thesis statement about the holocaust

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Holocaust Thesis Statement

Type of paper: Thesis

Topic: History , Middle East , Literature , Books , Racism , Website , Holocaust , Adolf Hitler

Published: 12/12/2019

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The Holocaust was the planned and state-supported execution of around six million Jews. The persecution was carried out by the Nazi administration and its supporters. The Nazis, came to rule in Germany in 1933; they deemed Jews as inferior to Germans and that they were contaminating the German community. The Nazi reign continued until 1945 when they were finally defeated. As well as targeting Jews, the Nazis also singled out gypsies, homosexuals, those with disabilities and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In fact, any person who put up resistance to the Nazi’s was either sent to a labour camp or was killed. Although the common name for Nazi camps is “concentration camps,” there were several types of camp. These included concentration camps, extermination camps, labour camps, prisoner-of-war camps and transit camps. Life for the Jews within the camps was awful. Prisoners were made to work hard with very little food. Furthermore, they had to sleep up to three people on one bare wooden bunk. There was also a great deal of torture and killing in the camps. At several concentration camps, Nazi physicians carried out medical experiments on the Jews without their consent. While the concentration camps were designed to make the prisoners work hard while starving them to death, extermination camps were designed to kill large numbers of people quickly and without fuss. It is difficult to comment on which of these camps would have been worse. Although it is generally accepted that these atrocities took place, there are people who deny the Holocaust. Such people sometimes claim that the Nazi government had no official policy to eradicate the Jews. Others claim that the Nazis did not use extermination camps or gas chambers to carry out mass killings. Holocaust deniers do not tend to agree to the word “denial” as a definition of their point of view. Instead, they use the word “revisionism.” However, they cannot use this term in a historical sense as they largely ignore historical evidence in formulating their arguments. Although Holocaust Denial is actually illegal in many countries, there are still people who take up the position. However, there is a vast wealth of historical evidence which confirms that the mass-murder of Jews did take place, in a premeditated fashion, by the Nazi rule.

Annotated Bibliography

Gilbert, M. (1989). The Holocaust. Harper Collins: New Ed edition. This book provides a detailed account of the Jews’ experience of the Holocaust. It is told in the words of men and women who were actually there and lived through it. This is a disturbing book with some graphic descriptions of events. It is likely to prove useful in my research as it draws on real life experiences.

Longerich, P. (2010). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. OUP Oxford.

This book offers a broad history of the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews. It particularly concentrates on the perpetrators and looks carefully at the decision making processes that took place. Longerich claims that anti-Semitism was not a simple consequence of the Nazis' political enlistment or an effort to deflect attention, but that the disappearance of Jews was planned as the initial step nearer a racially homogeneous society. As this book pays attention to the perpetrators, it will prove useful in my research process. It is relatively unbiased which is also an advantage.

Lipstadt, D. (1994). Denying the Holocaust: A Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Penguin.

In this book of Holocaust denial history, Deborah Lipstadt explains how this illogical idea has not only carried on gaining supporters but has also developed into an internationally structured movement. This source will be of large assistance to me when I come to write my section on Holocaust denial.

Shermer, M. (2009). Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why do they Say it? University of California Press.

This book takes a brave and detailed look at the people who claim that the Holocaust never happened and investigates the impetuses driving such statements. Historians Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman have absorbed themselves in the thoughts and culture of the deniers in an attempt to get to the bottom of their argument. This book will be useful in writing about Holocaust denial and, indeed, in the proof that it did happen.

Think Quest Library. The Holocaust: A Tragic Legacy. Retrieved from http://library.thinkquest.org/12663/

This award winning website provides a solid grounding to the Holocaust as a whole. There is a detailed timeline which clearly sets out the chain of events leading up to and beyond the Holocaust. This website will be useful in providing an insight into the Holocaust, with pages that are easy to use. Finding information on this site will be quick and simple.

Auschwitz. The Holocaust: Crimes, Heroes and Villains. Retrieved from http://www.auschwitz.dk/

Perhaps the most useful and unique thing about this website is its range of biographies of key players within the Holocaust. I will be able to cross reference the information here, especially with the book by Longerich, in building up a picture of the motivation behind the Nazi rule.

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The Holocaust

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 11, 2023 | Original: October 14, 2009

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, Romani people, the intellectually disabled, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The word “holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition during World War II, with mass killing centers in concentration camps. About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.

Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler . Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .

The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf ” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer , becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. 

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

HISTORY Vault: Third Reich: The Rise

Rare and never-before-seen amateur films offer a unique perspective on the rise of Nazi Germany from Germans who experienced it. How were millions of people so vulnerable to fascism?

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland , starting World War II . German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution ) to “the Jewish question.”

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide . Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz , the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum . What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums . Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe . Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations .

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For Teachers

Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust

Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust

Timeline of Events

Explore a timeline of events that occurred before, during, and after the Holocaust.

• Introduction to the Holocaust
• Liberation of Nazi Camps
• Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
• Boycott of Jewish Businesses
• Axis Invasion of Yugoslavia
• Antisemitism
• How Many People did the Nazis Murder?
• The Rwanda Genocide

An Overview of the Holocaust: Topics to Teach

Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust.

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When teaching the history of the Holocaust, the complexity of the subject matter can often seem daunting or challenging for educators. Teaching the Holocaust requires contextualizing the events of the Holocaust within many different strands of history. To understand how individuals and organizations behaved at the time, students need to know a number of key concepts and information. Below are recommended resources and topics to address when planning lessons or units on the Holocaust. 

The objective of teaching any subject should always be to engage the intellectual curiosity of students in order to inspire critical thought and personal growth. With this in mind, it also is helpful to structure a lesson plan on the Holocaust by considering your main goals and purposes for teaching the subject matter. Find more information on how to craft learning objectives for teaching the Holocaust . 

Historical Background

The Path to Nazi Genocide  provides general background information on the Holocaust for the instructor and for classroom use. 

