Holocaust Essay

Submitted By Keith_M
Words: 1302
Pages: 6

This time period is the darkest decade known to man. This decade is commonly known as the Holocaust. The Holocaust started in the January of 1933, when the Nazis came to power in
Germany. Nazis are people that believe Germans are above all other races and Jews (as well as many others) are an evil that needed to be eradicated. They were led by the infamous Adolf
Hitler. He was able to make people kill and torture just with his words. The Holocaust finally came to an end in May, 1945, but many terrible things happened between those dates.

The Holocaust took place for a number of reasons some of which were long term and others short term. The main reasons are; for centuries Germany had been an anti­Semitic country
Jews were used as scapegoats for German problems. Also centuries of Nazi persecution caused the Holocaust in particular 1933 –1939 as well as Adolf Hitler and his racist views which influenced thousands of Germans.

The Main reason for the holocaust happening was that Germany had been anti­Semitic for many centuries, and during those centuries the anti­Semitism had gradually got worse.
Therefore because this was becoming a racial war, this was an opportunity for Germany to
‘cleanse’ itself of Jews like it should have done centuries ago. With Hitler being Anti­Semitic and a strong leader for the Nazi party, Anti­Semitism was influencing the minds of ordinary
German civilians. Adolf Hitler had previously been in prison before he became ruler of Germany in his second attempt. During the time he was in prison, he wrote a book called ‘Mien Kamph’ his book was incredibly racist and anti –Semitic, Hitler expressed his hatred for the Jews and influenced his readers into hating these ‘impure’ people. Hitler’s main idea was to as he called it

‘cleanse’ Europe of these non­ deserving people. Hitler despite having gained anti­Semitic views on his own from things he saw he also was influenced a lot by Neil Darwin. He based a lot of his racial arguments and views on this.

However another point to consider was that the Jews were being used as scapegoats for
German problems. The Germans believed that the Jews were attempting to destroy the ‘German way of life’ because they were said to be living off German wealth. For example after the First
World War, Hitler and the Nazi party blamed the Jews for Germany having lost the war. In the
1930’s the Wall Street crash occurred and the Jews having an image of being well educated and very wealthy and selfish due to all their large important businesses they ran in Germany. Hitler portrayed an image of the Jews to the Germans as though the reason why some Germans are out of jobs is because the Jews have stolen their jobs and are invading Germany being ‘parasites’ and taking what belongs to ‘pure’ hardworking German people. Therefore when the economic situation in Germany was very low and the German economy was suffering from the depression, the Jews were blamed for having all the German money and for Germans being very poor and starving during the time of the depression in the 1930’s. Despite the fact the Jewish people were not particularly communist at all, due to Hitler being anti­ communist, this was another act of using them as scapegoats. Anti ­ Semitism had been current in Europe for centuries, even since the days of ‘Christ’. Other religions blamed the Jews for ‘Christ’s’ resurrection and were regarded as ‘Christ killers’. As years and centuries have gone by, the Jews were still being blamed for unfortunate events that there wasn’t even evidence for.

Thirdly there had been centuries of persecution from the Nazis in particular; 1933­1939.
In 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power he immediately began discriminating Jewish people.
They were banned from working in public places such as broadcasting and teaching. Moreover also in the year of 1933, the first major act of discrimination was the Boycotting of all Jewish shops and workplaces;