Agree or Expand on a

¶ … Agree or Expand on a Topic Within the Provided Essay The Holocaust in the context of Omer Bartov's Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust" The Holocaust has left a horrible memory and made it possible for society to acknowledge that people are generally capable of performing atrocious acts in order to fight for absurd principles that they blindly believe in.

Omar Bartov's essay "Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust" provides an intriguing perspective regarding the Holocaust by attempting to emphasize that this event was not as complex as many tend to believe. Bartov considers that a discourse regarding enemies and victims can present society with a simple explanation of why the event happened in the first place. The essay is focused on the Jewish population and on how the masses are inclined to think about this community as being different and thus predisposed to being discriminated.

The fact that Europe was dominated by Christianity during the first half of the twentieth century played an important role in shaping people's attitudes toward Jewish individuals. Many Germans did not hesitate to support Nazi thinking concerning Jewish people and were inclined to think that it would be perfectly normal for them to get actively involved in persecuting this community as a result of the presumed wrong that it had done to society in general.

Even with this, it appears that Jewish people indirectly contributed to the Holocaust in some cases, taking into account that many were unable to understand the condition they were in and believed that it was in their best interest to cooperate with their oppressors rather than to rebel. Bartov's main purpose is to have his readers comprehend that it would be wrong for them to only focus on Nazism when trying to understand what the Holocaust is all about.

Instead, he believes that it is intriguing to look at matters from the perspective of Jews with the purpose of analyzing their exact reactions to the experiences that they went through during the Holocaust's early years. Many people across Europe failed to acknowledge the gravity of the Holocaust because they believed that it was natural for them to express hostile attitudes with regard to Jewish individuals.

"Nevertheless, behind the operating mindset of Europe's Christians, whether articulated or not, existed centuries of official teaching of the Christian churches, which portrayed Jews as the Other" (Spicer xv). Even with the fact that many Jews appeared to have integrated the European society, they were still regarded as being insiders as outsiders (Bartov 773). One of the principal problems with the world today is that many Christians are reluctant to look at the Holocaust from a religious perspective.

Surely, many of the people involved in implementing the Holocaust were acting on account of wanting to behave in accordance with orders they received. These people were obsessed with completing their missions and believed that there was nothing wrong with them persecuting Jewish individuals as long as the general public supported them in doing so (Rittner & Roth).

Even if Christians were not actually accountable for the Holocaust, it is only safe to say that they and their thinking were used with the purpose of providing reasoning with regard to actions the Nazis undertook. Bartov concentrates on trying to understand the Holocaust from other perspectives, such as from the one involving Christians and the one involving Jewish people. He supports the belief that circumstances played an essential role in having people think that what they did was justified.

Hitler practically took opportunity of the fact that people in Germany suffered as a result of their loss in the First World War. As a consequence, he used the Jewish people as a scapegoat mainly because he knew that people across Germany and across Europe had a tendency to discriminate Jewish individuals. There was nothing new about Anti-Semitism at the time when Hitler decided to use this concept as a means to gather supporters.

However, the fact that he went further than most and actually instigated people to use extreme violence against the Jewish community enabled some individuals to think that it was actually their civic duty to get involved. What is curious about the moment when Nazi Germany started to expand its borders and ideology is that many presumably moral countries hesitated to intervene and provide Jewish people with any kind of assistance.

Countries like Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Italy closed their borders and expressed little to no interest in the fate of Jewish people present on German occupied territory. "Great Britain instituted a special new visa requirement sorting out Third Reich Jews from other refugees" (Brustein 1). It is almost as if Bartov appreciates the fact that the Nazi had the inspiration to use people's traditional thinking against them by influencing them to think that it was them who wanted the Holocaust to happen.

Christians, poor people, and the masses in general were inclined to regard the Jews as being the 'other' and thus felt that it would be perfectly normal for them to join an anti-Jewish campaign, as this would apparently solve most of Europe's problems. It is actually not surprising to observe how many individuals in Europe today consider that Jewish people hold too much power and that something needs to be done about this.

It was thus logical for Hitler and his companions to use the 'Jews are enemies' underlying principle with the purpose of getting people to join his cause. When taking into account that countries like Germany suffered serious loss as a consequence of the First World War, it is not surprising that a wave of paranoia came to dominate thinking in many important European players.

"Moreover, confidence in European superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world, rooted in newly conquered vast colonial empires, was undermined by fear about the West's vulnerability to infiltration by other races and civilizations and alarm about the biological degradation of the white race" (Bartov 773).

Jewish people were the perfect scapegoat, especially considering that a mass persecution of Jewish across Europe would generate a lot of earnings as a result of the fact that many influential people on the continent were Jews -- thus meaning that eliminating them would absolve numerous individuals of their debts. One can actually say that soldiers were very different from obsessed anti-Semites because they fought a real enemy -- one that posed a threat for them and for their countries.

In contrast, people in death camps were simply persuaded to believe that they were helping their countries and themselves by removing the Jewish "threat." Nazism was an ideology that appealed to people's feelings about their personal identity in an attempt to have them think that it was their job to hate Jewish individuals. Whether one was Christian, German, or simply non-Jewish, the respective person had all the reasons to hate Jews.

It was practically a matter of deciding whether one would love Jews and be against his or her people or hate Jews and help his or her people. Nazism came at the time when Europe needed something to hold on to in order to feel that it actually experienced progress and it was thus welcomed by numerous individuals because of the benefits that it presumably brought on.

People across Germany and across many other European countries virtually realized that there was something holding them together -- their hatred of Jewish people. As a.