Jews In German Cities example essay topic

Hitler's hatred towards the Jews was known as "anti-Semitism". When Hitler came to power in Germany, he preached to his followers that "the Jews are the image of the devil" and he blamed them for all of the problems in the world. When Hitler was 18, he arrived in Vienna hoping to get accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts as he wanted to become an artist. When he was rejected, he blamed the Jews for his setbacks.

Hitler believed that the Germans were the superior race and that job positions and money were wasted on people like the Jews. He despised them and did not want them to be successful in his country. By the time Hitler left Vienna, he was a full-fledged anti-Semite and in his autobiography "Mein Kampf", which he wrote in 1924, he made his hatred of the Jews known. Hitler believed that the Jewish people were the "eternal enemy" and that in order to save the German people; he had to exterminate them. Not only some of the Jews, but all of them.

After World War I, Germany was devastated and the German people had lost all hope. Adolf Hitler gave them faith and he reunited the masses under a common bond of hatred towards the Jews. He blamed them for Germany's loss of World War I. He told the German people that they could have won the first world war if Germany had not been "stabbed in the back" by the Jews and their conspirators. When Hitler established the Nazi Party, he had many followers as people sought hope in him after the war. In his emotional and persuasive speeches, he made his promise to murder the Jewish people of Europe. After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30th 1933, his attack on the Jews commenced.

He preached to his SS troops that "The Jew is a parasite. Wherever he flourishes, the people die... elimination of the Jew from our community is to be regarded as an emergency defense measure". In Germany, hundreds of Jews were murdered and over 35,000 fled. On April 1st 1933, the Nazi boycott of Jewish stores began. Their stores were vandalized and Germans were discouraged from buying anything from a Jew. On May 10th 1933, thousands of books were burnt in the cities throughout Germany.

Anything that had been written by a Jew or by a foreign writer was thrown into the fire. In regards to this event, Heinrich Heine who was a German-Jewish poet from 1797-1856 said "Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people". On August 2nd 1934, after the death of the German president Von Hindenburg, Hitler declared himself the "leader" of Germany and using his powers he made the German military the servant of a criminal regime and fully implicated it in the destruction of the Jews. In 1935, Hitler passed the Nuremburg Laws which took German citizenship away from them, banned marriage and sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews in Germany and forced all Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes or they would be shot.

The Nazi Party began to establish interrogation and torture chambers in basements of regular apartment buildings throughout Berlin. The first concentration camp was opened at Dachau, a suburb of Munich to concentrate "all communist and social democrat officials who cannot be allowed to remain free as they continue to agitate unrest". The Nazis were now in firm control of Germany and violence struck the Jews in German cities. In 1938, riots broke out throughout Germany after a Jew had murdered a German diplomat in Paris. Thousands of Jewish shops were smashed and thousands of Jews were arrested. Nazi propaganda made people believe that the Jews were a threat and that they should be sent to concentration camps or be humiliated and maltreated in public such as forcing them to clean the streets with toothbrushes while being kicked and laughed at by the non-Jews.

Thousands of Jewish shops, synagogues and houses continued to be destroyed and when the Second World War began in 1939, the Nazi Party's anti-Semitism took a murderous turning point. After the invasion of Poland and Russia more Jews came under Nazi control and in 1941, Hitler ordered the annihilation of the entire Jewish population in Europe. The Nazis referred to this program as the "Final Solution" of the "Jewish Problem". In March 1941, Adolf Hitler said that "This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented unmerciful and unrelenting harshness". In July, local anti-Semites abused Jewish women in the streets of Lvov, Ukraine, dozens were murdered and women were raped. On July 29th and 30th after the Germans had captured the city, 5000 Jews were rounded up and massacred by the Utoranian militia.

On the 2nd of August 1941, W. Sakowicz who was the president of Po nary, Poland and was later murdered by the Nazis said "There were terrible tortures before shooting. Nobody buried the murdered. The people were herded straight into the pit, the corpses were trampled on. Many of the wounded writhed with pain. Nobody finished them off". The Jewish people were constantly being murdered by SS troops and were thrown onto the streets or into huge pits of hundreds of corpses.

Erich Fuchs also explains another way in which Jews were murdered; "I installed shower heads in the gas chambers. The nozzles were not connected to any water pipes; they would serve as camouflage for the gas chamber. For the Jews who were gassed it would seem as if they were being taken to baths and for disinfection". Gas chambers were built for the mass murder of thousands of Jews and were established in all of the death camps around Europe.

When the Allies began to advance, they discovered the horrors and the atrocities of the death camps and in 1945, after the war had ended and the Germans had lost, people around the world found it hard to believe that this inhumane, cold-blooded extermination had ever taken place. A few soldiers who were members of the Nazi Party said that they feared their leaders and were simply doing their jobs and obeying orders. Other soldiers felt that killing the Jews did not matter because Hitler had brainwashed them into thinking that since the Jews were not regarded as human, it was not relevant whether they died or not. By the time the German government fell, its leaders and its followers had murdered an estimated six million European Jews as well as untold numbers of Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals and any others who did not fit the perfect "Aryan mold". The systematic Nazi destruction of almost an entire race is known as the Holocaust and will always be remembered for the savagery and cruelty that was inflicted on so many by so few.

Bibliography

1. Maz our, Anatole G, Peoples, John M. World History People and Nations. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc. Orlando, Florida: 1993.
2. Quotes taken from the Imperial War Museum 3. Holocaust handouts 4. Slater, Nathalie. Anti-Semitism. 1999 web 5.
Robinson, Plater. Deathly Silence Guide: Everyday People in the Holocaust. 1997 web.