This 38-minute film examines the Nazis’ rise and consolidation of power in Germany. Using rare footage, the film explores their ideology, propaganda, and persecution of Jews and other victims. It also outlines the path by which the Nazis and their collaborators led a state to war and to the murder of millions of people. By providing a concise overview of the Holocaust and those involved, this resource is intended to provoke reflection and discussion about the role of ordinary people, institutions, and nations between 1918 and 1945.

View The Path to Nazi Genocide .

This film is intended for adult viewers, but selected segments may be appropriate for younger audiences. The final 8 minutes of the film present very graphic material.

There is a worksheet with an answer key to go along with the film. Many of these questions could be used as discussion questions in class. Additionally, there is a one-day lesson that provides an introduction to the Holocaust by defining the term and highlighting the story of one Holocaust survivor, Gerda Weissmann.

Accessibility

To make the content of the Holocaust Encyclopedia more broadly available, any materials translated into various languages. Please select your language by using the globe icon. 

The Holocaust Encyclopedia also includes provides a glossary for students.

The following key articles in the Holocaust Encyclopedia now have audio versions for greater accessibility and to match different learning styles. 

• Anne Frank Biography: Who was Anne Frank?
• Anne Frank: Diary
• The "Final Solution"
• "Final Solution": Overview
• History of the Swastika
• Hitler Comes to Power
• Josef Mengele
• Kristallnacht
• Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the Socialists..."
• Nazi Propaganda
• Nazi Racism
• The "Night of Broken Glass"
• The Nuremberg Race Laws
• World War II Dates and Timeline

Context for Understanding the Holocaust

The encyclopedia articles below provide background and more context on the Holocaust. 

• Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust
• World War I
• Nazi Rise to Power
• Dictatorship under the Third Reich
• Early Stages of Persecution
• The First Concentration Camps
• World War II in Europe
• Murder of the Disabled (Euthanasia Program)
• Persecution and Murder of Jews
• Mobile Killing Squads ( Einsatzgruppen )
• Expansion of the Concentration Camp System
• Killing Centers
• Additional Victims of Nazi Persecution
• Jewish Resistance  
• Non-Jewish Resistance
• United States
• Death Marches
• Postwar Trials
• Displaced Persons Camps  

If You Have One Class Period

Provide a historical overview of the history through use of the Path to Nazi Genocide film or other materials. Or refer to the   one-day lesso n , which provides an introduction to the Holocaust by defining the term and highlighting the story of one Holocaust survivor, Gerda Weissmann.

Based on your rationale, choose one or more topics to highlight. Include personal testimonies from the Museum's ID Cards  or oral history excerpts as appropriate.

Critical Thinking Questions

The most visited articles in the Holocaust Encyclopedia include critical thinking questions to encourage reflection on connections to contemporary events and genocide prevention, analysis of the range of motivations and behaviors, and further research on key topics.

The following are examples of articles with critical thinking questions. You'll find these questions at the foot of each page:  

Discussion Questions

A set of Discussion Questions aim to provide a framework for understanding how and why the Holocaust was possible. 

What made it possible?

• What conditions and ideas made the Holocaust possible?
• How and why did ordinary people across Europe contribute to the persecution of their Jewish neighbors?
• How did German professionals and civil leaders contribute to the persecution of Jews and other groups?
• How did the Nazis and their collaborators implement the Holocaust?
• What does war make possible?
• How did the United States government and American people respond to Nazism?
• How did leaders, diplomats, and citizens around the world respond to the events of the Holocaust?
• Which organizations and individuals aided and protected Jews from persecution between 1933 and 1945?

After the war

• How did postwar trials shape approaches to international justice?
• What have we learned about the risk factors and warning signs of genocide?

Other topics

• How did the shared foundational element of eugenics contribute to the growth of racism in Europe and the United States?
• What were some similarities between racism in Nazi Germany and in the United States, 1920s-1940s?
• How did different goals and political systems shape racism in Nazi Germany and the United States?

Thank you for supporting our work

We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors .

Why did the Holocaust happen?

Antisemitism was one of the most fundamental causes of the Holocaust. The banner in this picture reads ‘Germany does not buy from Jews’. This photograph is taken from The Wiener Holocaust Library’s Motorcycle Album , a collection of photographs taken on a journey from the Dutch border to Berlin in 1935.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.

The Holocaust was the culmination of a number of factors over a number of years.

Historic antisemitism , the rise of eugenics and nationalism , the aftermath of the First World War, the rise of the Nazis, the role of Adolf Hitler, the internal operation of the Nazi state, the Second World War and collaboration all played key roles in the timing and scale of the final catastrophe.

This section aims to explore how these individual factors contributed to the Holocaust.

Nationalism and the First World War

This leaflet was produced and distributed by the Deutsche Fichte-Bund , a nationalist organisation founded in Hamburg in 1914. The organisation spread nationalist and antisemitic propaganda in Germany and across the world.

German military personnel serving in the First World War pictured in Aisne, Northern France, in July 1915.

Following the Enlightenment (late seventeenth century – early nineteenth century), there was a growth in nationalism . The rise in nationalism intensified the rise in antisemitism, which had also been growing since the Enlightenment. The First World War (1914-1918) strengthened these feelings of nationalism across Europe, as nations were pitted against each other.

In 1918, Germany lost the First World War . Many people within Germany, including Adolf Hitler, found this loss very difficult and humiliating to process. Instead, many looked for scapegoats to blame.

This led to the Stab-in-the-Back Myth. The Stab-in-the-Back Myth was the belief that the German Army did not lose the First World War on the battlefield, but was instead betrayed by communists , socialists and Jews on the home front. This myth fostered the growth of extreme antisemitism , nationalism and anti-communism .

These feelings were exacerbated further by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to admit complete responsibility for the war; pay large amounts of reparations (which undermined the Germany post-war economy); give up significant proportions of land, and limited the size of its army. The Treaty was extremely unpopular in Germany, where the public regarded it as a diktat (dictated peace). This led to a lack of faith in the Weimar Republic , the newly established regime of rule in Germany.

