Holocaust Really Happened. The Systematic

¶ … Holocaust really happened. The systematic murder of six million Jews is hard to take in, hard to conceive. Those six million people were human beings with hopes and dreams, families they loved, lives to live, and things they wanted to do. In recent years neo-Nazi groups have tried to revise history and claim that the holocaust didn't happen, that the numbers of people who died were not so many, and that they died in regular labor camps of natural causes (Luke, 2005). However, thousands of eye-witnesses are still alive to tell the story. Moreover, the Nazis were obsessive record keepers. The holocaust is the most well documented genocide in the history of mankind. In this essay the nature of anti-Semitism will be discussed as well as Hitler's rise, his use of the Jews as scapegoats, his belief in eugenics and a super-race, what the camps were like, and how the world stood by and failed to help the Jews.

What is Antisemitism?

The word anti-Semitism was invented in the late19th century as a more acceptable word than Jew-hatred. It was meant to sound scientific, but actually there is no such thing as "Semitism." The word Semitic refers to a language group that includes Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke), Hebrew, and Arabic. Ages (1981) points out that there are nuances in the meaning of the word anti-Semitism. It is possible, for example, to dislike Jews but be opposed to slaughtering them. In its most innocent form anti-Semitism is like the widespread prejudice found throughout the whole human race towards people different from ourselves. It could be hostility after working for an unsympathetic Jew or a vague negativism from being taught to dislike them as a child. This differs from diabolical anti-Semitism, which pictures Jews as non-human parasites and disease organisms, "agents of an international conspiracy... bacteriological pollutants allied with unnamed sinister forces in a campaign to dominate the world" (Ages, 1981, p. 384). This goes far beyond the ordinary hostility of one group for another. "The disease of anti-Semitism is irrational, and seeking its etiology [origins] is futile. In the 20th century Nazism took the virus, which had long caused a low-grade fever in the German consciousness, and injected it into the mainstream of political life. The result was the Holocaust" (p. 384).

Racial oppression against the Jews was not new. For 2000 years Jews have been objects of oppression and used as scapegoats for society's ills. The Bible reports persecution of the Jews when the Romans came to Palestine in 66 AD. The Diaspora, when Jews were expelled and scattered throughout the world, began with the slaughter of 580,000 Jews and the destruction of nearly a thousand towns. Jews without land or power existed in foreign countries as a despised group. Despite their status as wanderers and aliens, they maintained the Hebrew language and remained unique in their customs, religion, and traditions. They did not inter-marry with other groups or assimilate into other cultures. This made them distinct and different. It is not surprising that Hitler pointed the finger at them as the cause of all of Germany's troubles; he simply reawakened old feelings and found ways to heighten and intensify the hatred.

Hitler's Rise to Power

Adolph Hitler was a product of severe child abuse. Miller (1998) makes a convincing case that Hitler emerged from the brutality of his childhood with the following values: (1) The highest value is not life but order and obedience; (2) Order can only be established by violence; (3) Creativity is dangerous and must be destroyed; (4) Absolute obedience to one's father is the highest law; (5) Disobedience and criticism are punishable by beatings and threat of death; (6) Children must be turned into obedient robots as soon as possible; (7) Undesirable feelings and real needs must be suppressed vigorously; and (8) Mothers must not intervene in the punishment of children but after each incident must preach to them to honor and love their parents. Ultimately, these became the values of the Third Reich -- the children were the citizens and the father was the Fuhrer. Miller's argument is not that we should pity Hitler because he was abused, but that abuse of children produces criminals and can be highly dangerous "Not only for the individual but under certain circumstances for whole nations" (p. 8).

