5-7-08
English
Research Paper
The Holocaust: A Nightmare in Daylight
The average American has more rights and privileges than the rest of the world could even dream of having. They do not have the foggiest concept of being incapable coming and going as they please, or being afraid to say something, anything that could cause their lives to be destroyed by the government. The average American does not have clue because they have never undergone such circumstances that the rest of the world has been forced to endure. Furthermore, when an event like the Holocaust is explained to them, they simply cannot comprehend it. It is so far outside their realm of normal, it hardly seems relevant at all. Why was the Holocaust a significant event in history? What bearings does it have on society today, especially in America? The only way to answer those questions is to investigate the dismal history of such an event.
While investigating the Holocaust, it is important to remember that Adolf Hitler, the main perpetrator of the Holocaust, did not simply wake up one morning and decide to kill the Jewish race. It was over the process of time that he became convinced of such a sinister idea and acquired the capacity to carry out his evil plan. After World War I, Hitler rose to power in Germany. As he did so, he brainwashed the German people into thinking that the Jews caused the defeat of the war. He claimed the Jews were the reason for the extreme economic disparities in Germany. As a result of the lies spread about the Jews, the Germans were soon convinced that the Jews the source of all their problems. Hitler’s main point was to convince the Germans that the Jews were, in fact, inferior to the human race (UHR para. 2). Eventually, in the Germans’ minds, the Jews became “basically and deeply different from everyone else,” and “that single idea was the cornerstone of Nazi anti-Semitism” (Rogasky 14). However, Hitler did not want the Germans to simply believe there was a difference, he insisted that, “these sick people had to die,” because, “keeping them alive was also uneconomical, because they produced nothing and were examples, the Nazis said, of the “useless eaters” in the nations” (Rogasky 60).
Hitler “wanted to kill all Jews solely because they were Jews…they were accused of living, of having been born” (Meltzer 3). What did Hitler propose to do about them? He enacted what is known as “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (Rogasky 8). His plan had never been thought of before and thus called for the new term of “genocide” (USHMME para. 1). The Holocaust was one man’s attempt to annihilate an entire group of people based on their genetic make up and history. An historian named Lucy S. Dawidocicz said it well when she wrote, “the German dictatorship murdered the Jews for the purpose of murdering the Jews. For the Germans [took] to themselves the decision as to who was entitled to live on this earth and who was not” (qtd. Rogasky 156).
How could Hitler do such a thing? His dream became possible in 1933 after WWI, when he moved into the seat of political power in Germany. Once he was poised in the powerful position as chancellor, he suspended constitutional civil rights and enacted a state of emergency, which allowed him to operate outside the confines of parliamentary involvement. (USHMM para. 1).
The German government increasingly pressured the Jews and by the conclusion of 1937, 130,000 Jews had dispersed from Europe, but three-fourths of the Jews in Europe still remained. Hitler proceeded to rid Germany of Jews by forcing them across the border, but on November 9, 1938, the extermination began. The start was called the Kristallnacht, when at least 1,000 Jews were murdered, 26,000 were thrown into concentration camps, and 50,000 more were driven from Germany (Meltzer 8). Next, Germany started World War II when it invaded Poland in 1939. It took Germany only a month to defeat Poland completely (USHMME para. 2).
According to author, Barbara Rogasky, “five thousand Jews were killed within the first two months of the Nazi takeover of Poland” (36). By the close of 1941 into 1942 “more than 90 percent of the Polish Jews trapped by the Germans were dead” and “by the end of the summer of 1942 one to two million Jews had been assassinated” (Meltzer, 24; 9). The death rates continued to rise and by the end of the war in 1945, upwards of six thousand Jews had been murdered.
Hitler wanted to dispose of all the Jews, but he needed to handle them strategically because he could not kill them all at the same time. During the transitional period between the time that the Jews were taken from their homes and the time they were sent to the concentration camps, many were dumped in a specific section of their city designated as a temporary residence. The partitioned place was called a ghetto. One of the most well known ghettos was in Warsaw, Poland. The construction of it was started in October 1940. “Roughly 30% of the city’s population was to be confined to an area that comprised just 2.4% of city lands…German and Polish police guarded its outside entrance and a Jewish militia was formed to police the inside” (JVL para. 2). The ghetto at Warsaw retained anywhere from 400,000 to 600,000 Jews (more than the entire population of Vermont) while in use. Living space was tight with eight to ten people per room. When the size of the ghetto was reduced, the number of occupants per house increased to almost double. (Rogasky 29). Although their living quarters were miniscule, the Jews still managed to construct hospitals, public soup kitchens, orphanages, refugee centers and recreation facilities. Schools were illegal, but were still conducted incognito. Other aspects of life were difficult as well, such as the burial of typhoid and starvation victims. If their families could not afford the burial cost, which was often the case, the corpses were merely left to rot in the streets (JVL para.4).