The unsettled conditions in Germany encouraged the popularity of nationalism and nostalgia for the country’s pre-war strength. Nationalism was a key factor in the rise in popularity of nationalist political parties such as the Nazis, and, in turn, ideas such as antisemitism.

Eugenics and antisemitism

An Ahnenpass or ancestry pass belonging to Rita Jarmes. Ancestry passes were used to demonstrate Aryan heritage in Nazi Germany. The Nazis often requested Ahnenpasses as proof for of eligibility for certain professions, or citizenship after 1935.

This poster, entitled ‘recreation, friends, health’, depicts an ‘ideal’ German child in accordance to the Nazis’ vision and beliefs in eugenics.

This pamphlet, entitled Aryan Worldview , was published by Houston Stewart Chamberlain in Berlin in 1905. Chamberlain was an advocate of the racial superiority of ‘Aryans’. His ideas influenced Adolf Hitler and were used by the Nazis as justification for their racial policies.

Robert Ritter (1901-1951) was a German ‘racial scientist’ in the Nazi regime. Ritter’s research into the eugenics of Roma led to his appointment as head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit. Ritter’s work to classify Roma aided and justified the Nazis discrimination, persecution, and execution of Roma. Here, Ritter [right] is pictured doing research in 1936

Courtesy of Bundesarchiv (R 165 Bild-244-71 / CC-BY-SA 3.0) [Public Domain].

Once in power, the Nazis initiated extensive antisemitic legislation. This letter is a translation of a list of antisemitic measures issued by Göring on 28 December 1938.

A photograph showing an antisemitic street sign in Mainbernheim, central Germany, taken in September 1935. The sign reads ‘The Jew is our misfortune. He shall stay away from us’. This photograph is taken from The Wiener Holocaust Library’s Motorcycle Album , a collection of photographs taken on a journey from the Dutch border to Berlin in 1935.

In addition to the rise in nationalism, the modern age saw the rise of racist ideas such eugenics and antisemitism . Both of these ideas lay at the heart of Nazi ideology, and eventually informed their persecutory and genocidal policies.

Following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, the study of eugenics became extremely popular. Eugenics is the science of regulating a population through controlled breeding. Eugenic scientists aimed to eliminate traits believed to be undesirable, and encourage those that were ‘desirable’ in order to ‘improve’ the human race. This idea was dangerous as it suggested that certain groups were superior to others. Eugenics quickly became misused by far-right groups.

Hitler and the Nazis later used the popularity of eugenics and the theory of Social Darwinists as a pseudo-scientific justification to support their idea that non-‘ Aryans ‘ were inferior races, and should therefore be exterminated.

Antisemitism

Antisemitism  was one of the most fundamental causes of the Holocaust.

The rise of antisemitism over the course of the early twentieth century was extremely dangerous. It allowed an overtly antisemitic party such as the Nazis to come to power in 1933.

Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race of people, who set out to weaken other races and take over the world. Hitler believed that Jews were particularly destructive to the German ‘ Aryan ’ race, and did not have any place in Nazi Germany.

The Nazis’ implemented antisemitic laws, which persecuted and oppressed Jews, and eventually led to their deportation and mass murder.

Rise of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler

This poster was used to promote Hitler in the 1932 Reichspräsident  elections, where he ran against Hindenburg for the presidency. Hitler lost the election, with 36.8% of the vote to Hindenburg’s 53%. Despite losing, the election put Hitler on the map as a credible politician. The poster states ’Hesse chooses Hitler!’

This poster, also used in the 1932 Reichspräsident  elections was aimed specifically at women, emphasising Hitler’s proposed policies on family life.

The Nazis’ rise to power , and the role of Adolf Hitler himself, is one of the primary causes of the Holocaust. The Nazis initiated, organised and directed the genocide and their racist ideology underpinned it.

The Nazi rise to power 

The Nazis’ ideology rested on several key ideas , such as nationalism, racial superiority, antisemitism, and anticommunism. These ideas were popular in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, as the economic and political situation fluctuated and then, following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, quickly deteriorated.

In these uncertain times, the Nazi Party appeared to offer hope, political stability and prosperity. In 1932, the Nazis became the biggest party in the Reichstag , with 37.3% of the vote.

Shortly afterwards, on 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. The Nazis quickly consolidated their power, taking advantage of the Reichstag Fire of February 1933   to begin their reign of terror. Whilst primarily aimed at political enemies, the infrastructure of camps and institutionalised torture used in these initial months provided the groundwork for the camp system which later facilitated mass murder. Although not the subject of mass arrests in the same way that many political prisoners were initially, Jews were quickly targeted by the Nazi regime.

The Nazis’ persecution of Jews started with exclusionary policies, eliminating Jews from certain professions and educational opportunities and encouraging them to emigrate. As their power became more secure, the Nazis quickly escalated to more direct persecution, such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of their citizenship and Kristallnacht (an antisemitic pogrom ) in 1938. This escalation of oppression continued to intensify and radicalise until the outbreak of war, where it quickly became more lethal, and, eventually, genocidal.

The role of Adolf Hitler

As leader of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler played a key role in the ideas behind, the events leading up to, and the unfolding of, the Holocaust.

Prior to their election, the Nazis shaped their propaganda to present Hitler as a strong leader that could return Germany from the uncertain circumstances of the time to its former glory. In the early years, Hitler was the driving force behind the Nazis, and made key changes to the party’s structure, branding and methods to turn it into a credible political force.

Once elected, Hitler rarely took part in direct actions against Jews or other internal enemies, instead directing his security forces, the SS , SA and SD , and their leader, Heinrich Himmler, to carry out this work. Whilst not physically involved, Hitler was involved in all major policy decisions, including persecutory policies and events. This is evidenced by his personal approval for the secret euthanasia programme of the disabled, T-4 , in Autumn 1939.

