The Undercurrents of World War II: The Holocaust

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As tensions escalated in Europe until the point of the Second World War, another war raged beneath the surface, unbeknownst to foreign onlookers. Not only did Hitler and Nazi Germany start an unprovoked war that took the lives of over 50 million soldiers, they also exterminated millions of innocent people for no other reason than their religion. The Holocaust began in 1933, reached its peak during the Second World War, and came to an end with the war in 1945. Hitler used the Holocaust as a mechanism to purge his German state of any lesser people (especially those of Jewish heritage) that might be of some threat to his superior Aryan race. As a result of the Holocaust, millions of men, women, and children of various national, ethnic, and social backgrounds died or had their lives impacted forever.

The word holocaust was originally used to describe the destruction or slaughter on a mass scale (especially cause by fire); however, this term has been more widely accepted to refer to the genocide orchestrated by Adolf Hitler from January 30, 1933, when he took over as prime minister of Germany, to May 8, 1945, the end of the war in Europe. There is controversy over whether or not the term “Holocaust” includes only those murdered of Jewish decent. Today, it is generally held that the term “Holocaust” refers to all those put to death in the Nazi concentration camps, ghettos, and murder squads, and the term “Final Solution” is given to refer to the genocide of the Jewish people (also referred to the as “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”). There is no way to determine the exact number of lives taken during the Holocaust, but six millions is the widely accepted death toll for Jewish victims and five millions is the accepted ...

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... extermination of every living thing in certain areas of the Kurdish north. [IMAGE] Over a period of three years spanning from 1986 to 1989, some 182,000 innocent people were killed through the use of chemical weapons. Is this not reminiscent of the type of evil that fueled Adolf Hitler?

In closing, the Holocaust is, and always will be, one of the most disturbingly evil events in modern history. In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe was estimated at over nine million. By the end of the war in 1945, the Nazi’s had killed nearly two-thirds of the European Jews as part of the Final Solution. The senseless killing of millions of innocent people for no reason other than their religion can never be forgotten. In addition, we must learn from the mistakes that led to the events of those years that will forever scar the history books. Why are we here?

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