When the Jews began to realize what was happening to their friends and family who were being taken away from the ghettos, the ones who were left finally decided to resist the transporters who came to take them away. In spite of all the other hardships, a few of the Jews still managed to conjure up courage and strength enough to fight back against onslaught of the Nazis. When the Jews in Warsaw and other ghettos decided to fight back, they fought with anything they could put their hands on. Though they did not have many guns at all they used what they did have, everything from boiling water to sticks, even their bare hands. The Jews definitely gave the Germans more of a resistance than the Germans were expecting. (Rogasky 112).
Where were the Jews from the ghettos taken though? What happened to them? They were carted away on trains to concentration camps and death camps, which were orchestrated by Hitler’s right hand men, the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squad), or SS, who were also in charge of the Einsatzgruppen (Operational Squad) (HS para. 1). Hitler’s Gestapo was composed partially composed of the SS, who “operated without any restrictions by civil authority, meaning that its members could not be tried for any of their police practices” (JVL para. 3). The Einsatzgruppen in particular, “were deployed to organize the mass shootings of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Communist leaders and prisoners-of-war” (HS para. 1).
However, the Germans were not the only one required by Hitler to fulfill his death wishes. Hitler also employed the Jewish Police to kill his innocent victims. It was not as if they wanted to work for him, but “if they chose not to obey such orders, they knew they had made another choice at the same time. They would be killed, knowing that their wives and children would also be murdered as a result of their refusal to obey” (Rogasky 70).
What methods were actually utilized to bring about so many deaths? How were the Jews within the camp chosen to live or die? According to Milton Meltzer, the author of Rescue: The Story of How Gentiles Saved Jews in the Holocaust, “the “unproductive” Jews – the weak, the sick, the old, -- were shot or forced to die from starvation and disease”, but those methods were too slow so “Jews were packed into buses with sealed windows and carbon monoxide from the exhausts was piped back into the buses. The buses were driven to pits, the doors opened, and corpses shoveled out” (11).
Those methods were still too slow for Hitler, so a new poison, using hydrogen cyanide, was developed. It was packed into pellets, which were then dropped on the unsuspecting victims, and killed them in fifteen minutes or less. “Hitler’s experts had found the most efficient way of ridding the world of Jews” (Meltzer 11). Yet, there was still the question of what to do with the bodies once they had died because decaying flesh tends to smell, and it can only be imagined what kind of stench literally tons of decaying human bodies would produce (Meltzer 11). The answer was not in mass graves, but in cremation. “But by 1944 over 10,000 Jews were being gassed every day, the ovens couldn’t process that many bodies”, and of course, there is always a more efficient way, “burning corpses in open pits…In Auschwitz, by use of round-the-clock shifts, 34,000 people were killed every twenty-four hours” (Meltzer 12). In Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, 1,600,000 people are estimated to have been killed (HS para. 10).
Auschwitz-Birkenau, what was that? In fact, it was a bona fide death camp. According to the United Human Rights Council, “trainloads of human cargo arriving at Auschwitz went through a selection process conducted by the SS doctors”, some were considered fit to work and received an ID number branded on their forearm, but “everyone else went to the gas chambers” (para. 26).
The persons chosen to live long enough to work had variety of jobs to do, none of which were enjoyable. There were “special squads of Jewish slave laborers called Sonderkommondos [who] were utilized to untangle the victims and remove them from the gas chamber…next they extracted any gold fillings from teeth and search body orifices for hidden valuables” (UHR para. 23). When the Jews arrived at the camp they were stripped of all their possessions and all their hair was shaved. Probably the most desirable job at the camp was the one who sorted through all of the collected belongings. The objects they managed to conceal and smuggle out of the storage building were bought, traded, or stolen because even the most seemingly insignificant item could mean the difference between life and death for a prisoner (Rogasky 94). The human hair was collected as well and sold to manufacturing companies. When Auschwitz was evacuated in 1944, the Soviets discovered 7.7 tons of human hair already packed to be shipped out (HS para. 9).
