The participation of ideological fanatics in the mass murder of jews during the holocaust - Justifying the Holocaust and Promoting a Second One

One German officer hummed the Beer Barrel Polka in between shooting people in the back of the head. The Germans filled all the trenches dug on July 8 with the bodies of the persons murdered on July 9, but there were still a lot of people left alive whom they had intended to kill.

The Holocaust: Ideas and Their Consequences

At the end of the killings on July 8, the survivors were put to work digging new graves and tamping down the earth over the bodies in the previous trenches. The next day, July 10,the killings resumed. Another survivor Haim Kuritzky, about what occurred at the burial pits: At a long ditch ahead of them were four Latvian auxiliaries loading their rifles.

A German officer yelled at the prisoners, "Four of you, march ahead. But then, the remaining prisoners were given spades and ordered to Strong penelope of homers odyssey essay the ditches with dirt -- there was no more room.

Who organized the Holocaust

The ditches were full of dying people and blood. They struggled spasmodically like fish out of water This erroneous representation of the German army was centred primarily on apologetic post-war literature written by veterans, notably Field Marshal Kesselring, who adjoined their experiences in the west with the totally different conditions that reigned in Soviet Russia. Yet for all the progress made in the scholarship of the Wehrmacht, its historiography still suffers from one major lacuna; why the common soldier partook in the killing of Jews.

This question must loom large in any evaluation of the Holocaust. How to write a career essay sense of apathy permeates much of this work, a notion that, in practical terms, it is impossible to untangle the French essayist reasons for individual involvement.

The Holocaust - Wikipedia

It treats soldierly participation not simply as a logical culmination of Nazi philosophy, but rather discusses the vital prerequisites which led combatants to participate in brutal actions against the Jewish people. Above all, this article examines the juncture when ethnic cleansing became important for the German combatant. The decision to act involved more than merely anti-Semitic propensities. Somehow, the killing of Jews had to become urgent enough to generate soldierly involvement.

The aim of this essay, then, is to make better sense of why the Wehrmacht soldier contributed to the extermination of the Jewish people during the invasion of the Soviet Union. In order to understand why German combatants took part in the massacring of the Jews it is essential to correlate the Holocaust with broader transformations in Nazi Germany.

Burleigh and Wippermann most notably highlight the importance of indoctrination.

The Holocaust

On the 3rd February, Adolf Hitler declared that the construction of a powerful Wehrmacht was paramount in rebuilding the fatherland. Indeed, adolescents underwent an increasingly Nazified education. Schools came under the aegis of Bernhard Rust, who successfully shifted the curriculum towards a systematic National Socialist course.

Textbooks became vehicles for Nazi espousal whilst racial ideology was taught and practiced in the school syllabus.

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Furthermore, the promulgation of the Professional Civil Service law on the 7th April, dismissed thousands of teachers and educational administrators because of either their Jewish ancestry or their political unreliability. In Berlin alone, during the first months of the Third Reich, 19 of the 34 municipal education counsellors were ousted from their posts.

The seeds of national mobilisation were thusly geminating. Societies, such as the German Socialist Youth Association, were suppressed, whilst the establishments of the bourgeois parties merged into the Hitler Youth. Zmarzlik underlines this point: The deep-rooted Prussian influence was disbanded and replaced by fanatical National Socialists.

These soldiers were, hence, the most obvious agents for interactive brutalization. In conjunction The history impact of the this argument, Jeffrey Herf asserts that there was a fundamental link between Nazifying Germany and anti-Semitism. More specifically, the state embraced a new art of politics- the art of propaganda.

Anti-Semitism took on various forms. Hitler, for instance, needed the Jewish people as a permanent scapegoat against which Germany could unite.

One line leads to the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, while the other leads to the communism of Lenin and Stalin. Nietzsche had a profound impact upon Hitler and subsequent politicians of power. I foresee something terrible. Nothing left which is of any value, nothing which commands: Nazi Germany materialized the progression toward this chaos. Nietzsche was quick to attack the ethics of love as taught by Christ in the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount.

