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Survivors of the Holocaust include those persecuted civilians who were still alive in the concentration camps when they were liberated at the end of the war, or those who had either survived as partisans or been hidden with the assistance of non-Jews, or had escaped to territories beyond the control of the Nazis before the Final Solution was implemented.

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The Final Solution ( German: ) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question ( German: die Endlösung der Judenfrage , pronounced [diː ˈɛntˌløːzʊŋ deːɐ̯ ˈjuːdn̩ˌfʁaːɡə]) was a Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews during World War II.

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Famous books and movies about the holocaust 

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Famous books and movies about the holocaust 

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Book: The diary of Anna Frank
Movies: The Attic: The Hiding of Anne frank
Hanna's War
War and Remembrance
United States | Enemies, a Love Story

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PREMYSL DOBIAS

Premysl Dobias was born in June 1913 in the Czech town of Turnov. In September 1938, Germany annexed territory along Czechoslovakia’s northern and western borders. Six months later, German forces occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia and divided it into two separate territories – Slovakia in the east and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the west.

In the winter of 1941, Premysl was arrested for helping Jews and in May 1942 was deported to the Terezin transit and labour camp. From there he was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he was forced into slave labour and subjected to medical experimentation. The camp was liberated by American troops in May 1945 and Premysl worked with the Americans as an interpreter. He moved to London in 1947.

Here, Premysl describes an encounter with Austrian civilians following his deportation and remembers a particular incident at Mauthausen.

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Concentration Camp Survivors Share Their Stories

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TOBY BIBER

Toby Biber was born in 1925 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Mielec, Poland. Following German occupation in September 1939, the Jewish population of Mielec was subjected to increased antisemitism, persecution and violence.

Mielec’s Jewish community was deported in March 1942 and its residents were forced into a nearby forest. From there, they were moved to a small town where Toby’s father obtained forged papers for Toby and her sister, allowing them to escape. They lived in hiding until arriving in Krakow in southern Poland.

In the autumn of 1942, several thousand inhabitants of the Krakow ghetto, including Toby and her sister, were moved to the Plaszow forced-labour camp. They remained there until the summer of 1943, when they were deported to Auschwitz and then to Bergen-Belsen in 1944. Toby’s sister died eight days after Belsen’s liberation in April 1945.

After the war, Belsen was used as a displaced persons camp and Toby remained there until 1947. She met and married her husband at the camp and they immigrated to Britain in 1947.

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Concentration Camp Survivors Share Their Stories

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The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. The Nazis also enslaved and killed other groups who they perceived as racially, biologically or ideologically inferior or dangerous. Hear seven survivors talk about and reflect…

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Auschwitz: How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust

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Where did it take place and how did the system work

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Where did it take place and how did the system work

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In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. Almost one million were Jews.

The Nazi camp system began as a system of repression directed against political opponents of the Nazi state. In the early years of the Third Reich, the Nazis imprisoned primarily Communists and Socialists. In about 1935, the regime also began to imprison those whom it designated as racially or biologically inferior, especially Jews. During World War II, the organization and scale of the Nazi camp system expanded rapidly and the purpose of the camps evolved beyond imprisonment toward forced labor and outright murder.

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On 27 January 1945, Soviet troops cautiously entered Auschwitz.

Primo Levi - one of the most famous survivors - was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the liberators arrived.

The men cast "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive", he would later write.

"They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by... the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist."

"We saw emaciated, tortured, impoverished people," soldier Ivan Martynushkin said of liberating the death camp. "We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell."

In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. Almost one million were Jews.

Those deported to the camp complex were gassed, starved, worked to death and even killed in medical experiments. The vast majority were murdered in the complex of gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.

Six million Jewish people died in the Holocaust - the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe's Jewish population. Auschwitz was at the centre of that genocide.

What was the Holocaust?

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they began to strip Jewish people of all property, freedoms and rights under the law. After the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, the Nazis started deporting Jewish people from the Third Reich to parts of Poland, where they created ghettos to separate them from the rest of the population.

In 1941, during the German invasion of the USSR, the Nazis began their campaign of extermination in earnest. Nazis spoke about their invasion as a race war between Germany and Jewish people, as well as the Slavic population and the Roma.

Groups of German soldiers called Einsatzgruppen set out across newly conquered lands in Eastern Europe to massacre civilians. By the end of 1941, they had killed 500,000 people, and by 1945 they had murdered about two million - 1.3 million of whom were Jewish.

Behind the lines, Nazi commanders were experimenting with ways to kill en masse. They feared that shooting people was too stressful for their soldiers, and so came up with more efficient means of murder.

Experimental gas vans had been used to kill mentally disabled people in Poland as early as 1939. Poisonous fumes were pumped into a sealed compartment to suffocate those inside. By the winter of 1941, the Nazis had constructed gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Nazi leaders met in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference to coordinate the industrial slaughter - what they called a "final solution to the Jewish question" - killing the entire European Jewish population, 11 million people, by extermination and forced labour.

What was Auschwitz?

Auschwitz was originally a Polish army barracks in southern Poland. Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland in September 1939, and by May 1940 turned the site into a jail for political prisoners.

This area - with the infamous lie Arbeit Macht Frei written above the entrance in German - meaning work sets you free - became known as Auschwitz I.

But as the war and the Holocaust progressed, the Nazi regime greatly developed the site.

The first people to be gassed were a group of Polish and Soviet prisoners in September 1941. Work began on a new camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the following month. This became the site of the huge gas chambers where hundreds of thousands were murdered prior to November 1944, and the crematoria where their bodies were burned.

German chemicals company IG Farben built and operated a synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Other private companies like Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert also ran factories nearby, to use the prisoners as slave labour. Both Primo Levi and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel survived Monowitz concentration camp.

When Auschwitz was eventually liberated, it had more than 40 camps and subcamps. How Auschwitz became centre of Nazi Holocaust

How did Auschwitz work?

People from all over Europe were crammed into cattle wagons without windows, toilets, seats or food, and transported to Auschwitz.

There they were sorted into those who could work and those who were to be immediately killed.

The latter group were ordered to strip naked and sent to the showers for "delousing" - a euphemism used for the gas chambers.

Guards from the so-called "Hygienic Institute" would then drop powerful Zyklon-B gas pellets into the sealed chambers, and wait for people to die. It took about 20 minutes. The thick walls could not hide the screams of those suffocating inside.

Then Sonderkommandos - other prisoners, usually Jews forced to work for the guards or be killed - would remove artificial limbs, glasses, hair and teeth before dragging the corpses to the incinerators. Ashes of the bodies were buried or used as fertiliser.

Belongings of those gassed and those sent to work were taken for sorting in a part of the camp known as "Canada" - so named because the country was seen as a land of plenty.

Who were the victims?

SS guards sought to hide their crimes as Soviet troops closed in, and tried to destroy their extensive prisoner records - making it hard to fully quantify the number of victims.

Academic studies since agree that in total close to 1.3 million people arrived at Auschwitz. About 1.1 million of them died there.

Jews from all across Nazi-controlled Europe made up the vast majority of the victims. Almost one million Jewish people were murdered at Auschwitz.

One specific example was Hungary's Jewish population. In the space of just two months, between May and July 1944, Hungary transported 420,000 of the 437,000 Jewish people it sent to Auschwitz.

Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz every day. Three quarters of them were killed on arrival.

Some 75,000 Polish civilians, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 25,000 Roma and Sinti, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and political prisoners were also put to death by the German state at the Auschwitz complex.

German authorities ordered a halt to gassing and the destruction of the gas chambers and crematoria in late 1944, as Soviet troops advanced westward. The stockpile of stolen valuables in the Canada sector was shipped to Germany shortly afterwards.

Determined to erase the evidence of their crimes, the Nazis ordered 56,000 remaining prisoners to march west to other concentration camps, such as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Those too sick to walk were left behind; any who fell behind on the march itself were killed.

Soviet forces found only a few thousand survivors when they entered the camp on 27 January 1945, along with hundreds of thousands of clothes and several tonnes of human hair. Soldiers later recalled having to convince some survivors that the Nazis had truly gone.

Elie Wiesel later said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation that the Nazi crimes at Auschwitz "produced a mutation on a cosmic scale, affecting man's dreams and endeavours".

"After Auschwitz, the human condition is no longer the same. After Auschwitz, nothing will ever be the same."

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Auschwitz: How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust

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On 27 January 1945, Soviet troops cautiously entered Auschwitz. Primo Levi - one of the most famous survivors - was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the liberators arrived. The men cast "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive", he would later write.

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Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society.

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Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti- Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Holocaust was "the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators".

Scope of usage

While the term Holocaust generally refers to the systematic mass-murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe, the Nazis also murdered a large number of non-Jewish people who were also considered subhuman (Untermenschen) or undesirable. Some victims belonged to several categories targeted for extermination, e.g. an assimilated Jew who was a member of a communist party or someone of Jewish ancestry who identified as a Jehovah's Witness.

Taking into account all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews and an additional 11 million people during the war. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition, including Soviet civilian deaths, would produce a total of 17 million victims.

Despite widely varying treatment (some groups were actively targeted for genocide while others were not), some died in concentration camps such as Dachau and others from various forms of Nazi brutality. According to extensive documentation (written and photographic) left by the Nazis, eyewitness testimony by survivors, perpetrators and bystanders, and records of the occupied countries, most perished in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Ethnic criteria

Jews delivered to Chełmno death camp were forced to abandon their bundles along the way. In this photo, loading of victims sent from the ghetto in Łódź in 1942

The military campaign to displace persons like the Jews from Germany and other German-held territories during World War II, often with extreme brutality, is known as the Holocaust. It was carried out primarily by German forces and collaborators, German and non-German. Early in the war, millions of Jews were concentrated in urban ghettos. In 1941, Jews were massacred, and by December, Hitler had decided to exterminate all Jews living in Europe at that time. The European Jewish population was reduced from 9,740,000 to 3,642,000; the world's Jewish population was reduced by one-third, from roughly 16.6 million in 1939 to about 11 million in 1946. The extermination of Jews had been a priority to the Nazis, regardless of the consequences.