Everyday within the camp was a new challenge to stay alive. The camps themselves were harsh, cold, and uncomfortable. They were not heated or well insulated. They did not even have sanitary facilities. Hundreds of prisoners were assigned barracks, which were not designed to contain them all (JVL para. 2). Notwithstanding how difficult the situations were prisoners strived everyday to keep breathing, even if that was all they could do. They desperately needed to maintain their own well being first and foremost, and “if they managed to do that successfully, then – and only then –would they have the thought and the strength to help someone else”; however, ‘“Loners” did not last very long. Risking his or her life, a prisoner would help hide a sick fellow inmate during a selection…A prisoner about to drop during roll call would be held upright by the tightly squeezed bodies by inmates in front and back of him” (Rogasky 95).
If all these enormous atrocities were occurring daily for more than five years, why did the Jews not get help sooner? Meltzer said it well when he wrote, “information had to reach the Jews; then the mind had to see the connection between this terrible new reality and a possible way out. Only lastly might there come a decision to act – might, for even at this stage, not everyone was ready, or able, to act” (18). In fact, during WWII, the US government did not help sooner, “nor was it always clear to Allied policy makes how they could pursue large-scale rescue actions behind German lines” (USHMM para. 1). There were several who did help the Jews. Among, the more well known are Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg. Schindler saved approximately 1,500 Jews from the camps, and Wallenberg 70,000 Jews (Rogasky 146-148).
When Hitler was attempting to gather up all the Jews, he had a hard time of it in Denmark. He instructed all the Jews everywhere to pin the Star of David on their chest to identify them as Jews. In Denmark even the royal family wore the star. The entire country “altered to the coming deportation of their Jews, almost all the citizens of this tiny country contributed…to get them ferried across to Sweden and to safety”; in fact, “four hundred were caught and sent to a concentration camp… [they] survived because of the great pressure from the Danish government” (Rogasky 143).
The Jews that escaped the deportation to camps and ghettoes, like the famous young girl Anne Frank and her family, only did so by the help of non-Jews. Those willing to help became very creative when it came to disguising the existence of Jews in their home.
Necessity made Gentiles brilliant at designing hiding places. They built double walls, they made false ceiling, and they camouflaged attics and cellars. The hid Jews in factories and offices, in nunneries, monasteries, churches, and hospitals, in stables, cemeteries, pigsties, cowsheds, haystacks, pigeon coops, and greenhouses. When overcrowding inside the secret hideaways became a problem, Jews took turns standing, kneeling, squatting, sleeping. Small children were hidden in boxes, garbage bins, baskets, baking stores (Meltzer 17).
All this, and yet, there exist people today who claim “the Holocaust – the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people – never happened. Typical of the deniers’ attempt to obfuscate is their claim that they do not deny that there was a Holocaust, only that there was a plan or an attempt to annihilate the Jewish people” (Lipstadt 21). Author, Deborah Lipstadt, went on to write about the deniers that “they have distorted and deconstructed the definition of the term Holocaust” (21). Not only do the deniers declare the absence of the Holocaust, “there are also those who…went a step further and portrayed Germany as the much-maligned victim of Allied aggression. Such arguments serve as the model for those who would eventually seek not just to exculpate Germany for the Holocaust but to deny its existence altogether” (Lipstadt 42). Essentially, deniers try to blame the Jews for what happened during WWII. The deniers victimize the Germans instead and claim the Jews only said what they said about the German to give the Germans a bad name (Lipstadt 23). Lipstadt wrote plainly “the attempt to deny the Holocaust enlists a basic strategy of distortion. Truth is mixed with absolute lies, confusing readers who are unfamiliar with the tactics of the deniers” (2). The deniers bamboozle the listeners by presenting them with a “distorted impression of what really happened”. The deniers try to disregard the multiple legitimate documents and accounts and attempt to make the false account seem more believable (Lipstadt, 2). Another profound observation by Lipstadt, “It was the inhuman social organization that enabled the Nazis to realize their goal of annihilating masses of Jews with such technological instruments. Thus, because they made the latter possible the bureaucratic achievements of the Nazis were more frightening than the technological ones” (94).
Lord Acton once said, “power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”, and so was the situation in Adolf Hitler’s case. He is a prime example of why evil men should be kept out of the government. When those in power do not fear God, the people they rule have much to fear from them, as was the case with the Jews. Finally, the Holocaust is a significant event and it is relevant to America today because if precautions are not taken, situations like the Holocaust can and will happen again.
