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Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler rose to the rank of German Chancellor in the year 1933. At the time, the German president was looking for an able leader who would rescue the country from the deepening economic and political crisis. Unknown to President Hindenburg, he had appointed a fiend to lead the country who would plunge Germany into some of the darkest times in human history. Under the Nazi Party, Hitler and his fellow party members began to rid the country of all opposition by putting their leaders to death. These radicalists believed that the Germans were a superior race, and others such as the Jews were second rate citizens as well as an inferior race. Some of the steps that Hitler took to rid Germany of the Jews include forced sterilization and mass murder in death camps.

The main reason why Hitler wanted to rid Germany of the Jews was that he believed they belonged to an inferior race. The inferior races threatened the purity of the master race, the Germans, and hence, they had to be eliminated. The Hitler government also spread propaganda blaming the Jews for the misfortunes that had befallen the country, including the economic depression as well as its defeat in the First World War. From the year 1933, the government began organized persecution of the Jews (Shera). First, all Jews were removed from their positions in government and other positions in the country. As the years progressed, things only got worse. The Germans seized all properties and businesses belonging to the Jews. The culmination of this was the Kristallnacht or the Night of the Broken Glass in English. On this night, the Nazis destroyed the Jewish synagogues, their business premises as well as their homes. In addition to this, the Jews were arrested and even killed.

Despite the grave human rights violations happening in Germany, the United States and other countries refused to take in refugees from the country. At the time, the US congress had strict quotas on immigrants, as well as a strict screening process that discouraged many. In addition to this, the country experienced the economic depression of 1929, and it feared that immigrants would further strain public resources (Shera). The economic depression gave rise to other hostile beliefs such as xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and isolationism. Right after the depression came the Second World War that overshadowed the Jewish persecution in Germany. There is a debate surrounding the action or lack thereof of the Allied countries to save the German Jews. Many argue that the Allied countries did not know the exact locations of the death camps, making it impossible to carry out any actions such as bombings that would result in more casualties. However, some of the actions that the countries should have taken include taking in as many refugees as possible and launching intelligence-gathering operations to find out the locations of the death camps. The German holocaust left about six million Jews dead, the worst state-sanctioned case of mass murder in human history.

Works Cited

Shera, Shahid Rasool. “Deportation and Persecution of Jews: A Study of Patrick Modiano’s The Search Warrant.” IJELLH (International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities) 7.2 (2019): 9-9.