In January 1942, during the Wannsee Conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the " Final Solution to the Jewish Question" ( Endlösung der Judenfrage) and German State Secretary Josef Bühler urged conference chairman Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in the General Government. Jewish populations were systematically deported from the ghettos and the occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager ( extermination camps):

In 1978, Sebastian Haffner wrote that in December 1941, Hitler began to accept the failure of his primary goal-to dominate Europe, after his declaration of war against the United States, and his withdrawal-was compensated for by his secondary goal: the extermination of the Jews. As the Nazi war machine faltered during the war's final years, military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still diverted from the fronts to the death camps.

A photograph depicting Polish Jews captured by Germans during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, May 1943

In Poland - home of Europe's largest Jewish community before the war - the Nazis murdered 3.3 million Jews, or 90 percent of its Jewish population. Although reports of the Holocaust had reached Western leaders, public awareness in the United States and other democracies of the mass murder of Jews in Poland was low at the time; the first references in The New York Times, in 1942, were unconfirmed reports rather than front-page news.

Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Latvia lost over 70 percent of their Jewish populations; in Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia, the figure was about 50 percent. Over one-third of the Soviet Union's Jews were murdered; France lost about 25 percent of its Jewish population, Italy between 15% and 20%. Denmark evacuated nearly all of its Jews to nearby neutral Sweden; the Danish resistance movement, with the assistance of many Danish citizens, evacuated 7,220 of the country's 7,800 Jews by sea to Sweden, in vessels ranging from fishing boats to private yachts. The rescue allowed the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population to avoid capture by the Nazis. Jews outside Europe under Axis occupation were also affected by the Holocaust in Italian Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Japan, and China.

Although Jews are an ethnoreligious group, they were defined by the Nazis on purely racial grounds. The Nazi Party viewed the Jewish religion as irrelevant, persecuting Jews in accordance with antisemitic stereotypes of an alleged biologically determined heritage. Defining Jews as the chief enemy, Nazi racial ideology was also used to persecute other minorities.

The Yad Vashem museum has created, in an ongoing collaboration with many partners, a database with the names and biographical details of close to 4.8 of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Holocaust, as well as those whose fate has yet to be determined. The names of more than one million victims remain unknown and are still being collected.

The Slavs were one of the most widely persecuted groups during the war, with many Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Serbs and others killed by the Nazis. According to British historian Ian Kershaw, the Nazis' genocide and brutality was their way of ensuring Lebensraum ("living space") for those who met Hitler's narrow racial requirements; this necessitated the elimination of Bolsheviks and Slavs:

The Nazi revolution was broader than just the Holocaust. Its second goal was to eliminate Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe and to create a Lebensraum for Aryans ... As Bartov ( The Eastern Front; Hitler's Army) shows, it barbarised the German armies on the eastern front. Most of their three million men, from generals to ordinary soldiers, helped exterminate captured Slav soldiers and civilians. This was sometimes cold and deliberate murder of individuals (as with Jews), sometimes generalised brutality and neglect ... German soldiers' letters and memoirs reveal their terrible reasoning: Slavs were 'the Asiatic-Bolshevik' horde, an inferior but threatening race.

Polish priests and civilians in Bydgoszcz's Old Market Square, 9 September 1939. The Polish Church experienced brutal persecution under Nazi occupation.

The Nazi occupation of Poland was among the most brutal of the war, resulting in the murder of more than 1.8 million ethnic Poles and about 3 million Polish Jews. The six million Jewish, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles represented nearly 17 percent of the country's population. Poles were one of Hitler's first extermination targets, as he outlined in a 22 August 1939 speech to Wehrmacht commanders before the invasion. Intelligentsia, socially prominent, and influential people were primarily targeted, although ethnic Poles and other Slavic groups were also killed en masse. Hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps, and the intelligentsia were the first targets of the Einsatzgruppen death squads. The anti-Polish campaign culminated in the near-complete destruction of Warsaw, ordered by Hitler and Himmler in 1944. The original assumptions of Generalplan Ost were based on plans to exterminate around 85% (over 20 million) of ethnically Polish citizens of Poland, with the remaining 15% to be used as slaves.

Ukrainians

Between 1941 and 1945, approximately three million Ukrainian and other gentiles were murdered as part of Nazi extermination policies in present-day Ukraine. More Ukrainians were killed fighting the in the Red Army than American, British and French soldiers combined. Original Nazi plans called for the extermination of 65 percent of the nation's 23.2 million Ukrainians, with the survivors treated as slaves. Over two million Ukrainians were deported to Germany as slave labor. The ten-year plan would have exterminated, expelled, Germanized or enslaved most (or all) Ukrainians.

Soviet Slavs and POWs

Naked Soviet prisoners of war in Mauthausen concentration camp

During Operation Barbarossa (the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union), millions of Red Army prisoners of war were summarily executed in the field by German armies (the in particular), died under inhumane conditions in German prisoner of war camps, on death marches, or had been shipped to concentration camps for execution. The Germans killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs by starvation, exposure, and execution over an eight-month period in 1941-42. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, by the winter of 1941 "starvation and disease resulted in mass death of unimaginable proportions". 140,000-500,000 Soviet citizens and POWs were murdered in the concentration camps.

Soviet civilian populations in the occupied areas were severely persecuted and endured the treacherous conditions of the Eastern Front, which spawned atrocities such as the siege of Leningrad, when 1.2 million civilians died. Thousands of peasant villages across Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were annihilated by German troops. During the occupation, the Leningrad, Pskov and Novgorod regions lost about a quarter of their populations. An estimated one-quarter of Soviet civilian deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their allies (five million Russians, three million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Belarusians) were racially motivated. In 1995, the Russian Academy of Sciences reported that civilian deaths in the occupied USSR, including Jews, at the hands of the Germans totaled 13.7 million dead (20% of the population of 68 million). The figure includes 7.4 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals, 2.2 million deaths of persons deported to Germany as forced labour, and 4.1 million famine and disease deaths. An estimated three million people also died of starvation in unoccupied territory. The losses occurred within the 1946-1991 borders of the USSR, and include territories annexed in 1939-40. The deaths of 8.2 million Soviet civilians, including Jews, were documented by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission.

German police round up Romani in Asperg, Germany in May 1940

The Nazi genocide of the Romani people was ignored by scholars until the 1980s, and opinions continue to differ on its details. According to historians Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, the genocide of the Romani began later than that of the Jews and a smaller percentage was murdered. Hitler's genocidal campaign against Europe's Romani population involved the application of Nazi " racial hygiene" ( selective breeding applied to humans). Despite discriminatory measures, some Romani (including some of Germany's Sinti and Lalleri) were spared deportation and death, with the remaining Romani groups suffering a fate similar to that of the Jews. Romani were deported to the Jewish ghettos, were shot by SS Einsatzgruppen in their villages, or deported and gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.

Romani woman with German police officer and Nazi psychologist Dr. Robert Ritter

Estimates of the number of Romani victims range from 250,000 to 500,000. The Romani genocide was formally recognized by West Germany in 1982 and by Poland in 2011.

Spanish Republicans

Thousands of Spanish Republican refugees were living in France at the time of its occupation by Nazi Germany in 1940; 15,000 were detained in concentration camps, including 7,000 in Mauthausen-Gusen. Around 3,500 were murdered in the camp.

Non-Europeans

Nazi propaganda about the differences between German Aryans and blacks

The Nazis promoted xenophobia and racism against all "non-Aryan" races. African (black) residents of Germany and black prisoners of war, such as French colonial troops and African Americans, were also victims of Nazi racial policy. When the Nazis came to power, hundreds of African-German children, the offspring of German mothers and African soldiers brought in during the French occupation, lived in the Rhineland. In , Hitler described the children of marriages to African occupation troops as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe" who were "bastardising the European continent at its core". According to Hitler, "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardising the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate".

Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy on 27 September 1940, and was part of the Axis. No Japanese people were deliberately imprisoned or killed, since they were considered " honorary Aryans". The same applied to Turks and all other "Ural-Altaic" peoples. In his political testament Hitler wrote:

I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. [...] and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilisation to which we belong.[unreliable source? ]

People with disabilities

According to their eugenics policy, the Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society because they needed care and were considered an affront to their notion of a society composed of a perfect race. About 375,000 people were sterilized against their will due to their disabilities.

Those with disabilities were among the first to be murdered by the Nazis; according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the T-4 Program (established in 1939) was the model for future Nazi exterminations and it set a precedent for the genocide of what they described as the Jewish race. The program attempted to maintain the "purity" of the Aryan race by systematically murdering children and adults with physical deformities or suffering from mental illness, using gas chambers for the first time. Although Hitler formally halted the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued until the end of the war and an estimated 275,000 people with congenital disabilities were murdered.

Homosexual men

Homosexual men were also targets of the Holocaust, since male homosexuality was deemed incompatible with Nazism. The Nazis believed that gay men were weak, effeminate and unable to fight for the German nation; homosexuals were unlikely to produce children and increase the German birthrate. According to the Nazis, "inferior races" produced more children than Aryans, so anything which diminished Germany's reproductive potential was considered a racial danger. Homosexuality was also thought to be contagious by the Nazis. By 1936, Heinrich Himmler was leading efforts to persecute gay men under existing and new anti-homosexual laws. More than one million gay Germans were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were convicted and imprisoned. An unknown number were institutionalized in state-run mental hospitals. Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were chemically castrated by court order. Although an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps, the number who were murdered is uncertain. According to Austrian survivor Heinz Heger, gay men "suffered a higher mortality rate than other relatively small victim groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and political prisoners". Gay men in Nazi concentration camps were identified by a pink triangle on their shirts, along with men convicted of sexually assaulting children and bestiality. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's website, "Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals. Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorise German homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more."

Many homosexuals who were liberated from the concentration camps were persecuted in postwar Germany. Survivors were subject to prosecution under Paragraph 175 (which forbade "lewdness between men"), with time served in the concentration camps deducted from their sentences. This contrasted with the treatment of other Holocaust victims, who were compensated for the loss of family members and educational opportunities.