While investigating the Holocaust, it is important to remember that Adolf Hitler, the main perpetrator of the Holocaust, did not simply wake up one morning and decide to kill the Jewish race. It was over the process of time that he became convinced of such a sinister idea and acquired the capacity to carry out his evil plan. After World War I, Hitler rose to power in Germany. As he did so, he brainwashed the German people into thinking that the Jews caused the defeat of the war. He claimed the Jews were the reason for the extreme economic disparities in Germany. As a result of the lies spread about the Jews, the Germans were soon convinced that the Jews the source of all their problems. Hitler’s main point was to convince the Germans that the Jews were, in fact, inferior to the human race (UHR para. 2). Eventually, in the Germans’ minds, the Jews became “basically and deeply different from everyone else,” and “that single idea was the cornerstone of Nazi anti-Semitism” (Rogasky 14). However, Hitler did not want the Germans to simply believe there was a difference, he insisted that, “these sick people had to die,” because, “keeping them alive was also uneconomical, because they produced nothing and were examples, the Nazis said, of the “useless eaters” in the nations” (Rogasky 60).
Hitler “wanted to kill all Jews solely because they were Jews…they were accused of living, of having been born” (Meltzer 3). What did Hitler propose to do about them? He enacted what is known as “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (Rogasky 8). His plan had never been thought of before and thus called for the new term of “genocide” (USHMME para. 1). The Holocaust was one man’s attempt to annihilate an entire group of people based on their genetic make up and history. An historian named Lucy S. Dawidocicz said it well when she wrote, “the German dictatorship murdered the Jews for the purpose of murdering the Jews. For the Germans [took] to themselves the decision as to who was entitled to live on this earth and who was not” (qtd. Rogasky 156).
How could Hitler do such a thing? His dream became possible in 1933 after WWI, when he moved into the seat of political power in Germany. Once he was poised in the powerful position as chancellor, he suspended constitutional civil rights and enacted a state of emergency, which allowed him to operate outside the confines of parliamentary involvement. (USHMM para. 1).
The German government increasingly pressured the Jews and by the conclusion of 1937, 130,000 Jews had dispersed from Europe, but three-fourths of the Jews in Europe still remained. Hitler proceeded to rid Germany of Jews by forcing them across the border, but on November 9, 1938, the extermination began. The start was called the Kristallnacht, when at least 1,000 Jews were murdered, 26,000 were thrown into concentration camps, and 50,000 more were driven from Germany (Meltzer 8). Next, Germany started World War II when it invaded Poland in 1939. It took Germany only a month to defeat Poland completely (USHMME para. 2).
According to author, Barbara Rogasky, “five thousand Jews were killed within the first two months of the Nazi takeover of Poland” (36). By the close of 1941 into 1942 “more than 90 percent of the Polish Jews trapped by the Germans were dead” and “by the end of the summer of 1942 one to two million Jews had been assassinated” (Meltzer, 24; 9). The death rates continued to rise and by the end of the war in 1945, upwards of six thousand Jews had been murdered.
Hitler wanted to dispose of all the Jews, but he needed to handle them strategically because he could not kill them all at the same time. During the transitional period between the time that the Jews were taken from their homes and the time they were sent to the concentration camps, many were dumped in a specific section of their city designated as a temporary residence. The partitioned place was called a ghetto. One of the most well known ghettos was in Warsaw, Poland. The construction of it was started in October 1940. “Roughly 30% of the city’s population was to be confined to an area that comprised just 2.4% of city lands…German and Polish police guarded its outside entrance and a Jewish militia was formed to police the inside” (JVL para. 2). The ghetto at Warsaw retained anywhere from 400,000 to 600,000 Jews (more than the entire population of Vermont) while in use. Living space was tight with eight to ten people per room. When the size of the ghetto was reduced, the number of occupants per house increased to almost double. (Rogasky 29). Although their living quarters were miniscule, the Jews still managed to construct hospitals, public soup kitchens, orphanages, refugee centers and recreation facilities. Schools were illegal, but were still conducted incognito. Other aspects of life were difficult as well, such as the burial of typhoid and starvation victims. If their families could not afford the burial cost, which was often the case, the corpses were merely left to rot in the streets (JVL para.4).
When the Jews began to realize what was happening to their friends and family who were being taken away from the ghettos, the ones who were left finally decided to resist the transporters who came to take them away. In spite of all the other hardships, a few of the Jews still managed to conjure up courage and strength enough to fight back against onslaught of the Nazis. When the Jews in Warsaw and other ghettos decided to fight back, they fought with anything they could put their hands on. Though they did not have many guns at all they used what they did have, everything from boiling water to sticks, even their bare hands. The Jews definitely gave the Germans more of a resistance than the Germans were expecting. (Rogasky 112).
