Treatment of the Jews During the Holocaust

Treatment of the Jews During the Holocaust

The Nazi slaughter of European Jews during World War II, commonly referred to as the Holocaust, occupies a special place in our history. The genocide of innocent people by one of the world's most advanced nations is opposite of what we think about the human race, the human reason, and progress. It raises doubts about our ability to live together on the same planet with people of other cultures and persuasions.

Before it happened, virtually no one thought such a slaughter likely or even possible. To be sure, for many centuries anti-Semitism had been widespread throughout Europe. Devout Christians had viewed the Jews as Christ killers and deliberate misbelievers, but conversion was considered the inevitable cure, however long it might be delayed. Following the Jew's emancipation from discriminatory laws in the 19th century, the old religious anti-Semitism was joined by secular nationalism that challenged the Jews' qualifications for membership in the nations in which they lived. Secular anti-Semites objected when the Jews newly freed from persecution, often tied their destinies to growing capitalist economies, to architecture, and the theater. As we have learned and talked about in class, their success in banking, business, politics, and culture made the Jews far more visible in society than what their small numbers were. Europeans who felt threatened by modernity, and especially those who lost status as the result of economic changes and the spread of democracy, sometimes blamed the Jews for problems.

Political parties that supported anti-Semitism prior to about 1914, rarely won, but anti-Jewish attitudes became fairly commonplace in many European countries. From what I...

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...d from all causes range from just over five million to more than six million. These were not the only innocent victims of Nazi racial madness. Hundreds of thousands of gypsies and millions of Polish slave laborers and Soviet prisoners of war died at German hands.

The treatment of humans for the cause of "purification" is un-questionably a total embarrassment to the entire world. And it is so unfortunate that it took until the 1960's at the Nuremberg trials for the world to truly hear what one man's beliefs did to the entire world.

Bibliography:

Bibliography

Sources other than classroom material

The "Final Solution". http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.final.htm . 6 November 2000.

Schindler's List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Studios, 1993.

War and Remembrance. Dir/writter. Herman Wouk. ABC Video, 1988.