Political victims

Political prisoners

Another large group of victims was composed of German and foreign civilian activists from across the political spectrum who opposed the Nazi regime, captured resistance fighters (many of whom were executed during-or immediately after-their interrogation, particularly in occupied Poland and France) and, sometimes, their families. German political prisoners were a substantial proportion of the first inmates at Dachau (the prototypical Nazi concentration camp). The political People's Court was notorious for the number of its death sentences.

Nazi SA guard shut-down trade union headquarters in Berlin, 2 May 1933

German communists were among the first to be imprisoned in concentration camps. Their ties to the USSR concerned Hitler, and the Nazi Party was intractably opposed to communism. Rumors of communist violence were spread by the Nazis to justify the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Hitler his first dictatorial powers. Hermann Göring testified at Nuremberg that Nazi willingness to repress German Communists prompted Hindenburg and the old elite to cooperate with them. Hitler and the Nazis also despised German leftists because of their resistance to Nazi racism. Hitler referred to Marxism and "Bolshevism" as means for "the international Jew" to undermine "racial purity", stir up class tension and mobilize trade unions against the government and business. When the Nazis occupied a territory, communists, socialists and anarchists were usually among the first to be repressed; this included summary executions. An example is Hitler's Commissar Order, in which he demanded the summary execution of all Soviet troops who were political commissars who offered resistance or were captured in battle.

Enemy nationals

Thousands of people, primarily diplomats, of nationalities associated with the Allies ( China and Mexico, for example) and Spanish Civil War refugees in occupied France were interned or executed. After Italy's 1943 surrender, many Italian nationals (including partisans and Italian soldiers disarmed by the Germans) were sent to concentration camps.

Other religious persecution

The Nazis also targeted religious groups for political and ideological reasons.

Jehovah's Witnesses

Historian Detlef Garbe, director of the Neuengamme Memorial in Hamburg, wrote about Jehovah's Witnesses: "No other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism [Nazism] with comparable unanimity and steadfastness". Between 2,500 and 5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were murdered in the concentration camps; unwilling to fight for any cause, they refused to serve in the army.

Roman Catholics

The Nazis persecuted the Catholic Church, with the Nazi leadership hoping to gradually de-Christianize Germany. According to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, "By the latter part of the decade of the Thirties, church officials were well aware that the ultimate aim of Hitler and other Nazis was the total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion." Hitler vehemently despised Christianity, calling it the enemy of National Socialism. According to historian William Shirer, "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler-backed by Hitler-the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists". He also wrote that Hitler "inveighed against political Catholicism in and attacked both of the Christian Churches for their failure to recognise the racial problem...". As reported in the New York Times, Hitler's forces wished to de-Christianize Germany after "the final victory" and destroy Christianity. According to historian Alan Bullock, "Once the war was over, [Hitler] promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches, but until then he would be circumspect." Political Catholicism was a target of Hitler's 1934 Night of the Long Knives. German clergy, nuns and lay leaders were also targeted after the Nazi takeover, leading to thousands of arrests over the following years. Priests who were part of the Catholic resistance were killed. Hitler's invasion of Catholic Poland in 1939 began World War II, and the Nazis targeted clergy, monks and nuns in their campaign to destroy Polish culture.

The Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel at Dachau commemorates the clergy who were imprisoned there.

In 1940, the Priest Barracks of Dachau Concentration Camp was established. Of 2,720 clergy imprisoned at Dachau, the overwhelming majority (94.88 percent) were Catholic. According to Ian Kershaw, about 400 German priests were sent to the camp. Although the Holy See concluded a 1933 concordat with Germany to protect Catholicism during Nazi rule, the Nazis frequently violated the pact in their Kirchenkampf ("struggle with the churches"). They shut down the Catholic press, schools, political parties and youth groups in Germany amid murder and mass arrests. In March 1937, Pope Pius XI issued his Mit brennender Sorge encyclical accusing the Nazi government of violating the 1933 concordat and sowing the " tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church".

The church was especially harshly treated in annexed regions, such as Austria. Viennese Odilo Globocnik confiscated property, closed Catholic organizations and sent many priests to Dachau. In the Czech lands, religious orders were suppressed, schools closed, religious instruction forbidden and priests sent to concentration camps. Catholic bishops, clergy, nuns and laypeople protested and attacked Nazi policies in occupied territories; in 1942, the Dutch bishops protested the mistreatment of Jews. When Archbishop Johannes de Jong refused to yield to Nazi threats, the Gestapo rounded up Catholic "Jews" and sent 92 to Auschwitz. One Catholic abducted in this manner was nun Edith Stein, who was murdered at Auschwitz along with Poland's Maximilian Kolbe. Other Catholic victims of the Holocaust have been beatified, including Poland's 108 Martyrs of World War II, the Martyrs of Nowogródek, Dutch theologian Titus Brandsma and Germany's Lübeck martyrs and Bernhard Lichtenberg.

Polish Franciscan Maximilian Kolbe was murdered at Auschwitz.

According to Norman Davies, the Nazi terror was "much fiercer and more protracted in Poland than anywhere in Europe." The Nazis murdered millions of Polish Catholics. Nazi ideology viewed ethnic Poles-the mainly Catholic ethnic majority of Poland-as subhuman. After their 1939 invasion of Poland, the Nazis instituted a policy of murdering (or suppressing) the ethnic-Polish elite (including Catholic religious leaders). The Nazi plan for Poland was the nation's destruction, which necessitated attacking the Polish Church, (particularly in areas annexed by Germany). About the brief period of military control from 1 September to 25 October 1939, Davies wrote: "According to one source, 714 mass executions were carried out, and 6,376 people, mainly Catholics, were shot. Others put the death toll in one town alone at 20,000. It was a taste of things to come."

In Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, severe persecution began. The Nazis systematically dismantled the church, arresting its leaders, exiling its clergy and closing its churches, monasteries and convents. Germanization of the annexed regions began in December 1939, with deportations of men, women and children. According to Richard J. Evans, in the Reichsgau Wartheland "numerous clergy, monks, diocesan administrators and officials of the Church were arrested, deported to the General Government, taken off to a concentration camp in the Reich, or simply shot. Altogether some 1700 Polish priests ended up at Dachau: half of them did not survive their imprisonment." Among the clergy who were murdered at Dachau were many of the 108 Polish Martyrs of World War II.

Hans Frank said in 1940, "Poles may have only one master-a German. Two masters cannot exist side by side, and this is why all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed." Thomas J. Craughwell wrote that from 1939 to 1945, an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy (18 percent) were murdered; of these, 1,992 were murdered in concentration camps. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1,811 Polish priests were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Among the persecuted resisters was Irena Sendlerowa, head of the children's section of Żegota, who placed more than 2,500 Jewish children in convents, orphanages, schools, hospitals, and homes. Captured by the Gestapo in 1943, Sendlerowa was crippled by torture.

Protestants

The Nazis attempted to deal with Protestant dissent with their ideology by creating the Reich Church, a union of 28 existing Protestant groups espousing Positive Christianity (a doctrine compatible with Nazism). Non-Aryan ministers were suspended and church members called themselves German Christians, with "the swastika on their chest and the cross in their heart." The Protestant opposition to the Nazis established the Confessing Church, a rival umbrella organization of independent German regional churches which was persecuted.

Freemasons

The Nazis claimed that high-degree Masons were willing members of "the Jewish conspiracy" and Freemasonry was a cause of Germany's defeat in World War I. Reich Security Main Office ( Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA) records indicate the persecution of Freemasons during the Holocaust. RSHA Amt VII (written records), overseen by Franz Six, was responsible for "ideological" tasks: the creation of antisemitic and anti-Masonic propaganda. Although the exact number is unknown, an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 Freemasons were murdered as a result of Hitler's December 1941 Nacht und Nebel directive. Masonic concentration camp inmates, considered political prisoners, wore an inverted red triangle.

Small blue forget-me-nots were first used by the Zur Sonne Grand Lodge in 1926 as a Masonic emblem at its annual convention in Bremen. In 1938, a forget-me-not badge made by the factory which produced the Masonic badge was chosen for the annual Nazi Winterhilfswerk, the charity drive of the National Socialist People's Welfare (the party's welfare branch). The coincidence enabled Freemasons to wear the forget-me-not badge as a secret sign of Masonic membership.

After the war, the forget-me-not was again used as a Masonic emblem at the first annual United Grand Lodges of Germany convention in 1948. The badge is worn on the lapels of Masons worldwide in remembrance of those who have suffered in the name of Freemasonry, particularly during the Nazi era.

The SS and police conducted mass actions against civilians with alleged links to resistance movements, their families, and villages or city districts. Notorious killings occurred in Lidice, Khatyn, Kragujevac, Sant'Anna and Oradour-sur-Glane, and a district of Warsaw was obliterated. In occupied Poland, Nazi Germany imposed the death penalty on those found sheltering (or aiding) Jews. "Social deviants"- prostitutes, vagrants, alcoholics, drug addicts, open dissidents, pacifists, draft resisters and common criminals-were also imprisoned in concentration camps. The common criminals frequently became Kapos, inmate guards of fellow prisoners.

Some Germans and Austrians who had lived abroad for much of their lives were considered to have had too much exposure to foreign ideas, and were sent to concentration camps. These prisoners, known as "emigrants", each wore a blue triangle.[better source needed ]

On rare occasions, POWs from Western Allied armies were sent to concentration camps, including 350 Americans - some chosen for being Jewish, but mostly for looking Jewish or for being troublemakers or otherwise 'undesirable'. Some captured in the Battle of the Bulge were forced into slave labor at the Berga concentration camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald; over 70 were killed by the conditions there. The " KLB Club" was a group of 168 Allied airmen - mainly American, British, and Canadian - considered Terrorfliegers ("terror fliers"), denied POW status, and held at Buchenwald for two months until a German officer arranged their transfer to a standard POW camp, a week before their scheduled execution.

Bibliography

Further reading

Benz, Wolfgang (2015). Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus [Dimension of the genocide: the number of Jewish victims of Nazism] (in German). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. ISBN 978-3-486-70833-2.