Where were the Jews from the ghettos taken though? What happened to them? They were carted away on trains to concentration camps and death camps, which were orchestrated by Hitler’s right hand men, the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squad), or SS, who were also in charge of the Einsatzgruppen (Operational Squad) (HS para. 1). Hitler’s Gestapo was composed partially composed of the SS, who “operated without any restrictions by civil authority, meaning that its members could not be tried for any of their police practices” (JVL para. 3). The Einsatzgruppen in particular, “were deployed to organize the mass shootings of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Communist leaders and prisoners-of-war” (HS para. 1).
However, the Germans were not the only one required by Hitler to fulfill his death wishes. Hitler also employed the Jewish Police to kill his innocent victims. It was not as if they wanted to work for him, but “if they chose not to obey such orders, they knew they had made another choice at the same time. They would be killed, knowing that their wives and children would also be murdered as a result of their refusal to obey” (Rogasky 70).
What methods were actually utilized to bring about so many deaths? How were the Jews within the camp chosen to live or die? According to Milton Meltzer, the author of Rescue: The Story of How Gentiles Saved Jews in the Holocaust, “the “unproductive” Jews – the weak, the sick, the old, -- were shot or forced to die from starvation and disease”, but those methods were too slow so “Jews were packed into buses with sealed windows and carbon monoxide from the exhausts was piped back into the buses. The buses were driven to pits, the doors opened, and corpses shoveled out” (11).
Those methods were still too slow for Hitler, so a new poison, using hydrogen cyanide, was developed. It was packed into pellets, which were then dropped on the unsuspecting victims, and killed them in fifteen minutes or less. “Hitler’s experts had found the most efficient way of ridding the world of Jews” (Meltzer 11). Yet, there was still the question of what to do with the bodies once they had died because decaying flesh tends to smell, and it can only be imagined what kind of stench literally tons of decaying human bodies would produce (Meltzer 11). The answer was not in mass graves, but in cremation. “But by 1944 over 10,000 Jews were being gassed every day, the ovens couldn’t process that many bodies”, and of course, there is always a more efficient way, “burning corpses in open pits…In Auschwitz, by use of round-the-clock shifts, 34,000 people were killed every twenty-four hours” (Meltzer 12). In Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, 1,600,000 people are estimated to have been killed (HS para. 10).
Auschwitz-Birkenau, what was that? In fact, it was a bona fide death camp. According to the United Human Rights Council, “trainloads of human cargo arriving at Auschwitz went through a selection process conducted by the SS doctors”, some were considered fit to work and received an ID number branded on their forearm, but “everyone else went to the gas chambers” (para. 26).
The persons chosen to live long enough to work had variety of jobs to do, none of which were enjoyable. There were “special squads of Jewish slave laborers called Sonderkommondos [who] were utilized to untangle the victims and remove them from the gas chamber…next they extracted any gold fillings from teeth and search body orifices for hidden valuables” (UHR para. 23). When the Jews arrived at the camp they were stripped of all their possessions and all their hair was shaved. Probably the most desirable job at the camp was the one who sorted through all of the collected belongings. The objects they managed to conceal and smuggle out of the storage building were bought, traded, or stolen because even the most seemingly insignificant item could mean the difference between life and death for a prisoner (Rogasky 94). The human hair was collected as well and sold to manufacturing companies. When Auschwitz was evacuated in 1944, the Soviets discovered 7.7 tons of human hair already packed to be shipped out (HS para. 9).
Everyday within the camp was a new challenge to stay alive. The camps themselves were harsh, cold, and uncomfortable. They were not heated or well insulated. They did not even have sanitary facilities. Hundreds of prisoners were assigned barracks, which were not designed to contain them all (JVL para. 2). Notwithstanding how difficult the situations were prisoners strived everyday to keep breathing, even if that was all they could do. They desperately needed to maintain their own well being first and foremost, and “if they managed to do that successfully, then – and only then –would they have the thought and the strength to help someone else”; however, ‘“Loners” did not last very long. Risking his or her life, a prisoner would help hide a sick fellow inmate during a selection…A prisoner about to drop during roll call would be held upright by the tightly squeezed bodies by inmates in front and back of him” (Rogasky 95).