Hitler’s fanatic antisemitism , nationalism and anticommunism propelled Nazi ideology, and later, the Holocaust. Hitler’s expansionist policies, such as Lebensraum   pushed Europe into the Second World War. This, alongside other factors, had severe ramifications for European Jews.

Radicalisation of the administration of the Nazi state

The Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung resulted in the expulsion of many Jews from their jobs. Prior to the Nazi rise to power Wilhelm Meno Simon (1885 – 1966) worked as an assistant judge and senior lawyer in Berlin. In 1933, following as the Nazis applied their policy of Gleichschaltung, Wilhelm was reduced to working as a notary. Here, Wilhelm is pictured with his son, Bernd.

In 1938, following Kristallnacht , Simon emigrated to Britain (where his wife, Gerty, and son, Bernard, were already living) to escape further Nazi persecution. This is a copy of his sponsorship document, which, by 1938, was needed in order to get a visa for Britain.

Shortly after being elected into power, the Nazis set about radicalising the infrastructure of government to suit their needs.

Gleichschaltung (Co-ordination)

Gleichschaltung was the process of the Nazi Party taking control over or reforming all aspects of government in Germany. It is otherwise known as coordination or Nazification.

One of the first institutions to be targeted for reform was the Civil Service . On 7 April 1933, the Nazis passed the Act for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service , legalising the removal of anyone of non-Aryan descent from the civil service. Amongst other things, this act removed any judges that were deemed non-compliant with Nazi laws or principles, and therefore paved the way for legalising future radical persecutory actions against the Jews and other enemies of the Nazis. Those that remained in the Civil Service quickly became aware of how enemies of the regime were treated by the SS, and having benefitted from the spaces left by their Jewish colleagues, were unlikely to speak out in their favour.

This process of co-ordination was repeated through almost all aspects of government policy, which helped to align existing institutions to be sympathetic (and obedient) to Nazi ideology. This, in turn, allowed the Nazis to continue to push the boundaries of, and slowly radicalise, persecution.

Cumulative radicalisation

In addition to taking over existing government departments, the Nazis also created new departments of their own. These frequently carried out similar functions to pre-existing departments, often resulting in overlap on policy. An example of this is the Office of the Four Year Plan (created in 1936) and the already existing Economics Ministry, which both had power over economic policy.

This internal duplication meant that many elements of the regime were forced to compete with each other for power. Each office took increasingly radical steps to solidify its favour with Hitler, and in turn, its authority. The process is often referred to as ‘working towards the Führer’: the idea that the Nazi state attempted to anticipate and develop policy in line with Hitler’s wishes, without him being directly involved. Goebbels’ organisation of  Kristallnacht can be used as an example of ‘working towards the Führer’ – Hitler did not directly authorise the event, but it was carried out with his racist ideology and wishes in mind.

The competition and constant radicalisation meant that the administration and bureaucracy of the Nazi state was chaotic. This chaos increased over time because of a lack of clear lines of accountability. For example, even though, in theory, Himmler was answerable to Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, in reality he only ever received orders from Hitler himself.

As the Second World War progressed, the administration of the Nazi state became even further radicalised. New territories created new positions of power which further increased the radicalisation of ideological policy. The SS competed with senior party members and army officers for these positions and jurisdiction in the newly occupied areas. This internal competition in policy again pushed the radicalisation of policy as each organisation grappled for control, especially where there were ‘security concerns’ in the newly occupied areas.

The effect of the Second World War

The Second World War resulted in an extensive radicalisation of the Nazis’ antisemitic policy.

The first major radicalising action that resulted from the war was the creation of ghettos following the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. This resulted in three million Jews coming under German control. In order to contain the Jewish population, the Nazis forcibly segregated these Jews from the local population and placed them into ghettos. This was a large escalation of the Nazis’ previous antisemitic policy.

As the war continued it became clear that both the Magagascar Plan and the Generalplan Ost were infeasible, and it would not be possible to forcibly deport and resettle the Jewish population of Europe.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 further escalated lethal actions towards Jews. In the lead up to the invasion, Joseph Goebbels ’ propaganda against Jews and, specifically OstJuden (eastern Jews), became even more vicious. This propaganda not only gave justification for the invasion of the Soviet Union, but directly linked the invasion to Jews.

As the historian Donald Bloxham wrote, ‘The very decision to go to war presupposed a racial mindset…everything that happened in war was liable to be interpreted in that light: frustrations were the cause for ‘revenge’; successes provided opportunities to create facts on the ground’ [Donald Bloxham,  The Final Solution A Genocide , (United States: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.174].

Following behind the Germany Army throughout the invasion and subsequent partial occupation, the Einsatzgruppen conducted mass shootings of communists , Jews and any others thought to be enemies of the Nazi state. As the invasion of the Soviet Union slowed and the tide of war turned against the Nazis, actions against the Jews were further intensified. They were once again used as scapegoats for Germany’s military failures.

These actions culminated in the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 , which coordinated the Nazis genocidal policy towards the Jews and resulted in the establishment of six extermination camps.

The Second World War played a vital role in radicalising the Nazis’ antisemitic policy into genocide. The Nazis reacted to some events in the war by escalating their actions against Jews. One example of this is the murder of Reinhard Heydrich and the subsequent mass killings of civilians and the liquidation of the village of Lidice.

Collaboration

This testimony, given by Oscar Michelson in 1948 as part o f The Wiener Holocaust Library’s eyewitness testimony project , discusses the actions of the Nazis and Lithuanian officials in 1940 in Kovno, Lithuania.

German Army soldiers film the massacre of Jews in the Lvov Pogroms of July 1941, carried out by the Einsatzgruppe C and the Ukrainian National Militia.

This excerpt is taken from a situation report sent to the Chief of the Security Police and SD Reinhard Heydrich on 30 June 1941. The report details the involvement and collaboration of local Lithuanians in Kovno.

