Rise of the Nazi Party

• WWI ended in 1918 with 37 million total casualties and 9 million dead in Germany.
• Loosing the war injured Germany's national pride and forced it into economic crisis. Germany was punished severely and was forced to pay high reparations to France and Britain.
• Hitler captivated Germany with speeches of national pride, militarism and racial purity.
• Hitler attempted to overthrow the local government and was imprisoned for 5 years. In prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf - the book that became the ideological base for the Nazi Party's racist beliefs and murderous plans.
• After being released from prison, Hitler strengthened the Nazi party, growing its membership to 400,000.  As its numbers increased, the party instigated daily violence in the streets.
• With the the Great Depression of 1929, the German government was on the brink of collapse and Hitler initiated a massive propaganda campaign to destroy the government.
• With the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

Nazification of Germany 

• The Nuremberg Laws (1935) stripped Jews of civil rights. They were separated from Germans and defined as a "race."
• Jews were blamed as the sole cause of Germany's problems.
• Treatment of Jews was not motivated by territorial gain, political gain, or economic advantage. It was strictly ideological.

The World Reacts  

• The 1938 Evian Conference convened as 32 nations met to discuss the Jewish Refugee problem, but nothing was resolved.
• In 1939, Germany invaded Poland to officially start World War II.  

What was the Final Solution (Wannsee Conference, 1942)?

• The only time a government has sponsored the annihilation of a people.
• The decision was made to transport and destroy the 11 million Jews of Europe.
• Germans used 20th century technology for efficiency of cost and time.
• The annihilation of the Jews overlapped WWII, but the killing itself was not a part of the war.
• The plan was implemented in stages: isolation, ghettoization, deportation, concentration, extermination.

Help Falls on Deaf Ears

• At the 1943 Bermuda Conference, certain representatives of the U.S. and Britain cried out for help to the U.S. and British governments, but nothing was resolved. 

Were the Germans just following orders?

It has been written that ordinary Germans who were NOT in the army, SS, SA, Gestapo or prison camp guards, were never forced to kill Jews and very few of them ever did. Germans that were drafted in the army had no choice. If you refused to join the army, you were sent to prison. If they were ordered to shoot Jews, Russians, French, Dutch, British, etc., they had to do it; because, to refuse an order meant execution. 

Those that refused to kill were either executed or sent to the labor camps and died there. Germans that willingly joined the SS, SA, Gestapo or were prison camp guards were actively supporting the Nazi-regime (the Nazi party had 5 million members at the peak, about 10% of the population) and many of them were willingly killing Jews, because they believed them to be less human.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Kristallnacht ( the first outbreak of violence in the Holocaust)

Term given to the pogrom (riot against Jews) conducted by the Nazis on November 9, 1938, throughout Germany; literally "crystal night," it is usually translated as "night of broken glass" and refers to the broken plate glass windows that fell onto the streets when Jewish-owned stores were broken into and looted. On Kristallnacht, several hundred synagogues, religious items and books were burned, and Jewish men were arrested for no reason and sometimes killed.

Gestapo  (Secret State Police)

Prior to the outbreak of war, the Gestapo used brutal methods to investigate and suppress resistance to Nazi rule within Germany. After 1939, the Gestapo expanded its operations into Nazi-occupied Europe.

  SA or Storm Troopers (predominant terrorizing arm of the Nazi party)

Also known as "Brown Shirts," they were the Nazi party's main instrument for undermining democracy and facilitating Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

SS (Originally organized as personal bodyguards for Hitler)

but transformed into a unit used primarily to carry out the murder of the Jews.

Genocide

By combining the Greek genos - family, tribe, race, and Latin caedere - to kill, to cut down, the definition is "the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group."

Why didn't more Jews go to Palestine before the war?

The basic reason was that control over immigration to Palestine between the world wars was held by the mandatory power, the British, who cited the formal criterion of "economic absorptive capacity" to regulate Jewish entry in accordance with their own imperial and strategic interests.