If all these enormous atrocities were occurring daily for more than five years, why did the Jews not get help sooner? Meltzer said it well when he wrote, “information had to reach the Jews; then the mind had to see the connection between this terrible new reality and a possible way out. Only lastly might there come a decision to act – might, for even at this stage, not everyone was ready, or able, to act” (18). In fact, during WWII, the US government did not help sooner, “nor was it always clear to Allied policy makes how they could pursue large-scale rescue actions behind German lines” (USHMM para. 1). There were several who did help the Jews. Among, the more well known are Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg. Schindler saved approximately 1,500 Jews from the camps, and Wallenberg 70,000 Jews (Rogasky 146-148).
When Hitler was attempting to gather up all the Jews, he had a hard time of it in Denmark. He instructed all the Jews everywhere to pin the Star of David on their chest to identify them as Jews. In Denmark even the royal family wore the star. The entire country “altered to the coming deportation of their Jews, almost all the citizens of this tiny country contributed…to get them ferried across to Sweden and to safety”; in fact, “four hundred were caught and sent to a concentration camp… [they] survived because of the great pressure from the Danish government” (Rogasky 143).
The Jews that escaped the deportation to camps and ghettoes, like the famous young girl Anne Frank and her family, only did so by the help of non-Jews. Those willing to help became very creative when it came to disguising the existence of Jews in their home.
Necessity made Gentiles brilliant at designing hiding places. They built double walls, they made false ceiling, and they camouflaged attics and cellars. The hid Jews in factories and offices, in nunneries, monasteries, churches, and hospitals, in stables, cemeteries, pigsties, cowsheds, haystacks, pigeon coops, and greenhouses. When overcrowding inside the secret hideaways became a problem, Jews took turns standing, kneeling, squatting, sleeping. Small children were hidden in boxes, garbage bins, baskets, baking stores (Meltzer 17).
All this, and yet, there exist people today who claim “the Holocaust – the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people – never happened. Typical of the deniers’ attempt to obfuscate is their claim that they do not deny that there was a Holocaust, only that there was a plan or an attempt to annihilate the Jewish people” (Lipstadt 21). Author, Deborah Lipstadt, went on to write about the deniers that “they have distorted and deconstructed the definition of the term Holocaust” (21). Not only do the deniers declare the absence of the Holocaust, “there are also those who…went a step further and portrayed Germany as the much-maligned victim of Allied aggression. Such arguments serve as the model for those who would eventually seek not just to exculpate Germany for the Holocaust but to deny its existence altogether” (Lipstadt 42). Essentially, deniers try to blame the Jews for what happened during WWII. The deniers victimize the Germans instead and claim the Jews only said what they said about the German to give the Germans a bad name (Lipstadt 23). Lipstadt wrote plainly “the attempt to deny the Holocaust enlists a basic strategy of distortion. Truth is mixed with absolute lies, confusing readers who are unfamiliar with the tactics of the deniers” (2). The deniers bamboozle the listeners by presenting them with a “distorted impression of what really happened”. The deniers try to disregard the multiple legitimate documents and accounts and attempt to make the false account seem more believable (Lipstadt, 2). Another profound observation by Lipstadt, “It was the inhuman social organization that enabled the Nazis to realize their goal of annihilating masses of Jews with such technological instruments. Thus, because they made the latter possible the bureaucratic achievements of the Nazis were more frightening than the technological ones” (94).
Lord Acton once said, “power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”, and so was the situation in Adolf Hitler’s case. He is a prime example of why evil men should be kept out of the government. When those in power do not fear God, the people they rule have much to fear from them, as was the case with the Jews. Finally, the Holocaust is a significant event and it is relevant to America today because if precautions are not taken, situations like the Holocaust can and will happen again.
Sources:
American –Israeli Cooperative
Enterprise, The.
“http://www.jewishvertiuallibrary.ogr/jsource/holo.html”
and various sites.
The American
–Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2008. Accessed: 1 Mar. 2008.
Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the
Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.
New
York: The Free Press, 1993.
Meltzer, Milton. Rescue:
The Story of How Gentiles Saved Jews in the Holocaust.
New
York: Harper & Row Junior Books, 1988.
Menszer, John. “Holocaust
Survivors” 1999.
“http://www.holocaustsurvivors.org/
and various sites. Accessed: 3 Apr. 2008.
Rogasky, Barbara. Smoke and
Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust.
New York: Holiday
House, 1988.
United Human Rights Council. “http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/"
and various sites.
Accessed: 7
Apr. 2008
1 comment:
Excellent! Well drawn. As you point out, we may not be so very far from the replaying of these kinds of events, but in America.
-Lord Acton
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