Holocaust FAQ's by Madalyn Warnock

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Holocaust FAQ's

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The explanation of the Nazis’ implacable hatred for the Jews rests in their distorted world view that saw history as a racial struggle. They considered the Jews a race whose goal was world domination and, therefore, was an obstruction to Aryan dominance. They believed this struggle would resolve itself with the Aryans in control. There is no doubt that other factors contributed to the Nazis’ hatred of the Jews and their distorted image of Jewish people. Among them were the centuries-old tradition of Christian anti-Semitism, which propagated a negative stereotype of the Jew as a Christ-killer, agent of the devil, and practitioner of witchcraft. Anti-Semitism was still accepted in the latter half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. This attitude singled out the Jew as a threat to the "master" race. These factors combined to point to the Jew as a target for persecution by the Nazis.

In the late 1930's the Nazis killed thousands of handicapped Germans by lethal injection and poisonous gas. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units following in the wake of the German Army began shooting massive numbers of Jews and Gypsies in open fields and ravines on the outskirts of conquered cities and towns. Eventually the Nazis created a more secluded and organized method of killing. Six extermination centers were established in occupied Poland where large-scale murder by gas and body disposal through cremation were conducted systematically. Victims were deported to these centers from Western Europe and from the ghettos in Eastern Europe which the Nazis had established. In addition, millions died in the ghettos and concentration camps as a result of forced labor, starvation, exposure, brutality, disease, and execution.

Hitler did not make the Holocaust happen by himself. Many Germans and non-Germans contributed to or benefited from the so-called “Final Solution” (the term used by the Nazis for their plan to annihilate the European Jews). In addition to the SS, German government, military, and Nazi Party officials who planned and implemented policies aimed at persecuting and murdering the European Jews, many “ordinary” people civil servants, doctors, lawyers, judges, soldiers, and railroad workers played a role in the Holocaust.

Despite a history of providing sanctuary to persecuted peoples, the United States grappled with many issues during the 1930s that made living up to this legacy difficult. These issues included widespread antisemitism, xenophobia, isolationism, and a sustained economic depression. Unfortunately for those fleeing Nazi persecution, such issues greatly impacted US refugee policy, reinforcing an official and popular unwillingness to expand immigration quotas to admit greater numbers of people endangered by Nazi persecution and aggression at a time when doing so might have saved lives.

The statement that Jews did not fight back against the Germans and their allies is false. Jews carried out acts of resistance in every German occupied country and in the territory of Germany’s Axis partners. Against impossible odds, they resisted in ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers. There were many factors that made resistance difficult, however, including a lack of weapons and resources, deception, fear, and the overwhelming power of the Germans and their collaborators.

Those who made the difficult decision to leave Germany still had to find a country willing to admit them and their family. The search for safe haven was very difficult. The Evian Conference of 1938 showed this when almost every nation in attendance declined to change its immigration policies. Even when a new country could be found, a great deal of time, paperwork, support, and sometimes money was needed to get there. In many cases, these obstacles could not be overcome.