existence. This might explain why we still have people in our own country fighting against others of different religions, races, sexual preferences, etc. Only by studying the holocaust and the atrocities committed can we hope not to repeat history.
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The holocaust is one of the most well-documented genocides in history and singlehandedly the most traumatic event for Jewish people in the 20th century. Millions of people were murdered in just under 4 years. Yet, there is much debate on how and why it happened. People question why others allowed it or didn't resist the nazis. It may seem like there is a clear and cut answer to this but there isn't. It's more complicated and deeper than you think. But I can tell you some of the main causes of this are war, collaboration, political instability, antisemitism, propaganda, and societal pressure.
Scholar Doris Bergen said, “There's really, I think, four key phases for thinking about the Holocaust. And the first one is the German phase. Hitler came to power in January 1933. Until September 1939, Germany was not officially at war. Those six years are a very particular phase of development of the Nazi project where a lot of steps were taken inside Germany to isolate German Jews from the rest of the population, to start measures of sterilizing, isolating, and eventually even to start killing, to rearm Germany to prepare for the war of conquest, but also to cover up that rearmament by talking peaceful intentions publicly so that people elsewhere in the world wouldn't be too alarmed”. I also think that this was a very important stage in the holocaust because without Hitler coming to power the holocaust probably would have never happened to begin with. They also had to prepare to pull off what they wanted to so through a span of six years they were able to prepare and get ready to decimate the Jewish population.
In a BBC article “Why did the holocaust happen”?, they put “He introduced anti-septic laws which discriminated against Jewish people living in the areas he controlled. Some of these laws meant that Jewish children could no longer go to school, keep pets or have a bicycle. In one of their paragraphs, he also put in place some laws called the Nürnberg Laws. “One, the Reichsbürgergesetz (German: “Law of the Reich Citizen''), deprived Jews of German citizenship, designating them “subjects of the state.” The other, the Gesetz zum Schutze des Deutschen Blutes und der Deutschen Ehre (“Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour”), usually called simply the Blutschutzgesetz (“Blood Protection Law”), forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and “citizens of German or kindred blood”, said Michael Berenbaum. These laws were put in place to make sure that Jewish people don't repopulate with German people because Hitler wanted a future without Jewish people. If Jewish people have kids with a German person they will have a baby that is Jewish and Hitler didn't want that. He wanted to make sure the future generation wasn't “tarnished” with Jewish blood.
The Holocaust Explained said that “Hitler had a racist worldview. He believed that people could be separated into a hierarchy of different races, where some races were superior and others were inferior. Hitler believed the German race to be the superior race, and called the German race ‘Aryan’”. He also believed that anyone that was disabled as part of the LQBTQ, POC, and anybody who didn't look German should be killed and be inferior to the Germans. He believed that Germany would have a better future if everybody of a different race, sexuality, and disabled people were eliminated.
Antisemitism was one of the prime causes of the holocaust. Antisemitism attacks against Jews didn’t just start in the 1930s. It had been happening since the middle ages but it started becoming more brutal and expansive when Hitler gained power in 1933. Many wonder why Hitler targeted his attacks towards Jews since he is rumored to have Jewish family members and he grew up in Vienna which had a large Jewish population. However, the years he spent in Vienna and his time on the battlefield are crucial to how his ideology formed about Jewish people.
Doris Bergan said, ”I think you could say a second phase, let's say, September 1939 to June 1941. An extremely important phase of taking Nazi violence and expanding it from outside of Germany into Poland, into Western Europe, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and also Norway and Denmark. And there you see an increase in violence, mass violence against subject populations, people with disabilities, ghettoization”. Without expanding to different countries they wouldn't have been able to kill as many Jews as they had. Expanding to different countries was a huge part of their process.
After the first world war, Hitler and many other Germans started blaming Jews for their problems and being even more anti-Semitic. Hitler fought in the war as an infantryman and then as a private in the 16th Bavarian Reserve infantry regiment. He was injured twice and received several medals for his time in the military. He was in the hospital when he received news that Germany had lost the war and like many other Germans he refused the idea that they had lost on the battlefield. Many thought they had only lost because of enemy propaganda.
The holocaust memorial said, “The Holocaust was caused by many factors, including millions of individual decisions made by ordinary people who chose to actively participate in—or at least tolerate—the persecution and murder of their neighbors”. Without the collaboration of millions of other people, the holocaust wouldn’t have happened or been as destructive. Many people saw that they could exploit the murder of Jewish people because they could gain their property, business, and jobs in the nazi regime which gained them power and money.
The holocaust memorial museum said, “Nazi ideas about “race” and the supposed inferiority of Jews were taught in schools, and the government arrested political opponents or members of the press who criticized Hitler or the Nazi Party and put them in jails and concentration camps”. This means there was a lot of pressure to comply with the nazis because you could be killed if you didn’t. When people are in a situation like that where their life is on the line they usually just comply to save their lives as one would do. As mentioned before, propaganda was taught in school. Children are very impressionable, especially at a young age. Many children started to support and listen to the propaganda and many children also had many adults around in their home life so that encouraged the children to believe the ideology too. There was also a group called Hitler Youth which trained 14-18-year-olds to become more active in nazi ideology. They also had to go through physical training to become more strong before they become nazi soldiers. “The Nazis’ ideology rested on several key ideas, such as nationalism, racial superiority, antisemitism, and anti-communism. These ideas were popular in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, as the economic and political situation fluctuated and then, following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, quickly deteriorated”, the holocaust explained.
Propaganda also played a huge part in the Holocaust. The propaganda about Jewish people that the nazis were creating and putting up played a huge role in getting millions of people’s support during the holocaust. The propaganda was everywhere. It was on the radio, in music, in art, theater, films, books, the stuff used to teach schools, and the press. You could not escape it, the propaganda was everywhere. The propaganda would usually say something along the lines of how the Jews were selfish or greedy and how they were just money hungry. They would say how they were unclean, and also how they were the ones that were provoking war. The propaganda would depict the Jews with large noses, usually balding, fat, and visibly unclean.
There was also a lot of societal pressure to support the nazis and their actions because your social life would be gone. Many people didn’t want to be seen talking to someone who openly supported the Jewish people or people who were against the nazis' actions and ideology because there was a lot of stigma about Jews that the nazis had created like that they were dirty and they were like rats, lice, parasites, greedy and along many other insults used to dehumanize them and make them seem dirty and selfish. Of course, if you openly supported the Jews someone would make it aware to the nazis that you support them and that would result in you being sent to a concentration camp or executed.
Many people ask why the Jews didn't fight back. However, the Jews fought back and showed their acts of resistance through “personal acts ranging from documentation in diaries to the creation of art and poetry; through the organized dissemination of information about German crimes via underground newspapers, pamphlets, and photographs; by organizing revolts and providing aid and assistance through committees, food drives, and soup kitchens in ghettos; through such sacrifices as a rabbi’s courageous commitment to forgo safe passage to remain with those left behind; and through the armed resistance of those called partisans, who established fighting camps but also family camps that were a haven for young warriors as well as the elderly and the very young”, according to facing history and ourselves.
The holocaust happened 76 years ago yet it still continues to affect our society today. Even with so much documented history, there are many people who even deny its existence. This might explain why we still have people in our own country fighting against others of different religions, races, sexual preferences, etc. Only by studying the holocaust and the atrocities committed can we hope not to repeat history.
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