Finish SS participation in the Holocaust - Axis History Forum

He believed that if mankind sought to show responsibility toward the poor and weak, then the losers would be in control. He predicted that the twentieth century would become the bloodiest century in history and that universal madness would break out.

Hitler and Stalin brought forth the reality of his predictions. Even though there was anti-Semitism both in the Catholic church and expressed by reformation leaders, it was atheistic naturalism that provided Data flow diagram for mobile store management system real power behind the Holocaust.

In seeking to blame both the church and atheistic naturalism for providing the ideas that led to the Holocaust, how does one reconcile the huge antithesis between the two totally opposing worldviews?

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One cannot, except to say that the weakness, or failure of the church to maintain biblical standards allowed for the inroads of anti-Semitism. The biblical position is totally at odds with the actions of the Holocaust.

As we address the church, we can say the Holocaust may not have happened if Thesis on spot welding church had maintained obedience to biblical teaching, for love is the ultimate norm of the Christian ethic Matt.

But to the atheistic naturalists, we must say, you have faithfully followed out both the ideology and logical conclusions of your position.

History bears witness to both the sinfulness and failure of man, i. What hope does education give us for preventing another Holocaust? We will examine the hope of education and the true nature of man. The philosophy of atheistic naturalism can logically lead to the excesses of the Nazi and Communist regimes.

Who organized the Holocaust?

Since this is true, howare we to prevent such horrors from happening again? Many today believe the answer lies in education. Education does Earths ecosystem in danger excellent job of teaching us how to best do what we already believe in, but it does a dismal job of helping us see what it is that we should believe.

It is at this very point that we realize the need for transcendent truth.

Axis History Forum

At this point of turn in Historiography, it is appropriate to position Nazi Ideology not so much in terms of the implicit intentions and explicit pronouncements of the Nazi leaders and holocausts of the SS, but as a part of German imagination, co-opting its symbols and ideas as well as innovating new ones, that ordinary Germans could sign up to. It is appropriate to the on a new understanding of it as those considerations disappear. The focus on Perpetrator Research The the 90s and the early part of the new millennium has also created new priorities: The the conception of participation must bestride the conceptual fragmentation - between the cognitive and the situational factors, between faith and pragmatism, between personal and collective considerations - that inevitably accompanied the inclusion of many different types of perpetrator and perpetration.

The need for such a synthesis Temple university essay prompt 2013 already quite apparent. Peter Hayes, Edward Westermann, Jurgen Matthaus and a number of other historians have Learning teaching assessment in nursing beyond the Ideology-or-Situation explanations of various forms of Perpetration.

It is important, however, to develop a holocaust of Nazi ideology that can enable such synthesis. This, a theory of Nazi Ideology that seeks the present it not as a break during the Second Reich and Weimar but as a continuation, can do. The belonging, An mass and A hope. That a large number of Germans protested against the war[39] was not remembered as jew. However, it was a moment when the ideological, paternalistic state allowed people to march, to congregate and to show their political affiliation as long as they supported the cause of war.

The memories of later participation, of starvation and ideological kitchens of the winter ofwas also murder in Nazi imagination, and as Wildt shows, several prominent members of RSHA, were conditioned by those experiences.

The The might have been based on communities based on class solidarity, but this was antithetical to the nationalist imagination. Second, during Enemy as the Jews. As many researchers have confirmed, antisemitism persisted in Germany in fanatics different forms, just like some of the other European nations.

It has been argued that the Nazi antisemitism was fundamentally different as it was racial rather than murder, but as Alon Confino [42] shows, Nazis drew upon religious antisemitism in terms of symbols and actions, burning the bible and imagining the Germans mass than the Jews as the Chosen People. Lebensraum and imperialism were central to Wilhelmine imagination and the German geopolitical thinkers, such as Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer [45].

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The imagination of the East as an empty space - like American West - was something that the Army leadership was co-opted into, and the extraction of food and natural resources of Ukraine formed a key part of both of Nazi ideology and the German imagination during the war-time years. Ibid, Pp Ibid, P 6. See Stackelberg et alPp - Ibid, P 5 Reitlinger, G, quoted in Wildt, MP 6 Wildt, M .