Latvian People Suspicious Of The Jews example essay topic

The Holocaust seemed as if it was one mans (Adolf Hitler) determination to exterminate all Jews in Europe, but in fact this is not completely true. The Holocaust was the determination of many men and woman of different backgrounds and languages. One of which is the people of Latvia. During WWI, the was was no less disruptive to the Jews than to anyone else. They were and used for both Capitalist exploitation and Communist conspiracy. During WWII they were beaten, killed, and / or imprisoned mercilessly in camps throughout Europe, not excluding the two camps in Riga, Latvia.

The Latvian Jews had a long history. In 1897 the census for Latvia, just before WWI, reported a combined number of about 200,000 Jews. At this point, Riga held about 33,000 Jews. Since Kurland became a duchy of Poland in the sixteenth century, Jews of Lithuanian Poland moved north. There, even though, routinely regarded as outsiders, having to pay taxes and fees and fines, Jews prospered and expanded themselves in number. They engaged in commerce of every variety including leasing, brokering, and peddling.

Jew were goldsmiths, brandy distillers, artisans, tradesmen, and even sometimes hired as tax collectors. Jews were the center of economic life. They controlled exports of cereal, flax, eggs, and timber. Tanneries, sawmills, and banks were often owned by Jews, even clothing factories and stores were owned and operated by mostly Jews. Most well known doctors and lawyers and entertainers were Jewish, but of the 5,921 civil servants, only 21 were Jews. Around fifty percent were involved in commerce and trade, as opposed to the one percent of Latvians.

This was because most Latvians were engaged in agricultural production. Jew also lived mostly in the city and town areas and created strong Jewish communities. After WWI, when the census was done again in 1925, Latvia had only counted for 95,675 Jews, less than half of pre- WWI. Now the aggravated nationalist mind was getting very disoriented by what had happened after Soviet annexation, the people were seeing the Jew and Bolshevism as one and the same, and as before, es termination was the only answer.

The massacres of Jews began immediately after the Soviet counterattacks on June 29, 1941, before German police and officials even arrived. In Daugavpils, all Jews between the ages of sixteen to sixty were called to the down town square where they were assembled and incarcerated. At one of the main streets in Riga, Bear Slayer Street (the bear stands for the Russians) were the two Riga ghettos. In the smaller ghetto contained Latvian Jews, the big ghetto is where the Jews deported form Germany and other parts of Europe were contained. Before the German killing squads came, more than one thousand Jews were killed.

What drove the Latvians? Some would do it to please their 'liberators' (the Germans for liberating them for the third time), others did it for their own sick reasons. In Riga, there was mass pillage and killing of Jews and arrests on the night on July 1-2. During the summer and fall of 1941 as many as thirty thousand Jews were killed. The hostility and hatred for Jews by the Latvians was incredible.

The Latvians had done most of the Germans work before they could. Shortly after July 8th, Komm ando Arajs was created as a security unit, headed by Victors Arajs. By March 1943, the unit had expanded to 1,176 members, and had killed around 26,000 Jewish Latvians. The Jews had always been a major part of the Latvian society and played a crucial role in the Latvian economy. Even though they were disliked before, they were never hated, but the end of WWI and of WWII with its Nazi influence changes all that. during WWII the Jews were discriminated against in the most extreme ways possible.

They were slaughtered and imprisoned and worked like slaves during Germany's third liberation of Latvia. The anxiety and hysteria started making the Latvian people suspicious of the Jews. Most felt obligated to serve for the German cause by helping exterminate the Jews, and some did it for their own impulses. Before I read Morris Eksteins' Walking Since Daybreak, I thought that Hitler was the main cause of the Holocaust, but now I understand that these people had a long History with Jews, and that they themselves willingly participated in the Holocaust.

But i also dont think that they could have done all of it without any mental encouragement which is explained in this quote: Rudolf Hoss 'commandant of Auschwitz and veteran of the Baltic wars of 1918-19... the task of extermination was a serious one; it had to be done properly, with appropriate order and commitment... was not to be regarded as murder. Murder is a negative act; what the new German order was involved in was positive: it was a cleansing, an improvement... Heinrich Himmler, told his SS officers in October 1943: ... To exterminate human beings and at the same time to ram in decent -- -- that was the essence of Nazism. ' (Eksteins pg. 148-49).