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Hitler and his policies
Hitler and his policies
The systematic murder of the Jews by Hitler
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Anyone who paid attention in history class knows about the horrific crime against humanity committed by Adolf Hitler known as the Jewish Holocaust. But what they did not teach was that the Jews refused to go without a fight. In fact, the Jews resisted the Nazis on multiple occasions. Three common examples are the Buchenwald resistance group, The Warsaw uprising and the Bielski partisans. In each instance, the Jews gambled with their lives for their freedom. The first example of Jewish resistance took place in the concentration camp of Buchenwald. Concentration camps were constructed to work the life out of Jews, while simultaneously starving them to the point of death. Experiments were conducted on them and often times, they died.
“If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness.” (Quote from concentration) This quote was carved into the wall by a Jewish prisoner. Kaiserwald was one of many concentration camps used for the destruction of the Jewish race during the holocaust.
Prisoners in concentration camps committed small acts of rebellion against the Holocaust that outlived the guards and the Nazis. Even though their acts could not save their lives, they sparked questions that the survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, could recall years after the Holocaust ended.
Nazis which proved to the world the Jews are not that easy to extinguish. The Jews had several ways of exhibiting resistance, but "Organized armed resistance was the most powerful form of Jewish opposition"(Jewish Resistance). Armed resistance is an important aspect to revolting not only because it reinflicts the pain lashed upon the Jews, but it also shows the Jews have the ability to fight back and gives the world the knowledge that Jews do not go down easily. However, resistance is not only an act of violence since the Jews demonstrated several non-violent forms of resistance while locked up or being transported. Jews would escape into the forest and figured that by escaping they resisted the Nazi Party and reduced their chances of achieving their goal of exterminating all Jews on the planet(Acts of Resitance). By escaping Jews gave themselves a chance to live and warn others of their fate which was an excellent form of non-violent resistance since, generally speaking, no Germans were hurt. Resistance can take many shapes and forms which is why all Jews resisted one way or another, simply living is resistance(Acts of Resistance). The other reason Jews struggled so desperately to survive was not to merely see the light of another day, but to see the Germans become enraged by their "resistance", living.
During the Holocaust there were many varying forms of resistance these include refusal to follow German orders, the formation of the ZOB, continuing Jewish culture, education, religious practices, and keeping archives of historical events. These acts of Jewish resistance all required great courage and bravery as severe consequences were in place for those who did not follow German
Genocide is the deliberate killing of people who belong to a particular racial, political, or cultural group (Merriam-Webster). This is what Hitler did to the six million Jews during the Holocaust, which led to many Jews fighting back. This paper will talk about how the Holocaust victims fought back against Hitler and his army. The Holocaust was a mass killing of Jews and non-Jews who were viewed as unneeded within the world by Adolf Hitler. Hitler became leader of Germany and tortured and killed many people. With Nazi Germany killing and torturing millions of Jews and non-Jews, victims decided to fight back with armed and spiritual resistance.
The Holocaust was a time in which millions of people were persecuted and mistreated: people banned together and stood up against prejudice and discrimination by actively and passively opposing the Germans. Citizens that actively resisted used violence and force to directly attack the Nazis in attempt to save their life. Those that preferred, prepared to resist passively by not using physical brutality, but instead continued their daily lives out of the sight of the Nazis. In “The Diary of Anne Frank,” we see how Meip, a Dutch Citizen resisted the Germans passively, by hiding the Frank family and four other Jewish families in a secret annex above Anne’s father's business premise during World War Two. They resisted without risking anybody’s life,
In the "New Afterword" to the 1995 reprint of Escape From Sobibor, Richard Rashke makes explicit what was already implicit in the original 1982 edition. He forthrightly challenges historians of the Holocaust to reexamine a "flawed premise" of much of their writing. Unconsciously accepting the flawed premise that "if the Nazis...did not give it much significance, it wasn't significant," Rashke argues, historians have distorted the nature of the Jewish response to the Final Solution. Most historians have mistakenly portrayed Jews "as a flock of sheep on the road to slaughter," he insists, "causing intense suffering and irreparable damage to the Jewish people." He offers his own book as an antidote. The story of the escape from Sobibor and those who survived it, he argues, "represents the buried stories of hundreds of thousands who fought and died in ghettos no one ever heard of; who tried to escape on the way to camps but never made it; who fought back inside camps but were killed anyway; who managed to escape only to be recaptured and executed; who formed or joined partisan groups from the woods of Vilna to the forest of the owls and who never saw liberation...." I find Rashke's argument very convincing, and I would like to encourage others who teach about the Holocaust to join me in reexamining the way we present the Jewish response to the Final Solution to our students.