External links

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Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society.

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https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps

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anti-Semitism | History, Facts, & Examples

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anti-Semitism, hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group. The term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to designate the anti-Jewish campaigns under way in central Europe at that time.

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anti-Semitism, ( see Researcher's Note) hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group. The term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to designate the anti-Jewish campaigns underway in central Europe at that time. Nazi anti-Semitism, which culminated in the Holocaust, had a racist dimension in that it targeted Jews because of their supposed biological characteristics-even those who had themselves converted to other religions or whose parents were converts. This variety of anti-Jewish racism dates only to the emergence of so-called "scientific racism" in the 19th century and is different in nature from earlier anti-Jewish prejudices.

The origins of Christian anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism has existed to some degree wherever Jews have settled outside Palestine. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, religious differences were the primary basis for anti-Semitism. In the Hellenistic Age, for instance, Jews' social segregation and their refusal to acknowledge the gods worshipped by other peoples aroused resentment among some pagans, particularly in the 1st century bce-1st century ce. Unlike polytheistic religions, which acknowledge multiple gods, Judaism is monotheistic-it recognizes only one God. However, pagans saw Jews' principled refusal to worship emperors as gods as a sign of disloyalty.

Although Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples were practicing Jews and Christianity is rooted in the Jewish teaching of monotheism, Judaism and Christianity became rivals soon after Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate, who executed him according to contemporary Roman practice. Religious rivalry initially was theological. It soon also became political.

Historians agree that the break between Judaism and Christianity followed the Roman destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70 ce and the subsequent exile of Jews. In the aftermath of this devastating defeat, which was interpreted by Jew and Christian alike as a sign of divine punishment, the Gospels diminished Roman responsibility and expressed Jewish culpability in the death of Jesus both explicitly (Matthew 27:25) and implicitly. Jews were depicted as killers of the Son of God.

Christianity was intent on replacing Judaism by making its own particular message universal. The New Testament was seen as fulfilling the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible); Christians were the new Israel, both in flesh and in spirit. The God of justice had been replaced by the God of love. Thus, some early Church Fathers taught that God had finished with the Jews, whose only purpose in history was to prepare for the arrival of his Son. According to this view, the Jews should have left the scene. Their continued survival seemed to be an act of stubborn defiance. Exile was taken as a sign of divine disfavour incurred by the Jews' denial that Jesus was the Messiah and by their role in his crucifixion.

As Christianity spread in the first centuries ce, most Jews continued to reject that religion. As a consequence, by the 4th century, Christians tended to regard Jews as an alien people who, because of their repudiation of Christ and his church, were condemned to perpetual migration (a belief best illustrated in the legend of the Wandering Jew). When the Christian church became dominant in the Roman Empire, its leaders inspired many laws by Roman emperors designed to segregate Jews and curtail their freedoms when they appeared to threaten Christian religious domination. As a consequence, Jews were increasingly forced to the margins of European society.

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Enmity toward the Jews was expressed most acutely in the church's teaching of contempt. From St. Augustine in the 4th century to Martin Luther in the 16th, some of the most eloquent and persuasive Christian theologians excoriated the Jews as rebels against God and murderers of the Lord. They were described as companions of the Devil and a race of vipers. Church liturgy, particularly the scriptural readings for the Good Friday commemoration of the Crucifixion, contributed to this enmity. Such views were finally renounced by the Roman Catholic Church decades after the Holocaust with the Vatican II declaration of Nostra aetate (Latin: "In Our Era") in 1965, which transformed Roman Catholic teaching regarding Jews and Judaism.

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anti-Semitism | History, Facts, & Examples

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anti-Semitism, (see Researcher's Note) hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group. The term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to designate the anti-Jewish campaigns underway in central Europe at that time.

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Adolf Hitler, the leader of Germany's Nazi Party, was one of the most powerful and notorious dictators of the 20th century. Hitler capitalized on economic woes, popular discontent and political infighting to take absolute power in Germany beginning in 1933.

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Early Life

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town near the Austro-German frontier. After his father, Alois, retired as a state customs official, young Adolf spent most of his childhood in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria.

Not wanting to follow in his father's footsteps as a civil servant, he began struggling in secondary school and eventually dropped out. Alois died in 1903, and Adolf pursued his dream of being an artist, though he was rejected from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts.

After his mother, Klara, died in 1908, Hitler moved to Vienna, where he pieced together a living painting scenery and monuments and selling the images. Lonely, isolated and a voracious reader, Hitler became interested in politics during his years in Vienna, and developed many of the ideas that would shape Nazi ideology.

Military Career of Adolf Hitler

In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, in the German state of Bavaria. When World War I broke out the following summer, he successfully petitioned the Bavarian king to be allowed to volunteer in a reserve infantry regiment.

Deployed in October 1914 to Belgium, Hitler served throughout the Great War and won two decorations for bravery, including the rare Iron Cross First Class, which he wore to the end of his life.

Hitler was wounded twice during the conflict: He was hit in the leg during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and temporarily blinded by a British gas attack near Ypres in 1918. A month later, he was recuperating in a hospital at Pasewalk, northeast of Berlin, when news arrived of the armistice and Germany's defeat in World War I.

Like many Germans, Hitler came to believe the country's devastating defeat could be attributed not to the Allies, but to insufficiently patriotic "traitors" at home-a myth that would undermine the post-war Weimar Republic and set the stage for Hitler's rise.

Nazi Party

After Hitler returned to Munich in late 1918, he joined the small German Workers' Party, which aimed to unite the interests of the working class with a strong German nationalism. His skilled oratory and charismatic energy helped propel him in the party's ranks, and in 1920 he left the army and took charge of its propaganda efforts.

In one of Hitler's strokes of propaganda genius, the newly renamed National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazi Party, adopted a version of the swastika-an ancient sacred symbol of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism -as its emblem. Printed in a white circle on a red background, Hitler's swastika would take on terrifying symbolic power in the years to come.

By the end of 1921, Hitler led the growing Nazi Party, capitalizing on widespread discontent with the Weimar Republic and the punishing terms of the Versailles Treaty. Many dissatisfied former army officers in Munich would join the Nazis, notably Ernst Röhm, who recruited the "strong arm" squads-known as the Sturmabteilung (SA)-which Hitler used to protect party meetings and attack opponents.

Beer Hall Putsch

On the evening of November 8, 1923, members of the SA and others forced their way into a large beer hall where another right-wing leader was addressing the crowd. Wielding a revolver, Hitler proclaimed the beginning of a national revolution and led marchers to the center of Munich, where they got into a gun battle with police.

Hitler fled quickly, but he and other rebel leaders were later arrested. Even though it failed spectacularly, the Beer Hall Putsch established Hitler as a national figure, and (in the eyes of many) a hero of right-wing nationalism.

'Mein Kampf'

Tried for treason, Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, but would serve only nine months in the relative comfort of Landsberg Castle. During this period, he began to dictate the book that would become " Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle"), the first volume of which was published in 1925.

In it, Hitler expanded on the nationalistic, anti-Semitic views he had begun to develop in Vienna in his early twenties, and laid out plans for the Germany-and the world-he sought to create when he came to power.

Hitler would finish the second volume of "Mein Kampf" after his release, while relaxing in the mountain village of Berchtesgaden. It sold modestly at first, but with Hitler's rise it became Germany's best-selling book after the Bible. By 1940, it had sold some 6 million copies there.

Hitler's second book, "The Zweites Buch," was written in 1928 and contained his thoughts on foreign policy. It was not published in his lifetime due to the poor initial sales of "Mein Kampf." The first English translations of "The Zweites Buch" did not appear until 1962 and was published under the title "Hitler's Secret Book."

Obsessed with race and the idea of ethnic "purity," Hitler saw a natural order that placed the so-called "Aryan race" at the top.

For him, the unity of the Volk (the German people) would find its truest incarnation not in democratic or parliamentary government, but in one supreme leader, or Führer.

"Mein Kampf" also addressed the need for Lebensraum (or living space): In order to fulfill its destiny, Germany should take over lands to the east that were now occupied by "inferior" Slavic peoples-including Austria, the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia), Poland and Russia.

The Schutzstaffel (SS)

By the time Hitler left prison, economic recovery had restored some popular support for the Weimar Republic, and support for right-wing causes like Nazism appeared to be waning.

Over the next few years, Hitler laid low and worked on reorganizing and reshaping the Nazi Party. He established the Hitler Youth to organize youngsters, and created the Schutzstaffel (SS) as a more reliable alternative to the SA.

Members of the SS wore black uniforms and swore a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. (After 1929, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, the SS would develop from a group of some 200 men into a force that would dominate Germany and terrorize the rest of occupied Europe during World War II.)

Eva Braun

Hitler spent much of his time at Berchtesgaden during these years, and his half-sister, Angela Raubal, and her two daughters often joined him. After Hitler became infatuated with his beautiful blonde niece, Geli Raubal, his possessive jealousy apparently led her to commit suicide in 1931.

Devastated by the loss, Hitler would consider Geli the only true love affair of his life. He soon began a long relationship with Eva Braun, a shop assistant from Munich, but refused to marry her.

The worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929 again threatened the stability of the Weimar Republic. Determined to achieve political power in order to affect his revolution, Hitler built up Nazi support among German conservatives, including army, business and industrial leaders.

The Third Reich

In 1932, Hitler ran against the war hero Paul von Hindenburg for president, and received 36.8 percent of the vote. With the government in chaos, three successive chancellors failed to maintain control, and in late January 1933 Hindenburg named the 43-year-old Hitler as chancellor, capping the stunning rise of an unlikely leader.

January 30, 1933 marked the birth of the Third Reich, or as the Nazis called it, the "Thousand-Year Reich" (after Hitler's boast that it would endure for a millennium).

Reichstag Fire

Though the Nazis never attained more than 37 percent of the vote at the height of their popularity in 1932, Hitler was able to grab absolute power in Germany largely due to divisions and inaction among the majority who opposed Nazism.

