Heimlich Himmler was one of the main responsible persons for the holocaust. He was born in Munich on October 7, 1900 to a Roman Catholic middle-class family. His father was a teacher and his mother was a devout Roman Catholic. He had two brothers, Gebhard and Ernst. Heimlich was a good student, but struggled in athletics. He had poor health with lifelong stomach complaints as a child. In 1915, Himmler began training with the Landshut Cadet Corps. He was accepted as an officer candidate due to his father’s connections with the royal family. He was eventually promoted to lieutenant. While he was still in training in November 1918, World War I ended with German’s defeat. He was never able to become an officer or see combat. He …show more content…
Himmler was anti-Semitic by the time he went to Technical University Munich, where he avoided his Jewish classmates. He was a devoted Catholic while a student there. He continued to pursue a military career during his second year at the university. He wasn’t successful; however he did get involved in the paramilitary group in Munich. He then met Ernst Rohm, an early member of the Nazi party. Himmler admired him because he was a decorated combat soldier. In 1922, he joined Rohm’s anti-Semitic nationalist group, known as the Reichskriegsflagge. He joined the Nazi party in 1923 and quickly developed a reputation for thoroughness and efficiency. From 1925 to 1930 he was a propaganda leader for the Nazis in Bavaria, Swabia and the Palatinate. In 1929, Himmler was selected by Hitler to build up a group that was to become Hitler’s bodyguard – the SS. This group numbered 200 men at first.
Himmler was elected to the Reichstag as Nazi deputy for Weser-Ems in 1930. He continued to expand the SS so that by 1933, it had 52,000 men in it. He became very interested in the occult and felt the SS was a new type of people – soldiers, academics, administrators and leaders all in one. They were in his mind the new aristocracy of
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He gained more power after 1933 and this thought came to dominate his mind, as did hunting out traitors in Germany. The SS was given more responsibilities. Its main role was to help in the gathering of threats to the Nazi party. Himmler was appointed head of the Gestapo in April, 1934. The Gestapo became the most feared group in Nazi Germany and was located in Europe in World War II. He was one of the most powerful Nazi’s. In 1936, he was appointed leader of the German Police.
Hitler turned to Himmler when it came time to annihilate the Jews. Himmler obeyed the order he received, showing almost more amorality than immorality. Himmler was in charge of Germany’s concentration camps and Eastern Europe’s death camps. His expertise at organization had serious consequences for the Jews. The first murders were carried out by shooting, however, they wanted a more efficient method. They decided to put the Jews in gas chambers in Poland. The chambers were filled with poisonous gases. It is estimated that around 6 million Jews were killed as well as 6 million
The effect the Holocaust had on Wiesenthal played a major role on the person he made himself to be. Born on December 31, 1908, Simon Wiesenthal lived in Buczacz, Germany which is now known as the Lvov Oblast section of the Ukraine. The Nazi-Hunter came from a small Jewish family who suffered horrifically during the Holocaust (The Simon Wiesenthal Center). Wiesenthal spent a great amount of time trying to survive in the harsh conditions while in internment camps and after escaping the last camp he attended. Wiesenthal spent weeks traveling through the wilderness until he was eventually captured by the Allies, still wondering the entire time if his wife was even alive (The Simon Wiesenthal Center). Of the 3000 prisoners in the camp Wiesenthal escaped from, only 1200 survived and Wiesenthal was one of them (Holocaust Research Project). Once Simon was safe, he began working for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army and was later reunited with his wife (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). The two were under the impression that their spouse was dead. After their reunification, they had their first child in 1946 (Holocaust Research Project). Wiesenthal opened a Jewish...
Adolf Hitler, born in 1889, is an Austrian born man who is known for his instigation and participation in the Nazi Political movement, or genocide, known as the Holocaust. Throughout his later life, Hitler spent the majority of his time organizing discriminatory laws that prevented Jewish citizens’ basic rights and ultimately their demise. However, before he advanced such laws and politics, he served as the Head of State, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, until he became the Fuhrer of Germany’s Third Reich which began in 1933 and ended in 1945 (Jewish Virtual Library). His actions were fueled by an unrelenting and strict hate for the Jewish community, better known as anti-Semitism, much like the vast majority of Eastern countries. Both
Oskar Schindler was a German spy in the Nazi Party.He was also a very wealthy businessman who owned a war goods manufacturing factory in the World War II era. Schindler managed to employ 1,200 Jews in his factory in an effort to save them. While Schindler did this, a new concentration camp opened up near him that was run by the notorious Amon Goth. Schindler cultivated a relationship with Goth, so whenever Goth would try to take the Jews to his camp, Schindler would bribe him with black market goods. Later on in the war the camp was forced to shut down due to the advance of the Allies. Schindler got word that all of his Jewish workers would be shipped to Auschwitz with the other Jews. Schindler, upset by this, decided to build a new factory
him. When his father died in 1903, Hitler saw this as a relief to him.
Hitler did not do particularly well in school, leaving formal education in 1905. Unable to settle into a regular job, he drifted. He wished to become an artist but was rejected from the Academy in Vienna. (http://www.history.co.uk/biographies/adolf-hitler)
One of the first writers to express the racial anti-Semitic view was Wilhelm Marr, who it is believed invented the word “anti-Semitism”. He, like other Germans had grievance with the Jews on the basis that a universally successful Jew had pushed them out of getting a good job. Marr himself was fired from his job as a journalist at a paper owned by Jews. He wrote “Der Sieg des Judentums uber das Germanentum”. In other words Jew was not contrasted with Christian, religiously but with German, racially. In 1879 he founded The Antisemiten-Liga, its purpose was in short to bring together all non-Jewish Germans into a common union which strives to saving the Fatherland from the Jewish influence. Marr was the first to appreciate the possibili...