Through the Holocaust and through the fighting, the hunger and the fear, those persecuted managed to hold on to hope, the one thing no Nazi could break. Though the camps were liberated in 1944-1945, the horrors had already been committed. The death counts of the Nazi prisoners go as high as 13 million, but even with this the Jews still held out hope, still kept fighting, even as they were dragged from their homes into the Death Camps that awaited them, And it is for this reason that none will ever truly forget all the atrocities, horrors and, most importantly, the victims.
No other place has there been a pressure so large on a group of people to change and the entirety of the people resisted than the concentration camps of the holocaust. An excellent account of a life lived in the concentration camps is the novel “Survival in Auschwitz” by Primo Levi. This novel tells the story of an Italian chemist, who is Jewish, that is captured by the Germans while he is helping a resistance force. After his capture he is sent to Auschwitz ran by the S.S., the most brutal concentration camp of the holocaust. In his first day there he spouts one of the most influential quotes, “Man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly." (1.3) The camp was all about survival, all he worked for, all he gave up, and all the things he had to do to survive in the camp, he did for the small shred of hope that if he survives he would make it out of that god forsaken hell hole. The ideological pressure of the world was telling Levi to give up, there was no hope in trying, just die; but, Levi saw that hint of hope and without a thought, his mind and body latches onto that small strand of hope and never let
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, it talks about the holocaust and what it was like being in it. The Germans were trying to make the German race the supreme race. To do this they were going to kill off everyone that wasn’t a German. If you were Jewish or something other than German, you would have been sent to a concentration camp and segregated by men and women. If you weren’t strong enough you were sent to the crematory to be cremated. If you were strong enough you were sent to work at a labor camp. With all the warnings the Jewish people had numerous chances to run from the Germans, but most ignored the warnings.
We must first realize that resistance was in no way a survival strategy. Yet, even when it seemed obvious that death was near inevitable, why did they not put up a fight? This argument is still puzzling to many holocaust historians, yet the arguments of Raul Hilberg and Yehuda Bauer offer insight to possible reasons why they did not fight and that resistance was more widespread than most people think.
One form of resistance perpetrated by the Jewish people was armed resistance; which is where the Jews would arm themselves with whatever could be used as a weapon and stand against Nazi soldiers. An example of armed resistance is the
This form of resistance caught the German soldiers off guard during deportations. “Many ghetto fighters took up arms in knowledge that the majority of ghetto inhabitants had already been deported to the killing centers; and also in the knowledge that their resistance even now could not save from the destruction of the remaining Jews who could not fight.” () With the little weapons they had, they refused to let the Nazis take them out of the ghettos so they could be killed. Even though the Jews knew they would not be able to completely stop the German soldiers they still fought back and did not give up. Although they used armed resistance, this was not the only way the Jewish people stood up for
In "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak, Hans, Liesel, Max, and millions of Jewish people's Rights were violated by the Nazis. The more they tried to fight back the more they were punished for
The Holocaust is one of the greatest crimes ever committed against humanity. At first, the Nazi’s put pressure on the Jews by forcing them out of high statuses by boycotting their stores, and eventually by physically persecuting them. However, several Jews did emigrate, more so to North America. After the annexation of Austria and the invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazi control eventually spread to Holland, Norway, northern France, and Czechoslovakia; as the Nazi’s power spread, the more executions occurred. Those Jews, who wanted to flee, found it difficult, because several countries refused to take in massive amounts of Jews, including the United States. The Jews were without defenders, and when World War II was declared, they were trapped. Hitler then began to exterminate all European Jews.