After a devastating fire at Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, in February 1933-possibly the work of a Dutch communist, though later evidence suggested Nazis set the Reichstag fire themselves-Hitler had an excuse to step up the political oppression and violence against his opponents.

On March 23, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, giving full powers to Hitler and celebrating the union of National Socialism with the old German establishment (i.e., Hindenburg).

That July, the government passed a law stating that the Nazi Party "constitutes the only political party in Germany," and within months all non-Nazi parties, trade unions and other organizations had ceased to exist.

His autocratic power now secure within Germany, Hitler turned his eyes toward the rest of Europe.

In 1933, Germany was diplomatically isolated, with a weak military and hostile neighbors (France and Poland). In a famous speech in May 1933, Hitler struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone, claiming Germany supported disarmament and peace.

But behind this appeasement strategy, the domination and expansion of the Volk remained Hitler's overriding aim.

By early the following year, he had withdrawn Germany from the League of Nations and begun to militarize the nation in anticipation of his plans for territorial conquest.

Night of the Long Knives

On June 29, 1934, the infamous Night of the Long Knives, Hitler had Röhm, former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and hundreds of other problematic members of his own party murdered, in particular troublesome members of the SA.

When the 86-year-old Hindenburg died on August 2, military leaders agreed to combine the presidency and chancellorship into one position, meaning Hitler would command all the armed forces of the Reich.

Persecution of Jews

On September 15, 1935, passage of the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship, and barred them from marrying or having relations with persons of "German or related blood."

Though the Nazis attempted to downplay its persecution of Jews in order to placate the international community during the 1936 Berlin Olympics (in which German-Jewish athletes were not allowed to compete), additional decrees over the next few years disenfranchised Jews and took away their political and civil rights.

In addition to its pervasive anti-Semitism, Hitler's government also sought to establish the cultural dominance of Nazism by burning books, forcing newspapers out of business, using radio and movies for propaganda purposes and forcing teachers throughout Germany's educational system to join the party.

Much of the Nazi persecution of Jews and other targets occurred at the hands of the Geheime Staatspolizei (GESTAPO), or Secret State Police, an arm of the SS that expanded during this period.

Outbreak of World War II

In March 1936, against the advice of his generals, Hitler ordered German troops to reoccupy the demilitarized left bank of the Rhine.

Over the next two years, Germany concluded alliances with Italy and Japan, annexed Austria and moved against Czechoslovakia-all essentially without resistance from Great Britain, France or the rest of the international community.

Once he confirmed the alliance with Italy in the so-called "Pact of Steel" in May 1939, Hitler then signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. On September 1, 1939, Nazi troops invaded Poland, finally prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany.

Blitzkrieg

After ordering the occupation of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, Hitler adopted a plan proposed by one of his generals to attack France through the Ardennes Forest. The blitzkrieg ("lightning war") attack began on May 10; Holland quickly surrendered, followed by Belgium.

German troops made it all the way to the English Channel, forcing British and French forces to evacuate en masse from Dunkirk in late May. On June 22, France was forced to sign an armistice with Germany.

Hitler had hoped to force Britain to seek peace as well, but when that failed he went ahead with his attacks on that country, followed by an invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor that December, the United States declared war on Japan, and Germany's alliance with Japan demanded that Hitler declare war on the United States as well.

At that point in the conflict, Hitler shifted his central strategy to focus on breaking the alliance of his main opponents (Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union) by forcing one of them to make peace with him.

Concentration Camps

Beginning in 1933, the SS had operated a network of concentration camps, including a notorious camp at Dachau, near Munich, to hold Jews and other targets of the Nazi regime.

After war broke out, the Nazis shifted from expelling Jews from German-controlled territories to exterminating them. Einsatzgruppen, or mobile death squads, executed entire Jewish communities during the Soviet invasion, while the existing concentration-camp network expanded to include death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland.

In addition to forced labor and mass execution, certain Jews at Auschwitz were targeted as the subjects of horrific medical experiments carried out by eugenicist Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death." Mengele's experiments focused on twins and exposed 3,000 child prisoners to disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical research.

Though the Nazis also imprisoned and killed Catholics, homosexuals, political dissidents, Roma (gypsies) and the disabled, above all they targeted Jews-some 6 million of whom were killed in German-occupied Europe by war's end.

End of World War II

With defeats at El-Alamein and Stalingrad, as well as the landing of U.S. troops in North Africa by the end of 1942, the tide of the war turned against Germany.

As the conflict continued, Hitler became increasingly unwell, isolated and dependent on medications administered by his personal physician.

Several attempts were made on his life, including one that came close to succeeding in July 1944, when Col. Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb that exploded during a conference at Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia.

Within a few months of the successful Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the Allies had begun liberating cities across Europe. That December, Hitler attempted to direct another offensive through the Ardennes, trying to split British and American forces.

But after January 1945, he holed up in a bunker beneath the Chancellery in Berlin. With Soviet forces closing in, Hitler made plans for a last-ditch resistance before finally abandoning that plan.

How Did Adolf Hitler Die?

At midnight on the night of April 28-29, Hitler married Eva Braun in the Berlin bunker. After dictating his political testament, Hitler shot himself in his suite on April 30; Braun took poison. Their bodies were burned according to Hitler's instructions.

With Soviet troops occupying Berlin, Germany surrendered unconditionally on all fronts on May 7, 1945, bringing the war in Europe to a close.

In the end, Hitler's planned "Thousand-Year Reich" lasted just over 12 years, but wreaked unfathomable destruction and devastation during that time, forever transforming the history of Germany, Europe and the world.

Sources

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
iWonder - Adolf Hitler: Man and Monster, BBC.
The Holocaust: A Learning Site for Students, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Adolf Hiter: Rise to Power, Impact & Death

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Adolf Hitler was leader of the Nazi Party who rose to become dictator of Germany. Hitler used his power to orchestrate the deaths of 6 million Jews and millions of others during World War II.

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The major causes of World War II were numerous. They include the impact of the Treaty of Versailles following WWI, the worldwide economic depression, failure of appeasement, the rise of militarism in Germany and Japan, and the failure of the League of Nations. ... Then, on September 1, 1939, German troops invaded.

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In the course of the Second World War, the Nazis murdered nearly six million European Jews. This genocide is called the Holocaust.

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During the Second World War, the Nazis murdered nearly six million European Jews. This genocide is called the Holocaust. Here, you can read about its causes and backgrounds, the stages of the Holocaust, and the perpetrators.

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Political views of Adolf Hitler - Wikipedia

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Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf of his hatred towards what he believed were the world's twin evils, namely communism and Judaism. He said his aim was to eradicate both from Germany and moreover stressed his intention to unite all Germans in the process of destroying them.

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The political views of Adolf Hitler have presented historians and biographers with some difficulty. His writings and methods were often adapted to need and circumstance, although there were some steady themes, including antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-parliamentarianism, German Lebensraum ("living space"), belief in the superiority of an " Aryan race" and an extreme form of German nationalism. Hitler personally claimed he was fighting against " Jewish Marxism".

Adolf Hitler's political views were formed during three periods, namely (1) his years as a poverty-stricken young man in Vienna and Munich prior to World War I, during which he turned to nationalist-oriented political pamphlets and antisemitic newspapers out of distrust for mainstream newspapers and political parties; (2) the closing months of World War I when Germany lost the war, as Hitler is said to have developed his extreme nationalism during this time, desiring to "save" Germany from both external and internal "enemies" who in his view betrayed it; (3) and the 1920s, during which his early political career began and he wrote . Hitler formally renounced his Austrian citizenship on 7 April 1925, but did not acquire German citizenship until almost seven years later in 1932; thereby allowing him to run for public office. Hitler was influenced by Benito Mussolini, who was appointed Prime Minister of Italy in October 1922 after his " March on Rome". In many ways, Hitler epitomizes "the force of personality in political life" as mentioned by Friedrich Meinecke. He was essential to the very framework of Nazism's political appeal and its manifestation in Germany. So important were Hitler's views that they immediately affected the political policies of Nazi Germany. He asserted the Führerprinzip ("leader principle"). The principle relied on absolute obedience of all subordinates to their superiors. Hitler viewed the party structure and later the government structure as a pyramid, with himself-the infallible leader-at the apex.

Hitler firmly believed that the force of "will" was decisive in determining the political course for a nation and rationalized his actions accordingly. Given that Hitler was appointed "leader of the German Reich for life", he "embodied the supreme power of the state and, as the delegate of the German people", it was his role to determine the "outward form and structure of the Reich". To that end, Hitler's political motivation consisted of an ideology that combined traditional German and Austrian antisemitism with an intellectualized racial doctrine resting on an admixture of bits and pieces of social Darwinism and the ideas - mostly obtained second-hand and only partially understood - of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur de Gobineau and Alfred Rosenberg as well as Paul de Lagarde, Georges Sorel, Alfred Ploetz and others.

During World War I, Hitler was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack on 15 October 1918 for which he was hospitalised in Pasewalk. While there, Hitler learned of Germany's defeat, with the Armistice to take effect on 11 November. By his own account-upon receiving this news, he suffered a second bout of blindness. Days after digesting this traumatic news, Hitler later stated his decision: "... my own fate became known to me ... I ... decided to go into politics." On 19 November 1918, Hitler was discharged from the Pasewalk hospital and returned to Munich, which at the time was in a state of socialist upheaval. Arriving on 21 November, he was assigned to 7th Company of the 1st Replacement Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. In December he was reassigned to a Prisoner of War camp in Traunstein as a guard. There he would stay until the camp dissolved January 1919.

Returning to Munich, Hitler spent a few months in barracks waiting for reassignment. During this time Munich was a part of the People's State of Bavaria, which was still in a state of chaos with a number of assassinations occurring including that of socialist Kurt Eisner who was shot dead in Munich by a German nationalist on 21 February 1919. Other acts of violence were the killings of both Major Paul Ritter von Jahreiß and the conservative MP Heinrich Osel. In this political turmoil, Berlin sent in the military, whom the communists called the "White Guards of Capitalism". On 3 April 1919, Hitler was elected as the liaison of his military battalion and again on 15 April. During this time he urged his unit to stay out of the fighting and not join either side. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was officially crushed on 6 May 1919, when Lt. General Burghard von Oven and his military forces declared the city secure. In the aftermath of arrests and executions, Hitler denounced a fellow liaison, Georg Dufter, as a Soviet "radical rabble-rouser." Other testimony he gave to the military board of inquiry allowed them to root out other members of the military that "had been infected with revolutionary fervor." For his anti-communist views he was allowed to avoid discharge when his unit was disbanded in May 1919.

