Remembering Auschwitz Part 2
‘Until 1933 it was a very nice comfortable life,’ (Lucille Eichengreen) says. ‘But once Hitler came to power, the children that lived in the same building no longer spoke to us; they threw stones at us and called us names.’ (Rees, Lawrence. “Auschwitz: A New History” 2005, pg 38)
As I read Auschwitz: A New History, I could not wrap my head around two major factors: one, that so many “Christians” turned their heads away from the horrors happening in Eastern Europe during Adolf Hitler’s reign of power; and for two, how many Jews were led to the slaughter without fighting back. This second part will take us some time to get to. But for the first frame of thought I struggled with, the author Lawrence Rees did a good job explaining the atmosphere in Germany that led to the rise of the Nazi Party.
Germany had just suffered a shocking defeat at the end of World War I and as their empire crumbled, they sought to blame someone for their woes. Much of the world set their sights on the Jews as the ones to blame for WWI. Surprisingly, even American auto-maker Henry Ford “launched a vicious campaign against what he termed “The International Jew” which he accused of everything from threatening the capitalist system to undermining the moral values of the nation, and finally he even held them responsible for World War I.”
Adolf Hitler embraced Ford’s campaign and wrote his manifesto “Mein Kampf” in 1925, making the Jewish race his scapegoat for everything wrong in Germany. Feeding into an international view by many that Jews were “secretly” trying to take over the world, Hitler and the Nazi party were easily able to turn Germany against their Jewish population. When the Nazi Party was voted into power in 1932, they slowly began to isolate, segregate, and oppress the Jewish population. Anti-Semitic propaganda such as “Der Sturmer” helped push the German population to believing that the Jewish Race was a plague to the earth. Hitler would hate the Jews so much that instead of just allowing them to emigrate to other countries, Hitler decided that the only solution to the world’s “Jewish Problem” would be Hitler’s “Final Solution”.
By the time Hitler and his cronies had put in place the infrastructure to achieve the mass killings of millions of Jews, much of Eastern Europe already hated Jews and agreed with the Nazis that the world would benefit if the Jews were exterminated. All of that hatred came from a few conspiracy theories about Jews taking over the world, and from the fiery dictatorship of Hitler. The race to eliminate the Jewish race was on, and by 1939, the Nazi’s greatest struggle was not facing opposition to killing innocent Jews, it was not from the local population attempting to conceal or protect their Jewish neighbor; the Nazi’s greatest struggle was finding the most efficient way to kill thousands of men, women, and children at any one time. They would find an answer to that dilemma at Auschwitz.
Common Sense Reborn 