Who Was Responsible For The Holocaust

There is no way to determine who exactly is responsible for causing the Holocaust. There is a large amount of differing evidence that holds different people are responsible for what happened. It is evident that one person cannot be held completely responsible for all that happened nor can the blame rest fully on Nazi leaders. The common German citizen was also a part of the attempted genocide carried out by Nazi party. There were a variety of perpetrators, whose participated in the Holocaust for different reasons and in different ways. There were the people who truly believed the Nazi ideals, professionals and experts such as doctors, chemists, engineers, lawyers , priests, and educators, and the average citizens. People can be motivated by

A portion of the German public actually believed the Nazi principles such as: anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, antisemitism, nationalism, against communism and democracy they also felt contempt towards the Treaty of Versailles, and condemnation of the Weimar Republic for signing the armistice. The main principle being anti-Semitism. The vast majority of Germans were looking for someone to blame for their economic hardship. The German people agreed with the Nazi views, particularly that it was the Jews fault the German economy was in shambles. “Classic scapegoating allowed many Germans to think none of these problems were their fault- it must have been traitor, leftists, or Jews.” There were also things to gain from blaming the Jews and allowing them to be persecuted, such as their material possessions, jobs and businesses or reduced competition in the market because of the loss of the Jewish owned businesses. What people gained from the mistreatment of the Jews could be a matter of survival or necessity for the poor German families suffering as a result of the reparations or could be greed in terms of the more affluent Germans, government officials or police, who were not as affected by the loss of the war in comparison to other Germans. The Nazi Party was enticing to the German people because Hitler and the Nazi party proposed a solution to majority of the problems that the German public were facing. Furthermore, the concept of cognitive dissonance played a part in the German people’s participation in enabling the Holocaust. Cognitive dissonance arises when people’s actions contradict or violate their own moral standards. A conflict between actions and beliefs causes distress, and people strive to rid that distress by changing their beliefs when they cannot change their actions. Cognitive dissonance also factors into people agreeing with the