In June 1919 he was moved to the demobilization office of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. Around this time the German military command released an edict that the army's main priority was to "carry out, in conjunction with the police, stricter surveillance of the population ... so that the ignition of any new unrest can be discovered and extinguished." In May 1919 Karl Mayr became commander of the 6th Battalion of the guards regiment in Munich and from 30 May the head of the "Education and Propaganda Department" (Dept Ib/P) of the Bavarian Reichswehr, Headquarters 4. In this capacity as head of the intelligence department, Mayr recruited Hitler as an undercover agent in early June 1919. Under Captain Mayr "national thinking" courses were arranged at the Reichswehrlager Lechfeld near Augsburg, with Hitler attending from 10 to 19 July 1919. During this time Hitler so impressed Mayr that he assigned him to an anti-bolshevik "educational commando" as 1 of 26 instructors in the summer of 1919.

These courses he taught helped popularize the notion that there was a scapegoat responsible for the outbreak of war and Germany's defeat. Hitler's own bitterness over the collapse of the war effort also began to shape his ideology. Like other German nationalists, he believed the Dolchstoßlegende ( stab-in-the-back myth) which claimed that the German Army, "undefeated in the field", had been "stabbed in the back" on the home front by civilian leaders and Marxists, later dubbed the "November criminals". "International Jewry" was described as a scourge composed of communists relentlessly destroying Germany. Such scapegoating was essential to Hitler's political career and it seems that he genuinely believed that Jews were responsible for Germany's post-war troubles.

In July 1919, Hitler was appointed Verbindungsmann (intelligence agent) of an Aufklärungskommando (reconnaissance commando) of the Reichswehr, both to influence other soldiers and to infiltrate the German Workers' Party (DAP). Much like the political activists in the DAP, Hitler blamed the loss of the war on Jewish intrigue at home and abroad, espousing völkisch-nationalist political beliefs with the intention of resurrecting Germany's greatness by smashing the Versailles Treaty. Along those lines, Hitler proclaimed that the "German yoke must be broken by German iron" ( Das deutsche Elend muß durch deutsches Eisen zerbrochen werden).

German Workers' Party

In September 1919 Hitler wrote what is often deemed his first antisemitic text, requested by Mayr as a reply to an inquiry by Adolf Gemlich, who had participated in the same "educational courses" as Hitler. In this report, Hitler argued for a "rational anti-Semitism" which would not resort to pogroms, but instead "legally fight and remove the privileges enjoyed by the Jews as opposed to other foreigners living among us. Its final goal, however, must be the irrevocable removal of the Jews themselves". Most people at the time understood this as a call for forced expulsion. Europe has a long history of expelling Jews and the of the Inquisition.

While he studied the activities of the German Workers' Party (DAP), Hitler became impressed with founder Anton Drexler's antisemitic, nationalist, anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist ideas. Drexler was impressed with Hitler's oratory skills, and invited him to join the DAP on 12 September 1919. On the orders of his army superiors, Hitler applied to join the party and within a week was accepted as party member 555 (the party began counting membership at 500 to give the impression they were a much larger party). In , Hitler later claimed to be the seventh party member, one of many myths in Mein Kampf designed, as biographer Ian Kershaw writes, "to serve the Führer legend".

Hitler was discharged from the army on 31 March 1920 and began working full-time for the party. Displaying his talent for oratory and propaganda skills, with the support of Drexler, Hitler became chief of propaganda for the party in early 1920. When early party members promulgated their 25-point manifesto on 24 February 1920 (co-authored by Hitler, Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart), it was Hitler who penned the first point, revealing his intention to unify German-speaking peoples, claiming that the party demanded "all Germans be gathered together in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of all peoples to self-determination". By the spring of 1920, he engineered the change of name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei - NSDAP), commonly known as the Nazi Party. Under his influence, the party adopted a modified swastika, a well-known good luck charm that had previously been used in Germany as a mark of volkishness and " Aryanism", along with the Roman salute used by Italian fascists. At this time, the Nazi Party was one of many small extremist groups in Munich, but Hitler's vitriolic beer hall speeches began attracting regular audiences. He became adept at using populist themes, including the use of scapegoats, who were blamed for his listeners' economic hardships. He gained notoriety for his rowdy polemic speeches against the Treaty of Versailles, rival politicians and especially against Marxists and Jews. Hitler used personal magnetism and an understanding of crowd psychology to advantage while engaged in public speaking.

While Hitler and Eckart were on a fundraising trip to Berlin in June 1921, a mutiny broke out within the Nazi Party in Munich. Members of its executive committee wanted to merge with the rival German Socialist Party (DSP). Hitler returned to Munich on 11 July and angrily tendered his resignation. The committee members realised that the resignation of their leading public figure and speaker would mean the end of the party. Hitler announced he would rejoin on the condition that he would replace Drexler as party chairman and that the party headquarters would remain in Munich. They capitulated to Hitler's demand and on 29 July 1921 a special congress was convened to formalize Hitler as the new chairman (the vote was 543 for Hitler and one against).

Hitler asserted the Führerprinzip ("leader principle"). The principle relied on absolute obedience of all subordinates to their superiors as he viewed the party structure and later the government structure as a pyramid, with himself-the infallible leader-at the apex. Rank in the party was not determined by elections-positions were filled through appointment by those of higher rank, who demanded unquestioning obedience to the will of the leader.

Early followers of the party included Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring (command of the Sturmabteilung (SA) as Oberster SA-Führer in 1923), Ernst Röhm (later head of the SA), Alfred Rosenberg (prominent racial theorist), Gregor Strasser, Dietrich Eckart (a key founder of the party), Hermann Esser, Ludwig Maximilian Erwin von Scheubner-Richter and Erich Ludendorff (Field-Marshal who was the party's candidate for President of the Republic in 1925).

Hitler enlisted the help of World War I General Erich Ludendorff to try to seize power in Munich (the capital of Bavaria) in an attempt later known as the of 8-9 November 1923. This would be a step in the seizure of power nationwide, overthrowing the Weimar Republic in Berlin. On 8 November, Hitler's forces initially succeeded in occupying the local Reichswehr and police headquarters; however, neither the army nor the state police joined forces with him. The next day, Hitler and his followers marched from the beer hall to the Bavarian War Ministry to overthrow the Bavarian government on their "March on Berlin". Hitler wanted to emulate Benito Mussolini's " March on Rome" (1922) by staging his own coup in Bavaria to be followed by a challenge to the government in Berlin. However, the Bavarian authorities ordered the police to stand their ground. The putschists were dispersed after a short firefight in the streets near the Feldherrnhalle. In all, sixteen Nazi members and four police officers were killed in the failed coup.

Hitler fled to the home of Ernst Hanfstaengl and by some accounts contemplated suicide, although this state of mind has been disputed. Hitler was depressed but calm when he was arrested on 11 November 1923. Fearing "left-wing" members of the Nazi Party might try to seize leadership from him during his incarceration, Hitler quickly appointed Alfred Rosenberg as the party's temporary leader.

Beginning in February 1924, Hitler was tried for high treason before the special People's Court in Munich. He used his trial as an opportunity to spread his message throughout Germany. At one point during the trial, Hitler discussed political leadership, during which he stated that leading people was not a matter of political science ( Staatswissenschaft) but an innate ability, one of statecraft ( Staatskunst). He further elaborated by claiming that out of ten thousand politicians only one Bismarck emerged, subtly implying that he too had been born with this gift. Continuing, he declared that it was not Karl Marx who stirred the masses and ignited the Russian Revolution but Vladimir Lenin, not making his appeal to the mind but to the senses. His rousing speeches during the trial made Hitler famous, but they did not exonerate him. In April 1924, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment in Landsberg Prison, where he received preferential treatment from sympathetic guards and received substantial quantities of fan mail, including funds and other forms of assistance. During 1923 and 1924 at Landsberg, he dictated the first volume of Mein Kampf ( My Struggle) to his deputy Rudolf Hess. Originally entitled Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice, his publisher shortened the title to Mein Kampf.

The book, dedicated to Thule Society member Dietrich Eckart, was an autobiography and exposition of his ideology. In Mein Kampf, Hitler speaks at length about his youth, his early days in the Nazi Party and general ideas on politics, including the transformation of German society into one based on race, with some passages implying genocide. Published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, it sold 228,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. In 1933, Hitler's first year in office, 1,000,000 copies were sold. The book acts as a reference, giving insight into the world view from which Hitler never wavered throughout his life.

It states that during his childhood, Hitler had little interest in politics as he had ambitions to become a painter. Like other boys in his part of Austria, he was attracted to pan-Germanism, but his intellectual pursuits were generally those of a dilettante. Hitler portrays himself as a born leader interested in knightly adventures, exploration. By the time he was 11, Hitler was a nationalist interested in history.

Ultimately, Hitler never finished his primary schooling since he quit by the time he was 16, devoting his attention instead to his artistic pursuits which led him to Vienna in 1905. It was in Vienna where Hitler was later to proclaim he learned some hard lessons, namely that life was a critical struggle between the weak and the strong where principles of humanity mattered not at all since everything simply boiled down to "victory and defeat".