The Schutzstaffel (SS) started off as Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguards. They later became one of the most feared and powerful organizations in all of Germany. Founded in 1925, the SS started off as a small group of eight members who were lead initially by Julius Schreck, a dedicated Hitler loyalist. The SS crew grew to more than 250,000 by the start of World War II. The SS did more than just guard Hitler; they guarded the concentration camps, and the Waffen-SS specialized in brutalizing and murdering people in territories occupied by the Nazi’s. The SS guards had an important role for Germany in World War II because they did most of Hitler’s work. The SS-VT were the SS guards that actually fought in the war, they were later named the Waffen-SS, who also caused terrorism. The regular SS’s guarding of Hitler, and of concentration camps affected the war in a major way.
Anti-Semitism has affected the world since Biblical times. There are many disastrous events in history, such as the Black Death, where the Jews have been put to blame by society. In March 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany by manipulating the Enabling Act, he started to put into action the discriminatory laws as promised. The Nazi Party wanted Germany to become a supreme race of strong, healthy people, called Aryans, without contamination from ‘dirty’ minorities such as the Jews. Through the period from 1933 to 1939 Hitler passed laws which started off by discriminating the Jews, such as burning Jewish books and forbidding them to join the Army, and then gradually put into effect active persecution, so that in 1939 Jews were beginning to be sent into the now famous concentration camps.
“You never truly know someone until you've walked a mile in his or her shoes.”-Unknown. How do we truly understand someone and know who they are? As people, we tend to judge others without realizing that they became the way they are through experiences and how they were brought up. In Susan Griffin’s “Our Secret” she discusses the abnormal strict childhood experiences of Heinrich Himmler. The main question that Griffin answers are: how did he become this way? We only knew him as a Nazi leader but we did not truly understand him and why he did the things he did.
In order to properly understand some of the more prevalent ideas that the Holocaust was allowed to happen, it is important to look at the different churches and the historical anti-semitic feelings among these churches. In Germany, around the time of the Holocaust, there were two dominant churches; the German Evangelical Church, and the Catholic Church. The German Evangelical Church always prided itself as...
The rise of conventional antisemitism occurred in places like Germany, France, and Austria between 1817 and 1914. In Germany, it was because the Jews profited from the industrial revolution unlike most of the native population. In France, the Jews were blamed for the French downfall in World War II, and in Austria they merely blamed Jews for any problems they had. Because of this, these countries began to have new national ideas. They believed nations were culturally exclusive, meaning it should be one ethnic group, and one culture, and no other group should contaminate it. They believed Jews would deteriorate the race and weaken the ethnicity. Antisemitism then became a secular idea rather than a religious one. Gentiles hated Jews simply because they were Jewish, not because of their religion. Once the idea began, it spread rapidly. In Germany, they had antisemi...
The man responsible for the Holocaust was Adolf Hitler and his Nazi war-machine. As an Austrian born soldier-turned-politician, Hitler was fascinated with the concept of the racial supremacy of the German people. He was also a very bitter, very evil little man.
In 1889 in Austria Adolf Hitler was born. Over the course of his life, he would go on to become the most infamous dictator of all time and cause the death of over eleven million people.
Schooling was one of the main things that set Hitler off in the real world. At age 11 he was very popular among friends. As of well, he was excellent in school. He received the highest marks in all of his classes. Problem was, was that when he hit age 12 he all of the sudden became the least desirable in his school. Then instead of receiving the highest marks he received the lowest marks in his classes. In 1900 his father took notice of this problem then withdrew him from school and sent him to a civil servant school named Realschule. In 1904 he quit Realschule and joined another school named Steyr only to quit in 1905. For 2 years he did no schooling and only art. His dream even as a child was to be an artist but for a short time he wanted to be a priest. When his 2 years of art was done he thought that his art was great so he traveled to Vienna, Austria for it. When he took the entrance exam he ended up failing tremendously. He tried the exam again but failed again. That then brought Hitler to a dark depression and he disappeared for 5 years.
These new Jews were even more different to the average German, and it did not help matters that they brought cholera to the country in 1892. In other words, these Jews were not hated because of their actual religious beliefs and actions, but because of Germans’ unwillingness to accept diversity. This lends itself to the wider debate of racial Anti-Semitism vs. religious Anti-Semitism. Due to the phrase Anti-Semitism being coined by a ‘secular Anti-Semite’, Wilhelm Marr, it is reasonable to conclude that the rational side of Anti-Semitism was perhaps more important a factor than the irrational side was. Due to the growing popularity of Darwinism and other such scientific theories, people began to believe in the superiority of the Aryan race. The move to scientific Anti-Semitism made it even more difficult for Jews to assimilate; they could be as German as they tried, but would always be treated differently because of their ancestry. Jews could not win either way, as they were told to become more like everyone else and when they did become upstanding members of German society, they were resented for it. Ultimately, Jews were not hated for what they believed or did, but simply because they were Jews. Anti-Semitism was just a symbol of right-wing ideology and a code word for all that was hated by conservative Germans, from socialism to liberalism, and ‘hatred of