The Holocaust

Running head : Holocaust

Holocaust

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Introduction

The unimaginable horror of the Holocaust was an unprecedented event in the history of civilization . Although genocidal behavior had occurred prior to the Holocaust , such as the Turkish atrocities against the Armenians in 1915 and America 's brutal treatment of the Native American population , never before had an entire people been marked for death because of the accident of their birth . After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June

1941 , the objective of the Nazis was to murder every last man , woman , and child of Jewish ancestry , which the Nazis defined as anyone with a trace of Jewish "blood " dating back two to three generations . Prior to the outbreak of World War II in 1939 Germany legally segregated Jews from the rest of society and justified this action by representing the Jews as a threat to the collective health of the German nation

Germany under Nazi rule ( 1933-1945 ) emphasized the primacy of racial ideology . Hitler 's close confidant Rudolf Hess made this clear when he defined National Socialism as applied biology . The genocide against the Jews derived from the view that Jews were one large , diseased , and alien entity and therefore must be separated from the rest of the German people . Although the Nazis also targeted other groups , such as the disabled , gypsies , and Slavs , they placed Jews in a special category

Nazi racial ideology stressed the descent of the German people from the Aryan race , an Indo-European language group . They described the history of civilization as the struggle between the superior Aryan race and the inferior but powerful Semites . Because the semitic Jews had attained positions ofprominence not only in Germany but throughout the Western world , they were deemed a threat to the Aryan race . In their efforts to reassert the primacy of the Aryan peoples over everyone else , the Nazis believed that the removal , if not the destruction , of the Jews was the necessary condition for the attainment of their ideological objective So compelling was this belief that Adolf Hitler compromised the German war effort to achieve it . The construction of the death camps and the rerouting of trains to camps such as Auschwitz in times of severe wartime shortages testify to the priority that the Germans placed on the murder of European Jewry (Burleigh Wippermann , 1991

Holocaust historians are divided on the question as to whether the plan to murder the Jews of Europe was Hitler 's objective from the moment he became the leader of the National Socialist movement or whether the opportunity to implement the Final Solution presented itself as a functional response to the exigency of World War II . Over the course of the war , the Germans ruled over more than 5 million Jews , about one-third of all Jews at that time . It was impossible during wartime to continue the policy of crowding Jews in ghettos in preparation for resettling them on "reservations " such...