This document is a translation used in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

The Nazis did not carry out the Holocaust alone. Their descent into genocide was assisted and carried out by collaborators: individuals, groups and governments that helped the Nazis to persecute and murder their victims. Without the aid of these collaborators, the Nazis would not have been able to carry out the Holocaust to the same extent or at the same pace.

Collaboration took many forms.

On the home front in Germany, some civilians actively collaborated with the Nazis to implement their antisemitic persecutory polices, such as denunciating Jewish neighbours or colleagues, or helping to implement antisemitic laws.

This form of collaboration reinforced antisemitic laws and obedience to the regime, which allowed the Nazis to slowly push and escalate the boundaries of acceptable levels of persecution.

Occupied countries

The most active, direct and deadly collaboration took place in the countries occupied by, or aligned with, the Nazis across Europe.

In the Seventh Fort, a concentration camp in Lithuania, Lithuanian police and militia acted as guards and participated in daily mass rapes, tortures, and murders. In Lvov, which is now part of modern-day Ukraine, pogroms organised by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian National Militia resulted in the deaths and torture of thousands of Jews in June and July 1941. In Romania, the Antonescu regime widely collaborated with the Nazis to murder their Jewish inhabitants. Approximately 270,000 Romanian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

These are just three examples of widespread collaboration with the Nazis.

The motivations behind these acts of collaboration are complex. Some acted in accordance with historic antisemitic views, others were motivated by potentials for economic gain, others did so out of fear.

Whatever their motivation, the effects of widespread collaboration for the Jewish population in the occupied countries of Europe were lethal. The participation of countries occupied by or aligned with Nazi Germany greatly extended the Nazis’ reach and speed at which the Holocaust unfolded, with fatal consequences.

Continue to next topic

What happened in April

On 1 April 1933, the Nazi Party led a nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned businesses across Germany

On 25 April 1933, the Law Against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities was issued, restricting the number of Jewish students.

On 7 April 1943, the SS shut down the Chełmno death camp for the first time. They would later reopen it to liquidate the Łódź ghetto.

On 19 April 1943, the beginning of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto was met with organised armed resistance by its residents.

On 11 April 1945, the US army liberated Buchenwald camp.

On 15 April 1945, Bergen-Belsen camp was liberated by the British Army.

On 30 April 1945, Hitler took his own life in his bunker underneath the Reich chancellery in Berlin.

Chronicles of Love & Resentment by Eric Gans

How to Write about the Holocaust

No. 410: Saturday, June 25th, 2011

As in many other things, not being an “authority” on the Holocaust makes it easier for me to formulate some basic ideas about it than for those whose lives and careers are directly dependent on it. I recently read Alvin Rosenfeld’s The End of the Holocaust (Indiana UP 2011), which is mostly devoted to noting the failures of Western culture’s memory of the Holocaust. While I sympathize with most of the views the author expresses, and certainly share his concluding apprehension concerning those in Iran and elsewhere who are happily dreaming of annihilating Israel in a “second Holocaust,” I would like to suggest a different, less polemical perspective on the subject.

The Holocaust provides an extreme version of the paradoxes that arise whenever we attempt to react as individuals to any real-world event. To simply take the event as a given is to abdicate our human responsibility to assign meaning, yet to insist on finding for it a “personal” meaning is to make our own judgment the measure of social value. The Holocaust poses this paradox in a maximally urgent manner because while it presents a spectacle so morally repugnant that we feel obliged to invent a personal way of “testifying” to it, it is a thing of the past that all our acts of repentance and charity cannot redeem. Hence it arouses reactions of denial, minimization, focusing on minor “positive” elements, de-Judaizing, attacks on the “Holocaust industry,” etc., as ways of reducing it to more tolerable dimensions; and at the other extreme, it inspires the suicide of survivors who cannot bear the guilt of having been “chosen” over so many others, coupled with the sense of irredeemable violation that suggests one no longer deserves to live.

But the intensity and frequent moral inadequacy of these responses testifies to the fact that the Holocaust’s historical impact goes well beyond the realm of direct reactions and their exploitation in rhetoric and imagery. To take a controversial example, when “happy” stories of the Holocaust such as Schindler’s List are accused of emphasizing cases that are in fact statistically trivial, I think a point missed is that the “happy ending” reflects not in fact the story of the Holocaust itself but of what is hoped to be its place in history—as the source of a new sensitivity to oppression, including but not limited to the Jewish resolve that has sustained Israel. For the justification for Schindler’s List as “the story of the Holocaust” includes as well the postwar liberation of the European colonies and the Blacks in the American South. Here and in general, I find it more useful to judge such works in their overall historical context rather than as attempted revisions, or re-visions, of the Holocaust. For the real story of the Holocaust cannot be made into a meaningful fiction, since the vast majority of its characters, those whom we desperately wish to memorialize, were not actors at all, only victims.

My thesis has long been that reaction to the Holocaust lies at the origin of the whole victimary trend of modern thought, in both what I consider its praiseworthy accomplishments and those I admire less—although like nearly all political actions ( except those that can be defined in terms of the Nazi-Jew paradigm of the Holocaust, which is why this very designation is, unsurprisingly, paradoxical) these are subject to the Hayekian principle that the “market” is smarter than its participants, so that a policy that may strike me as unjustified may in fact turn out to have a salutary effect on, say, the achievement of racial equality.

On the level at which this thesis is situated, specific reactions to the Holocaust as a historical event are no longer at issue; the question becomes how to understand the overall movement of thought that we claim this event brought about. To answer those who contest this claim, we must define victimary thinking and show how its categories can be conceived as reactions to the Holocaust. The point of such a discussion is not to prove that those who have made use of victimary categories in political and social thought “had the Holocaust in mind,” nor is it useful to argue with someone who denies either the Holocaust’s reality or its significance. The burden would rather be on such a person to provide an equally coherent alternative model, and only at this point would argument become productive.