Hitler wrote his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) while serving a prison sentence. The Court found him guilty of treason after he led a failed revolt against the government in 1921. In the trial, which lasted five weeks, he got the chance to make his views known to the public via media coverage. He attacked all those he hated -- the Jews, communists, socialists, and politicians who had allowed the disastrous Versailles Treaty to be signed (Germany was suffering because of huge reparations they had to pay after World War I). The way he expressed himself compelled attention, and although he was found guilty, he did not get the death penalty because some in the court actually agreed with him; instead, he got five years at Landesburg. His book is about as vile as a book could be, written at a time when he felt himself to be a failure. His anger, hatred, and self-pity all are expressed in terms of his failure being everyone else's fault except his. In Mein Kampf he constructs a racial "ladder" in which white, blue-eyed and blond Germans are at the top and Jews are at the bottom (Pryce-Jones, 2002). He wrote, "Was there any form of filth or crime... without at least one Jew involved in it. If you cut even cautiously into such a sore, you find like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light -- a Jew" (Jews in Nazi Germany web site). Hitler's rhetoric over the years is filled with references to Jews as parasites, cancer, and disease organisms destroying the country. He believed that by getting rid of the racially inferior, sub-human people at the bottom of the ladder, and only allowing the people at the top to reproduce, a super-race of humans could be achieved (Platt, 2006). Once Hitler came to power he launched a campaign against the Jews.

It began with marking Jewish shops with a yellow Star of David and a sign that said "Juden," forbidding Germans to buy in them. Seats on buses, trains and park benches were marked. The schools taught anti-Semitism. Teachers ridiculed Jewish students, and children on the playground were allowed (encouraged) to bully them. If a Jewish child stopped going to school, it "proved" that Jews were lazy and worthless. In 1939 Hitler waged a seven-day reign of terror on the Jews (called Chrystalnacht) in which 10,000 shops were destroyed. The Nazis set fire to Jewish homes and synagogues. Then the Jews were forced to pay for the clean-up afterwards and also to scrub the streets. During this period, many Jewish families tried to leave Germany, but they could not take their money with them, and other countries had "quotas" and were willing to accept only a few of them.

Hitler's values, enumerated earlier, were not life-affirming Western values at all. Cary (2002) argues it was not by chance that the Jews became the target of his wrath. "They alone in Europe still sustained the cultural and social practices of their pre-Christian forbears and vibrantly carried an ancient culture forward into the modern era. The Nazis targeted the Jews not because they were eternal outsiders, but because these outsiders were simultaneously the ultimate insiders. From the Bible (both testaments) to the Enlightenment and forward to modernity, Jewish culture was associated with the Western values against which the Nazis were in revolt" (Cary, 2002, p. 551). Thus, in a sense, the Nazis were making a statement to the world.

Nazi Concentration Camps

Eventually, the Nazis created what they called a "Final Solution" to the problem of getting rid of the Jews. They were rounded up and packed tightly into box-cars with no water, food, toilet facilities, or room to sit and transported to concentration camps. These trips generally lasted a week or so. Auschwitz is one of the most famous because it had machinery for extermination. As soon as the train arrived, the people were briefly examined, and their fate was sealed by the flick of a thumb. Most women and children went one way to the gas chambers. They were told they were going to take a shower, and having just made a terrible trip they were relieved to think they would soon be clean and hydrated. Adjacent to the "showers" was a crematorium, which burned their bodies into ash every night (Luke, 2005). It is estimated that in addition to the Jews, 200,000 disabled adults and children were murdered this way, as well as thousands of Marxists, Jehovah's Witnesses, sexual non-conformists, and moral dissenters. Those women and children that were not immediately killed, were used for sex and/or cruel medical experimentation (Cary, 2002).

Those who could work, mostly men, were sent the other way and "processed" into the camp. They were stripped naked, all their belongings confiscated, and shaved from head to toe, given worn-out rags to wear and shoes that did not fit. There were no blankets, mattresses, pillows, or heat in the dormitory "beds" (like wooden boxes) where they slept six to a bed. They were systematically starved and used for slave labor. After a whole day of heavy labor, "dinner" was a bowl of cabbage "soup," mostly water, and sometimes a slice of bread. They mustered twice a day to be counted, often standing for hours on end without adequate clothing in the winter. Those who became unable to work went to the gas chamber. During epidemics the bodies piled up in heaps like garbage, and vicious dogs, trained to hate the prisoners, guarded the camps. (Frankl, 1997).

Why Didn't Anyone Help Them?