Adolf Hitler Genocide Research Paper

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Austria. Hitler ruled Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. He mounted to power as the leader of the Nazi Party. He commenced World War II and caused the death of millions. During the time Nazi Germany existed genocide, the burning of books, and World War II took place. Hitler’s “solution” is known as the Holocaust. The event that burned its mark in history. The mass killing of millions of European Jews.

Genocide

Genocide is the premeditated and systematized elimination of a population because of their religion or race. The word developed from the Greek word genos which means “race”, “tribe”, or “nation” and the latin word “cide” which means killing. Raphael Lemkin. a Polish Jewish jurist who, during World War II, worked as an advisor to the U.S. Department. He acclaimed that a main factor of genocide was the “criminal intent to destroy or to cripple permanently a human group. The acts are directed against groups as such, and individuals are selected for

destruction only because they belong to these groups.” (Britannica, 1).

Genocide is a crime included in the grouping of “crimes against humanity.” This was defined by the Nüremburg Charter who are also known as the Charter of the International Military Tribunal. The crime of genocide became blameworthy under law due to General Assembly of Resolution 96-I. Also the General Assembly of Resolution 260-III affirmed the genocide convention’s Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The genocide convention’s genocide definition is “any of the following acts committed with intent to

destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” (Britannica, 1).

The Greek words “holos” means whole and “kaustos” means burned. These two words create the word to describe one of the biggest and cruelest genocides in history. This genocide is know as the Holocaust. The Holocaust included the mass killing of some 6 million European Jews which took place during World War II. In June of 1941, killing methods were being tested by the SS in Auschwitz. In September of 1941, thousands of Jews were transferred to ghettos and German cities in the USSR also known as the Soviet Union. In August of 1941, 500 soviet prisoners of war were gassed to death by pesticide. The SS later ordered tons of gas from a pest-control company. In 1941, Jews were transferred from Polish ghettos to concentration camps. They started with the ones who were useless to them, the ones who could not handle labor. In March of 1942, the camp of Belzec is where the first gassings began. Treblinka, Chelmno, Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Majdanek were built later in Poland. An enormous chunk of Hungary’s Jewish population were transferred to Auschwitz, a maximum of 80,000 Jews were killed every week.
The Burning of Books
Heinrich Heine said “Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to burn too.” (Heine, 1821). After many many years later it actually took place. "Book burning" adverts to the act of destroying books or other text by fire. On May 10, 1933, university students from over 30 university towns accumulated in Berlin at a bonfire and burned books that didn’t include “German ideas”. Over 25,000 books were burned in the bonfire that day. Some of the authors included: “Henri Barbusse, Franz Boas, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Förster, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, André Gide, Ernst Glaeser, Maxim Gorki, Werner Hegemann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kästner, Helen Keller, Alfred Kerr, Jack London, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Hugo Preuss, Marcel Proust...” (The History Place, 1).

Joseph Goebbels also known as the Propaganda Minister speaks to the adolescence at the bonfire and announces: "My fellow students, German men and women, the era of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The triumph of the German revolution has cleared a path for the German way; and the future German man will not just be a man of books, but also a man of character and it is to this end we want to educate you. To have at an early age the courage to peer directly into the pitiless eyes of life. To repudiate the fear of death in order to gain again the respect for death. That is the mission of the young and therefore you do well at this late hour to entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past. It is a strong, great and symbolic undertaking, an undertaking, which shall prove to all the world that the intellectual basis of the November Republic is here overturned; but that from its ruins will arise victorious the lord of a new spirit." (Goebbels, 1933). Among the books burnt some of the authors were Jewish and included American authors as well.

Before Hitler came into power, university towns in Germany were well known for their world’s greatest science and literature divisions. But with Hitler under power, Germany’s phrenic ardor began to attenuate. From Western Civilization, the foundation stones were admonished by mysticism supporting brainwashed students and teachers. Mysticism means “speculation and collective thinking toward a common goal - the pursuit of a glorious future for Germany” (The History Place, 2). Due to all the propaganda, youth were being brainwashed to do things like burn thousands of books and be proud of it.

The Holocaust, it influenced many Jewish authors since it had ended like Elie Wiesel and Safran Foer. It had also inspired non-jewish authors like Marcus Zusak and Thomas Keneally. The Holocaust caused the Holocaust to be a genre in literature, a very popular one. For example, Night is a very popular book by the Jewish author Elie Wiesel and this book is read in schools internationally.