But in fact the very notion of victimary thinking has no equivalent in everyday discourse, and not surprisingly there really are no other universal explanatory models. Most intellectuals reject the very idea of “victimary thought” and see themselves rather as defending the oppressed against their oppressors. In contrast, those who accept the idea of the victimary and who are generally critical of the phenomenon it designates are not wont to seek justifications for it in history.

Victimary thinking may be defined without circularly referring to the Holocaust. It is the way of thinking for which any difference between ascriptive or “objective” groups that can be understood as imputing values of superiority and inferiority is absolutely condemned as immoral and inhuman. In this context “ascriptive” may be taken broadly to include sexual orientation and religion as well as the usual categories of race, gender, nationality, social class, etc.

Let me now outline, as I have done in a number of Chronicles (e.g., 90 , 287 , 337 , 380 , 385 ,  392 , 399 …) a skeleton history of postwar victimary thinking. In the first phase, which in the United States was the era of “Civil Rights,” the form of victimization that was condemned was de jure inequality, whose obvious parallel with the Nazi-Jew relationship was rarely stated and, I imagine, seldom thought. The point is not that the living memory of the Holocaust was instrumental in creating a sense of repugnance, but that the Holocaust was experienced historically as a demonstration of the evil of differential relationships on racial lines. No doubt the Holocaust itself took place at a moment of history in which a certain (notably anti-colonial) struggle had already begun and must be understood in part as a reaction to it, as a strong assertion of the validity of “racial superiority” at a moment when this notion, so unproblematic in the previous century, had begun to come under fire. But in the next turn of the dialectic, the horror of Nazism itself, even independently of the still little-mentioned specifics of the Final Solution, was sufficient to fuel what turned out to be successful struggles for racial equality and colonial liberation. This phase of history, whose last triumph was the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1990-91, is to the extent that historical developments may be so considered, relatively unproblematic; today only a tiny fringe would find acceptable, let alone prefer, the racial/colonial hierarchies of an earlier era.

The “Jewish question” was relatively absent from the vision of Nazism that provided the impetus for these developments, which focused less on the six million than on the general horror of Nazi racism and tyranny. In this period the Jews, rather than insisting on their role as victims, tended rather to be ashamed of it; the question commonly asked of survivors was, “why didn’t you/they fight back?”

It was only in the second, mature phase of postmodernism that victimary thinking fully came into its own. At much the same time, the idea of “the Holocaust” acquired currency, along with the now-familiar images of piles of bodies and suitcases, emaciated prisoners, the Warsaw Ghetto in flames, “selection” on the Auschwitz ramp… as well as the iconic and much-abused figure of Anne Frank, to whom Rosenfeld devotes two full chapters of his book. In this second phase of victimary thinking, those who claimed to be or defend victims learned a new rhetoric of results . It was not enough to demand equal rights; to obtain full equality one had to be compensated for past ills, to be granted a “level playing field.” Victimary thinking has operated ever since with this expanded model, with which is associated a deconstructive theory of history. In this perspective, giving Blacks or women equal rights today cannot suffice to reverse not so much the direct results of past discrimination as the mind-set, indeed, the shared ontology of a world that affirms racial and gender superiority/inferiority. Although the domination of many areas of the university system, corporate hiring, etc., by such considerations has provided victimary groups with considerable financial and other advantages, victims are not expected to be satisfied simply to have acquired “rights” and advantages in the present. On the contrary, they are called as witnesses to the applicability of the Nazi-Jew model to human society in general. For from the beginning, the ethical and intellectual values of these societies have been complicit in the oppression of peripheral victims for the benefit of central authority.

The power of the Holocaust model is simple and absolute. If one wishes to claim, for example, that certain social roles are better fitted to men than women—or, say, that marriage should be restricted to that between a man and a woman—the implicit Nazi analogy renders these judgments as ugly as the caricatures in Der Stürmer . It is of great significance that anti-Jewish prejudice, unlike the standard racial variety, is based on the denial of what is generally an objective superiority— one that can be traced back to the Hebrews’ firstness as the inventors/discoverers of monotheism. The Nazi-Jew paradigm colors all other victimary oppositions with an undertone of envy. Whatever the value of the evidence that, say, Blacks are less intelligent on average than Whites, or women less gifted in the sciences than men, there is certainly no evidence that Jews are less intelligent or gifted than non-Jews— au contraire. If victimary groups are persecuted ultimately for their superiority, then no discrimination of any kind can be objectively justified. Hence the existence of statistical differences between groups with regard to success in any given endeavor (unless the victimary group actually does better, as with Blacks on basketball teams or women in college admissions) is considered prima facie evidence of discrimination.

At this point victimary thinking becomes problematic, for it incorporates two contradictory principles derived from the originary moral model. On the one hand, the firstness of the first user of the sign is not allowed to confer an advantage when it comes to distributing the products of the sparagmos; the exchange of signs, and of the things that are ritually distributed as a result of the exchange of signs, is in principle perfectly symmetrical. On the other hand, in more advanced societies the different roles are expected to be distributed according to the ability to perform them and not by victimary categories. The creation of such categories in the postwar era, however obviously necessary they may appear to us, is a radically new development that is best understood as the legacy of the Holocaust. It is in effect the extension of the Holocaust paradigm to the whole ensemble of social relations. Nothing like “affirmative action” had ever existed, even among persons with great sympathy for groups that are today considered victims and that in the past were simply thought of as deprived of equal rights, such as slaves in the South or women not given the vote. Needless to say, this new victimary consciousness has not done away with social hierarchy, but it has eliminated many selection criteria previously considered “objective,” such as aptitude examinations for civil service work, and spawned affirmative action programs of various kinds, not always in compensation for past prejudice.

Rosenfeld’s material offers confirmation of my assertion that results-oriented victimary thought is a product of the Holocaust, not merely in the broad sense that victimary thinkers make abundant and often reckless use of Holocaust analogies, but more specifically that the very outrageousness of the Holocaust metaphor is essential to creating and imposing the new victimary paradigm on human relations.

