Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The stark facts of the Holocaust can be summarized. When Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party came to power in Germany in 1933, they initiated measures against Germany's Jews. Before their rise to power the Nazis, under Hitler, had openly and vehemently blamed Jews for all of Germany's ills in the years following the country's loss of World War I (1914–18). After they gained power, the Nazi anti-Jewish measures included use of the existing legal machinery of the German state to devise and implement increasingly restrictive measures against Germany's Jewish population. These measures incrementally but inexorably deprived Jews of more and more rights of citizenship and capacity of living their daily lives. The legal measures were augmented by sporadic brutal attacks by organized thugs that molested and terrorized individuals and communities of Jews. The most extreme of these occurred on the night of November 9, 1938, the Kristallnacht , where a nationwide attack on Jews took place. Yet all of these eventually turned out to be preliminaries to an active and focused program to actually exterminate all Jews who came within Germany's reach during World War II – the war of 1939 to 1945. During the early years of that war Germany had overrun and conquered most of continental Europe, a land mass that included millions of Jews who had been living in the various countries now under ... log in or subscribe to read full text