While Hitler was incarcerated at the Landsberg prison writing Mein Kampf, he had routine visits from the respected First World War veteran, Major General Dr. Karl Haushofer, who was the chair of the military science and geography department at the University of Munich. These meetings consisted of lectures and academic briefings on geopolitics, most certainly covering the Nazi ideal of Lebensraum and which likely influenced the views Hitler laid out in Mein Kampf. Perhaps confirming Hitler's assertions, Haushofer espoused the theory that Germany was defeated in the Great War by her lack of sufficient space and autarchy. More importantly, Haushofer believed that nations which rested their power upon command of the sea and maritime trade routes were doomed to fail, since any such control "would soon be broken", writing that human history stood "at the great turning-point in the favourable position of the island empires". Hitler believed that for Germany to expand its influence, it would have to rely on continental space and abundant arable soil which could only be found eastward. Influenced by the theories of Haushofer, Hitler believed it was Germany's right to seize the cultivatable land in Russia since the earth belonged to those people willing to till it "industriously" as opposed to the slothful, incompetent people unworthy to possess it. Describing the Russians in the harshest of terms while intimating that the German people were more deserving by virtue of their alleged superior intellect, Hitler stated: "It is criminal to ask an intelligent people to limit its children in order that a lazy and stupid people next door can literally abuse a gigantic surface of the earth". Presaging this Nazi goal, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: "Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation". In this sense, social Darwinism and geography were merged in Hitler's mind.

Many historians contend that Hitler's essential character and political philosophy can be discovered in Mein Kampf. Historian James Joll once claimed that Mein Kampf constituted "all of Hitler's beliefs, most of his programme and much of his character". According to Andreas Hillgruber, evident within the text of Mein Kampf is nothing less than the very crux of Hitler's program. One of Hitler's foremost goals was that Germany should become "a World Power" on the geopolitical stage, or as he stated, "it will not continue to exist at all". Biographer Joachim Fest asserted that Mein Kampf contained a "remarkably faithful portrait of its author".

In his infamous tome, Hitler categorized human beings by their physical attributes, claiming German or Nordic Aryans were at the top of the hierarchy while assigning the bottom orders to Jews and Romani. Hitler claimed that dominated people benefit by learning from superior Aryans and said the Jews were conspiring to keep this " master race" from rightfully ruling the world by diluting its racial and cultural purity and exhorting Aryans to believe in equality rather than superiority and inferiority. Within Mein Kampf, Hitler describes a struggle for world domination, an ongoing racial, cultural and political battle between Aryans and Jews, the necessary racial purification of the German people and the need for German imperial expansion and colonisation eastwards. According to Hitler and other pan-German thinkers, Germany needed to obtain additional living space or Lebensraum which would properly nurture the "historic destiny" of the German people. This was a key idea he made central in his foreign policy. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf of his hatred towards what he believed were the world's twin evils, namely communism and Judaism. He said his aim was to eradicate both from Germany and moreover stressed his intention to unite all Germans in the process of destroying them.

Hitler was a pan-Germanic nationalist whose ideology was built around a philosophically authoritarian, anti-Marxist, antisemitic and anti-democratic worldview. Such views of the world in the wake of the fledgling Weimar government were not uncommon in Germany since democratic/parliamentary governance seemed ineffectual to solve Germany's problems. Correspondingly, veterans of the First World War and like-minded nationalists formed the Vaterlandspartei which promoted expansionism, soldierly camaraderie and heroic leadership, all under the guise of völkisch traditions like ethnic and linguistic nationalism, but which also included obedience to authority as well as the belief in political salvation through decisive leadership. The völkisch parties began to fractionalize during Hitler's absence from the revolutionary scene in Germany after the failed " Beer Hall Putsch" of November 1923. When he re-emerged upon release from Landsberg Prison, his importance to the movement was obvious and he came to believe that he was the realization of völkisch nationalistic ideals in a sort of near messianic narcissism which included his conviction to shake off the restrictive Treaty of Versailles and to "restore Germany's might and power", creating a reborn German nation as the chosen leader of the Nazi Party.

Hitler stressed the völkisch ideology, claiming Germanic/Aryan superiority in Mein Kampf:

Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill, which we see before our eyes today, is almost exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power. This very fact fully justifies the conclusion that it was the Aryan alone who founded a superior type of humanity; therefore he represents the archetype of what we understand by the term: MAN. He is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth. Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert.

The völkisch nationalism of Hitler and Nazis encompassed the notion that the German Volk was epitomized by German farmers and peasants, people who remained uncorrupted by modern ideals and whose greatest attribute was their "cheerful subservience" and their capacity to respond to their "monarchical calling". Hitler was their new monarch in a manner of speaking. Völkisch nationalism also forged into its ideals, the importance of nature, the centrality of a knightly savior (Hitler in this case) and the belief in the superior Aryan. Antisemitism remained a key component of the völkisch movement and a permanent undercurrent throughout conservative parties in German history and after many years culminated with the view that the Jews were the only thing standing in the way of the ideal society. As Germany's newfound völkisch nationalist leader, Hitler initiated a policy of ethnic nationalism replete with directives to eliminate Jews and other identified enemies as Nazism ultimately became the religion of the movement and the "irrational became concrete" under the terms of its "ideological framework".

Hitler and the Nazis promoted a socially conservative view concerning many aspects of life, supported by harsh discipline and a militaristic point of view. Conservative opinions about sexuality amid the Nazis led to extreme homophobia which resulted in the systematic persecution of homosexuals. Hitler and his paladins also controlled what constituted acceptable artistic expression in Nazi Germany, abolishing what they considered to be " degenerate art". The Nazis strongly discouraged and in some cases outright rejected the following behaviors, namely the use of cosmetics, premarital sex, prostitution, pornography, sexual vices, smoking and excessive drinking. In many ways, there was a distinct anti-intellectualism present within Nazi philosophy. Hearkening back to a simpler time, Hitler and the Nazis attempted to vindicate the glorious past as the key to a more promising future.

Evidence of Hitler's disdain for Weimar's cultural and social decadence appears on multiple occasions in Mein Kampf. In his seminal tome, he expresses an ultraconservatism:

If we study the course of our cultural life during the last twenty-five years we shall be astonished to note how far we have already gone in this process of retrogression. Everywhere we find the presence of those germs which give rise to protuberant growths that must sooner or later bring about the ruin of our culture. Here we find undoubted symptoms of slow corruption; and woe to the nations that are no longer able to bring that morbid process to a halt.

Hitler raved against what he considered to be tasteless and morally destructive art on display throughout Germany in Mein Kampf, calling some of it morbid and declaring that "people would have benefited by not visiting them at all". Convinced that it was necessary to show the German people what comprised, "degenerate art" so as to protect them in the future, Hitler arranged for a formally commissioned exhibit in July 1937 of specially selected carvings, sculptures, and paintings. Once the exhibit was at an end, selected artists' works were banned from Nazi Germany.

Well known was Hitler's vehement opposition to racial-mixing. He was also a natalist as he believed as did other pan-Germans that Germans had an obligation to procreate:

That such a mentality [racial purity] may be possible cannot be denied in a world where hundreds and thousands accept the principle of celibacy from their own choice, without being obliged or pledged to do so by anything except an ecclesiastical precept. Why should it not be possible to induce people to make this sacrifice if, instead of such a precept, they were simply told that they ought to put an end to this truly original sin of racial corruption which is steadily being passed on from one generation to another. And, further, they ought to be brought to realize that it is their bounden duty to give to the Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to His own image.

Another area of concern for Hitler and which was mentioned by his childhood companion in Vienna, August Kubizek, was prostitution. Hitler associated it with venereal disease and cultural decline. Moreover, Hitler found the practice counter to proper family development and displayed a puritanical view in Mein Kampf, writing:

Prostitution is a disgrace to humanity and cannot be removed simply by charitable or academic methods. Its restriction and final extermination presupposes the removal of a whole series of contributory circumstances. The first remedy must always be to establish such conditions as will make early marriages possible, especially for young men...

He goes on asserting that prostitution was dangerous and intimated much more significant, destructive socio-political implications. Once Hitler came to power, his regime moved against all forms of sexual deviations and sexual crimes, especially homosexuality, which was prosecuted as a crime as many as 30,000 times between 1934 and 1939. Hitler's social conservatism was so extreme towards homosexuals that he deemed them "enemies of the State" and grouped them in the same category as Jews and communists; a special department of the Gestapo was formed to deal with the matter.

Hitler's general perception about women was ultra-conservative and patriarchal, with their foremost task being a domestic one as a mother of children who worked contentedly at home, ensuring it remained clean and orderly. Meanwhile, it was the woman's role to educate her children to be conscious of their importance as Aryans and instill within them a commitment to their ethnic community. Consequently, Hitler believed women had no place in public or political life due to their differing nature from men. Like many Romantic artists, musicians, and writers, the Nazis valued strength, passion, frank declarations of feelings and deep devotion to family and community (with women being seen as the center of the family in Nazi Germany). So great was Hitler's influence in all political aspects of social life that even education for children was subordinate to his opinion. Profoundly anti-intellectual and against conventional education for children, Hitler determined instead that training and education should be designed to create young German "national comrades" who were utterly convinced of their "superiority to others". Moreover, Hitler wanted to create young German soldiers who were willing to fight for their convictions so they were accordingly indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda, trained in military discipline and taught obedience to authority in the Hitler Youth.

Hitler blamed Germany's parliamentary government for many of the nation's ills. The Nazis and especially Hitler associated democracy with the failed Weimar government and the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Hitler often denounced democracy, equating it with internationalism. Since democratic ideals espoused equality for all men, it represented to Hitler and his Nazi ideologues the notion of mob rule and the hatred of excellence. Not only was democracy antithetical to their social-Darwinist abstractions, but its international-capitalist framework was considered an exclusively Jewish-derived conception. Hitler also thought democracy was nothing more than a preliminary stage of Bolshevism.

Hitler believed in the leader principle (hence his title, the Leader, der Führer) and considered it ludicrous that an idea of governance or morality could be held by the people above the power of the leader. Joachim Fest described a 1930 confrontation between Hitler and Otto Strasser as such: "Now Hitler took Strasser to task for placing 'the idea' above the Führer and wanting 'to give every party comrade the right to decide the nature of the idea, even to decide whether or not the Führer is true to the so-called idea.' That, he cried angrily, was the worst kind of democracy, for which there was no place in their movement. 'With us the Führer and the idea are one and the same, and every party comrade has to do what the Führer commands, for he embodies the idea and he alone knows its ultimate goal'".