Let me take as an example a passage quoted by Rosenfeld from Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique , the key manifesto of American postwar feminism. This passage can serve us as a test case of “how to talk about the Holocaust,” since it lends itself admirably to Rosenfeld’s critique at the same time as its very enormity justifies my argument that the paradigm inaugurated by the Holocaust is at the heart of modern victimary thought.

[T]he women who “adjust” as housewives, who grow up wanting to be “just a housewife,” are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps—and the millions more who refused to believe that the concentration camps existed. In fact, there is an uncanny, uncomfortable insight into why a woman can so easily lose her sense of self as a housewife in certain psychological observations made of the behavior of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. In these settings, purposely contrived for the dehumanization of man [sic], the prisoners literally became “walking corpses.” Those who “adjusted” to the conditions of the camps surrendered their human identity and went almost indifferently to their deaths. Strangely enough, the conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and the brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife. . . .

It was said . . . that not the SS but the prisoners themselves became their own worst enemy. Because they could not bear to see their situation as it really was—because they denied the very reality of their problem, and finally “adjusted” to the camp itself as if it were the only reality—they were caught in the prison of their own minds. . . . All this seems terribly remote from the easy life of the American suburban housewife. But is [not] her house in reality a comfortable concentration camp? (48, quoting p. 305-07)

Here is Rosenfeld’s reaction to this passage:

“In reality,” her house is nothing of the sort, and a clear-thinking person knows that the comparison is a foolish one. . . . [W]hat we confront in Friedan’s book goes beyond merely hyperbolic thinking to something close to the shut-down of thought itself. For no one who thinks at all lucidly can possibly see a connection “in reality” between the situation of middle-class American housewives of the postwar period, no matter how bored they might be, and the wartime condition of inmates in the Nazi camps. (48)

In the paragraphs that follow, Rosenfeld attempts to explain Friedan’s use of this comparison, using ideas from Christopher Lasch and Tzvetan Todorov. But at bottom his “explanation” is simply a restatement of the facts. Rosenfeld alleges that “a politics of suffering and victimization has been developing within American society over the past several decades . . . whose proponents draw on the pervasive presence of Holocaust images in order to garner for themselves a certain moral superiority that victims have come to enjoy in our society.” Well, yes, but explaining the use of victimary imagery by “a certain moral superiority that victims have come to enjoy” is mere tautological wordplay.

But the basis for my remark that it is tautological is precisely my theoretical claim that it is truly the Holocaust that is the source of this rhetoric, which is not always as clearly derivative of its model as this particular example. And this means that calling it “rhetoric” and emphasizing as Rosenfeld does the “images” of the Holocaust in Friedan’s passage in fact obscures the real impact of the Holocaust on victimary thought. For these vocabulary elements need not be present in the text, and indeed, the course of victimary rhetoric has been to abandon the Nazi image, except to the extent it can be associated with the “West” and particularly with Israel. When Edward Said proposes “Orientalism” as the model for the West’s dismissive and ultimately oppressive attitude toward its “other,” the last thing he wants us to think of is the West’s oppression of its internal other, the Jews. In principle, at least, Rosenfeld should be happy with this development, as indeed he might be if it were not the flip side of Muslim-inspired neo-antisemitism that reviles Israel while reprinting Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . But precisely, the filiation of victimary thought with the Holocaust is not one of images but of paradigms, and the paradigm of oppressor vs. oppressed race/social group/gender/etc., is far more durable and significant than images of stacked bodies and false shower rooms.

What we observe in Friedan is an early, and for today’s reader strikingly naïve, use of this paradigm. But let us note how she uses it, before the Berkeley uprising of 1965, before the campus/French revolt of 1968, at a time when “affirmative action” (which dates—dixit Wikipedia—from a JFK Executive Order in 1961) was in its infancy and “diversity,” which college presidents today cannot form two consecutive sentences on any subject without mentioning, was as yet unknown. Friedan cannot claim that her housewives suffer physically, nor even that they are mentally tortured by… whom exactly? The SS is mentioned only to be dismissed, since not even the most uncompromising feminist could find an analogy between these women’s poor husbands and the SS. The real point is that the prisoners themselves became their own worst enemy , that the housewives/prisoners internalize their oppression and adjust to it. Today such language might be accused of “blaming the victim”; it is made palatable only by the extreme nature of the overall model, which allows the assimilation of the housewives’ oppression to Nazism on the condition that it be a Nazism without Nazis.

For the fact that the women’s material conditions are at the antipodes of those of Auschwitz inmates, far from leading us to dismiss Friedan’s comparison as “the shut-down of thought itself,” is precisely meant to caution us against rejecting it. Adjustment is the real problem, and although in the housewives’ world no oppressor is indicated, it is the system of oppression that is at fault. The point of this analogy is that any acquiescence in an oppressive system is the virtual equivalent of accepting the role of the oppressed in the Nazi-Jew model, something that no self-respecting human being should react to with anything but outrage, even unto death. But as Adam Katz would point out, and as the partisans of victimary thinking prefer to ignore, this analogy is only useful to the extent that it is being offered in a social context where it is not valid, where it can have an impact on us precisely because we are not Nazis and are shocked by the accusation that our notion of normality is “really the same as” Auschwitz.

Although Friedan isn’t proposing here anything like “affirmative action,” she clearly shows us where the Holocaust paradigm is going. This is no longer Civil Rights language; it is the language of absolute oppression, a pre-philosophical form of deconstruction, for which any acceptation of differential status—such as adjustment to a preestablished gender role—is equivalent to assuming the zombie-like status of prisoners who go unresistingly to their deaths. This is, to use a word that would have a considerable fortune a few decades later, the state of abjection.

However tasteless its rhetoric, Friedan’s book was instrumental in kicking off a neo-feminism that fifty years later has led American women to attend college in considerably higher proportion and with considerably greater success than men, to run for president, and to enter and in some cases dominate formerly male-dominated professions. Thus in condemning Friedan’s rhetoric for its wild reference to the Holocaust, we risk failing to notice what the outcome of reaction to the Holocaust through the mediation of such rhetoric has really been, leading both to the creation of a more gender-equal world and to the problematization of all remaining areas of non-reciprocity, justifiable or not. It is possible to feel disgust with the assimilation of suburban housewives to Nazi prisoners and yet to understand that Friedan’s overall (and generally valid) point in encouraging suburban housewives to look beyond their current roles is an example of the historical power of the Holocaust to generate victimary thought, independently of Friedan’s or anyone else’s specific use of Holocaust metaphors or images.

To conclude with an example of the persistence of this kind of rhetoric nearly fifty years later, here is an extract from the acknowledgement section of a 2008 UCLA doctoral dissertation.

I am . . . compelled to acknowledge the existence of demeaning plantation politics at UCLA, which also significantly and consistently contributed to my UCLA experience. While I carry a tremendous amount of resentment regarding experiences that can best be described as a new millennium form of Jim Crow, I have also gained a tremendous amount of strength from surviving, overcoming and conquering the demon of racism and the racist demons that exist and operate at the University of California Los Angeles.

The Nazis have been replaced by slave-drivers, but the rhetoric makes the same unbridled use of a stigmatized relationship of oppression to condemn phenomena that the author feels no need to describe in any detail. No doubt this example is more of an expression of personal hurt and resentment than an attempt to make other Black students conscious of their oppression. But this only makes it a more convincing illustration of the persistence of a model that, whatever the imagery used here, has its source not in American slavery but in the Holocaust, which brought forth a victimary paradigm that continues to dominate the postmodern era over 65 years after the end of WWII.

HIST B323 History of the Holocaust

• Finding Books
• Sources for Researching the Holocaust
• Develop a Research Question
• Primary Sources
• Cite Sources
• Scholarly vs Popular
• Thesis Statements

Developing a Research Question

From Laurier Library. 

Selecting and Narrowing a Topic

When starting out on your research, it is important to choose a research topic that is not only of interest to you, but can also be covered effectively in the space that you have available. You may not know right away what your research question is - that's okay! Start out with a broad topic, then conduct some background research to explore possibilities and narrow your topic to something more manageable.    

Choose an interesting general topic.  If you’re interested in your topic, others probably will be too! And your research will be a lot more fun. Once you have a general topic of interest, you can begin to explore more focused areas within that broad topic. 

Gather background information.  Do a few quick searches in OneSearch@IU  or in other relevant sources.  See what other researchers have already written to help narrow your focus.  

• What subtopics relate to the broader topic? 
• What questions do these sources raise?
• What piques your interest? What might you like to say about the topic? 

Consider your audience.  Who would be interested in this issue? For whom are you writing? 

Adapted from: George Mason University Writing Center. (2008). How to write a research question. Retrieved from  http://writingcenter.gmu.edu/writing-resources/wc-quick-guides  

From Topic to Research Question

Once you have done some background research and narrowed down your topic, you can begin to turn that topic into a research question that you will attempt to answer in the course of your research.  Keep in mind that your question may change as you gather more information and as you write. However, having some sense of your direction can help you evaluate sources and identify relevant information throughout your research process. 

Explore questions.

• Ask open-ended “how” and “why” questions about your general topic.  
• Consider the “so what?” of your topic. Why does this topic matter to you? Why should it matter to others?

Evaluate your research question. Use the following to determine if any of the questions you generated would be appropriate and workable for your assignment. 

• Is your question clear? Do you have a specific aspect of your general topic that you are going to explore further?   
• Is your question focused? Will you be able to cover the topic adequately in the space available?   
• Is your question sufficiently complex? (cannot be answered with a simple yes/no response, requires research and analysis)

Hypothesize.  Once you have developed your research question, consider how you will attempt to answer or address it. 

• If you are making an argument, what will you say?  
• Why does your argument matter?  
• What kinds of sources will you need in order to support your argument?  
• How might others challenge your argument?

Adapted from: George Mason University Writing Center. (2008). How to write a research question. Retrieved from http://writingcenter.gmu.edu/writing-resources/wc-quick-guides

Sample Research Questions

A good research question is clear, focused, and has an appropriate level of complexity. Developing a strong question is a process, so you will likely refine your question as you continue to research and to develop your ideas.  

Unclear : Why are social networking sites harmful?

Clear:  How are online users experiencing or addressing privacy issues on such social networking sites as MySpace and Facebook?

Unfocused:  What is the effect on the environment from global warming?

Focused:  How is glacial melting affecting penguins in Antarctica?

Simple vs Complex

Too simple:  How are doctors addressing diabetes in the U.S.?

Appropriately Complex:   What are common traits of those suffering from diabetes in America, and how can these commonalities be used to aid the medical community in prevention of the disease?

Adapted from: George Mason University Writing Center. (2008). How to write a research question. Retrieved from  http://writingcenter.gmu.edu/writing-resources/wc-quick-guides

General online reference sources.

Reference sources like dictionaries and encylopedias provide general information about various subjects. They also include definitions that may help you break down your topic and understand it better. Sources includes in these entries can be springboards for more in-depth research.

A note on citation: Reference sources are generally not cited since they usually consist of common knowledge (e.g. who was the first United States President).  But if you're unsure whether to cite something it's best to do so. Specific pieces of information and direct quotes should always be cited. 

Why Use References Sources

Reference sources are a great place to begin your research. They can help you:

• gain an overview of a topic
• explore potential research areas
• identify key issues, publications, or authors in your research area

From here, you can narrow your search topic and look at more specialized sources.

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Dehumanization in the Holocaust: An Analysis of Dehumanization in the Experiences of French Female Victims during the Holocaust

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