Although Hitler realized that his ascension to power required the use of the Weimar Republic's parliamentary system (founded on democratic principles), he never intended for the continuation of democratic governance once in control. Contrarily, Hitler proclaimed that he would "destroy democracy with the weapons of democracy". The rapid transition made by the Nazis once they assumed control clearly reveals that Hitler succeeded in this regard. For the most part, democratic governance was never embraced by the German masses or by the elite. The ill-fated Weimar democracy's inability to provide economic relief to the German people during the Great Depression further enhanced its image as an ineffectual system of government amid the masses. Hitler offered people the prospect of a "new and better society". He exploited the conditions in Germany in the ultimate expression of political opportunism when he brought his dictatorial and totalitarian government to power and thereafter attempting to impose himself and his system upon the world in the process.

In Hitler's mind, communism was a major enemy of Germany, an enemy he often mentions in Mein Kampf. During the trial for his involvement in the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler claimed that his singular goal was to assist the German government in "fighting Marxism". Marxism, Bolshevism, and communism were interchangeable terms for Hitler as evidenced by their use in Mein Kampf:

In the years 1913 and 1914 I expressed my opinion for the first time in various circles, some of which are now members of the National Socialist Movement, that the problem of how the future of the German nation can be secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated.

Later in his seminal tome, Hitler advocated for "the destruction of Marxism in all its shapes and forms". According to Hitler, Marxism was a Jewish strategy to subjugate Germany and the world and saw Marxism as a mental and political form of slavery. From Hitler's vantage point, Bolsheviks existed to serve "Jewish international finance". When the British tried negotiating with Hitler in 1935 by including Germany in the extension of the Locarno Pact, he rejected their offer and instead assured them that German rearmament was important in safeguarding Europe against communism, a move which clearly showed his anti-communist proclivities.

In 1939, Hitler told the Swiss Commissioner to the League of Nations Carl Burckhardt that everything he was undertaking was "directed against Russia" and that "if those in the West are too stupid or too blind to understand this, then I shall be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians to beat the West, and then, after its defeat, turn with all my concerted force against the Soviet Union". When Hitler finally ordered the attack against the Soviet Union, it was the fulfillment of his ultimate goal and the most important campaign in his estimation, as it comprised a struggle of "the chosen Aryan people against Jewish Bolsheviks".

Biographer Alan Bullock avows Hitler "laid great stress" on the need to concentrate on a single enemy, an enemy he lumps together as "Marxism and the Jew". Shortly in the wake of the Commissar Order, a directive pursuant to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, SS Deputy Reinhard Heydrich informed the SS of Hitler's geopolitical philosophy which conflated Bolshevism and Jews, writing that "eastern Jewry is the intellectual reservoir of Bolshevism and in the Führer's view must therefore be annihilated". Considering the eventual Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa), no additional inducements are really requisite concerning Hitler's hatred of communism, particularly since the Nazi persecution and extermination of these groups was not only systematic, but it was extensive both within Germany and only intensified in the occupied zones during the war under Hitler's leadership.

Because Nazism co-opted the popular success of socialism and Communism among working people while simultaneously promising to destroy Communism and offer an alternative to it, Hitler's anti-communist program allowed industrialists with traditional conservative views (tending toward monarchism, aristocracy and laissez-faire capitalism) to cast their lot with and help underwrite the Nazi rise to power.

Lebensraum and the invasion of the Soviet Union

Historian Roderick Stackelberg contends that Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union was the result of "mutually reinforcing ideological, racial, and geopolitical assumptions" that Hitler had plainly laid out in Mein Kampf. Noted German historian Andreas Hillgruber shares this view. In fact, Hillgruber encapsulates Hitler's political views (which drove German policy throughout his rule) in summary through the invasion of the Soviet Union. He places it within the context of Hitler's intent to create a continental Reich which included the destruction of the Jews. According to Hillgruber, Hitler had the following objectives in mind when he invaded the former Soviet Union:

1. The total eradication of all forms of "Judeo-Bolshevik" leadership, which encompassed its perceived biological roots, namely the millions of Jews occupying central and eastern Europe.

2. The requisite acquisition of Lebensraum or colonial space necessary for German settlement in the finest and most arable territories within Russia, or in those parts of Russia which provided political or strategic advantages in Hitler's mind.

3. The subjugation and decimation of the Slavic people, which was to be divided into four German territories or "Reich Commissariats" entitled Ostland, Ukraine, Moskovia and Caucasus, with each subordinated to German "viceroys". One of the principal aims of German leadership in these Reich Commissariats would be the cancellation of any semblance or memory of Russian statehood and the conditioning of these subordinated "states" to German mastery.

4. Ultimately, a "great space" autarchy in continental Europe under German suzerainty would result, one capable of defeating any possible Allied blockade and for whom the vanquished eastern territories could provide a theoretically inexhaustible source of raw materials and food necessary for any protracted war against the Allied powers. The establishment of this "German Reich of the Germanic nation" also included in its planning to feed its soldiers off the Russian land, although that meant that "many millions of people will be starved to death", a directive already contemplated by the Economic Staff East no later than 2 May 1941.

Not alone in this interpretation of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union as a move of continental expansion and one with an antisemitic eliminationist political intent, Hillgruber is joined by the likes of historian Karl Dietrich Bracher, among others. In his work The German Dictatorship, Bracher called the invasion the consequence of Hitler's "ideological obsession" and stated that "Hitler's drive for territorial expansion and the relentless expansion of the SS state ushered in the final phase of National Socialist rule". That final phase proved disastrous for the Jews, Slavs, Roma-Sinti and countless others.

Among scholars of the Nazi era, Hitler's role and relationship to the regime and The Holocaust has been a source of consternation and acrimonious historiographical debate. Biographer Ian Kershaw wrote that for historians Hitler was "unreachable" and that he was "cocooned in the silence of the sources". What Kershaw was referencing was the absence of any clear political directives accompanied by Hitler's signed authorization (primary source documents) regarding the atrocities carried out by his Nazi underlings. Given the abounding circumstantial evidence in Hitler's speeches, writing in Mein Kampf, administrative meeting notes taken by subordinates and the recollections of those in or near his inner-circle, it seems that his political intention was for Jews, Slavs and other "enemies" of the Nazi state to be persecuted without mercy in lieu of how gradual the process actually developed. A debate between two primary schools of thought emerged about Hitler's political role in Nazi policy and the Holocaust. One is termed intentionalist, represented by scholars who contend that virtually all Nazi policies (including the extermination of the Jews) were resultant from Hitler's desires; whereas the other school, entitled functionalist/structuralist, consists of scholars who see the intensification of Nazi persecution policies due to power struggles within the Nazi government as his minions attempted to "interpret" their master's wishes, often acting autonomously.

Either way, antisemitism always constituted one of the most important aspects of Hitler's political views. Historian Peter Longerich writes: "There can be no doubt that Hitler's behaviour during his entire political career... was characterised by radical antisemitism". Correspondingly, Germanic cultural and racial purity remained paramount in his understanding of the world, having once exclaimed: "The greatest danger is and remains for us, the alien racial poison in our body. All other dangers are transitory".

Hitler wrote his first antisemitic letter to Adolf Gemlich on 16 September 1919 stating that Jews were a race and not a religious group and that the aim for the government "must unshakably be the removal of the Jews altogether". Throughout Mein Kampf, Hitler employs biological crudity by describing the Jews as "parasites" or "vermin". Reflecting back on the beginning of the First World War, Hitler makes the eerily prescient statement that if "twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."

Underlining the argument that Hitler had overt eliminationist intentions for the Jews is the "prophecy" quote from the 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech:

I want to be a prophet again today: if international finance Jewry in Europe and beyond should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

German historian Klaus Hildebrand insisted that Hitler's moral responsibility for the Holocaust was the culmination of his pathological hatred of the Jews and his ideology of "racial dogma" formed the basis of Nazi genocide. Historian David Welch asserts that even if Hitler never gave the direct order for the implementation of the Final Solution, this is nothing more than a "red herring" as it fails to recognize his "leadership style" where Hitler's simple verbal statements were sufficient to launch initiatives "from below". Those "working towards the Führer" would often implement "his totalitarian vision without written authority". Throughout his work Hitler and the Final Solution, historian Gerald Fleming demonstrates that on multiple occasions Heinrich Himmler referenced a Führer-Order concerning the destruction of the Jews, making it abundantly clear that Hitler had at the very least verbally issued a command on the matter. The diary entries of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels allude to Hitler being the driving force behind the Nazi genocide, that he followed the subject closely and that Goebbels even described Hitler as "uncompromising" about eliminating the Jews. Taking the scale of the logistical operations that the Holocaust comprised in the middle of a war into consideration alone, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that the extermination of so many people and the coordination of such an extensive effort could have occurred in the absence of Hitler's authorization. As Welch relates, if Himmler was the "architect of genocide", he was merely "an instrument of Hitler's will". In the final analysis, Hitler was essentially omnipotent as the Führer of Nazi Germany with all encompassing power as the "supreme legislator, supreme administrator, and supreme judge" along with being the "leader of the Party, the Army, and the people". Hitler ruled the Nazi Party autocratically by asserting the Führerprinzip (leader principle). The principle relied on absolute obedience of all subordinates to their superiors; thus he viewed the government structure as a pyramid, with himself-the infallible leader -at the apex.

Notes

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The History Place: The Rise of Adolf Hitler

Ullrich, Volker (2016). Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-38535-439-4.

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Political views of Adolf Hitler - Wikipedia

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The political views of Adolf Hitler have presented historians and biographers with some difficulty. His writings and methods were often adapted to need and circumstance, although there were some steady themes, including antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-parliamentarianism, German Lebensraum ("living space"), belief in the superiority of an " Aryan race" and an extreme form of German nationalism.

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Genocide is a term used to describe violence against members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group with the intent to destroy the entire group. The word came into general usage only after World War II. In 1948, the United Nations declared genocide to be an international crime; the term would later be applied to the horrific acts of violence committed during conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in the African country of Rwanda in the 1990s.

https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/learn-about-genocide-and-other-mass-atrocities/what-is-genocide