the Holocaust Chronicle

[Sarah]

 

German soldiers, once part of a massive wartime army, found solidarity during the interwar years within the ranks of a nationalist veterans organization called Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet).
Photo: Bilderdienst SYddeutscher Verlag 
Still, it remains a question whether Vienna's antisemitism simply became Hitler's during the period from 1907 to 1913. Documented antisemitic remarks from the young Hitler are hard to find. Viennese eyewitnesses reported that Hitler got along well with Jews at the time. The picture that emerges in Mein Kampf, however, suggests something else. There, Hitler highlights what he describes as a converting experience. "The visual instruction of the Vienna streets," wrote Hitler, "performed invaluable services." According to Hitler, he initially "wandered blindly" through the city, but as time passed he saw the city's people "with open eyes." In particular, he emphasized seeing "an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought...but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?" In Mein Kampf, Hitler went on to say that this decisive encounter convinced him that the Viennese Jews were not Germans of a particular religious persuasion but "a people in themselves."
Mein Kampf says that Hitler's antisemitic vision became focused in Vienna, but that account was written more than a decade later, and much had happened during those intervening years. Of crucial importance was Hitler's experience in World War I. In 1913 Hitler avoided serving in the Austrian military by leaving Vienna. He lived in Munich for a time and then returned to Austria, where he was found physically unfit for military service. Nevertheless, when World War I began in August 1914, Hitler was elated, and he volunteered enthusiastically for the German Army. He spent the next four years on the Western Front, serving in France and Belgium as a dispatch runner, an often-dangerous duty that entailed carrying orders--on foot or by bicycle--from regimental commanders to leaders at the front. Hitler received a promotion to corporal on November 3, 1914, but rose no higher for reasons that remain unclear. Some accounts indicate that he refused to be considered for promotion; others suggest that his superiors found his leadership potential wanting.

Nevertheless, Hitler, who was wounded in October 1916, served with distinction. His military decorations included the Iron Cross First Class, a special achievement for a corporal, which he received on August 4, 1918, thanks to his nomination by a Jewish officer named Hugo Guttman. By that time, huge German losses--about 800,000 men had fallen in the previous four months--made the German leadership recognize that the war was lost. In October 1918, shortly before the war ended, a mustard-gas attack temporarily blinded Hitler. By the time he recovered in the Pasewalk military hospital, Germany had surrendered. Along with many other Germans, Hitler was stunned by the news of defeat.

[Sarah]

1899-1902: The term "concentration camp" is coined by the British during the Boer War to denote holding areas for potentially threatening Afrikaners (descendents of Dutch who immigrated to South Africa in the mid-1800s). 
  1903: The party platform of the nationalistic and aggressively antisemitic Narodowa Demokracja (National Democratic Party) is established in Poland. It encourages anti-Jewish pogroms and forced immigration. 
  1903-1906: A second wave of violently antisemitic pogroms sweeps Poland and the Ukraine; See 1881-1884; 1919-1921. 
  1905: A revised version of the apocryphal Protocols of the Elders of Zion is published in Russia. 
  1905: In Germany, the International Society for Racial Hygiene is founded to advance theories of Social Darwinism and selective breeding of human beings. 
  1907: Adolf Hitler is rejected for study at the Vienna Academy of Art.
 http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/StaticPages/32.html

[Sarah]

Influences on Hitler
The foundations of Hitler's worldview took shape during the six poverty-stricken years he spent in the Austrian capital of Vienna, from 1907 to 1913. His attitudes developed from the frustrations he experienced there, and were based on the interrelated concepts of social Darwinism, antisocialism, and antisemitism.

Reduced to living among Vienna's dregs of society and robbed of his self-esteem, the young Hitler deeply resented being denied access to the splendor and gaiety of the city. There, in what he termed a world of "repugnant filth," he saw himself engaged in a struggle for survival, in which only the fittest, most brutal, stood a chance. Applying this lesson to his Machiavellian perception of life, he declared in Mein Kampf that "he who wants to live should fight, and he who does not want to battle in this world of eternal struggle does not deserve to be alive."

Hitler contemptuously perceived working-class ideologies to be intrinsically weak doctrines that "reject the aristocratic principle of nature, and replace the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers." This, he was sure, would result in the "collapse of human civilization." It was no mere coincidence, he reasoned, that Jews were behind these "doctrines of destruction."

Hitler's nationalist and antisemitic ideology began to crystallize as a result of his exposure to an abundance of poisonous literature. Antisemitism became the driving force in his life. Among his favorite reading was the gutter journal Ostara, edited by Lanz von Liebenfels, an eccentric ex-monk. This crackpot racial theorist imagined blue-eyed, blond Aryans waging a monumental struggle against the "race defilement" danger posed by what he termed "monkey people."

Hitler acquired his first political education by studying the propaganda techniques and demagoguery of Dr. Karl Lueger (pictured), the antisemitic mayor of Vienna. Lueger was a skillful manipulator of mass audiences who pushed for the removal of Jews from influential positions. From Adolf Stoecker, the leading German antisemite of the late 19th century, Hitler borrowed the notion that Jews who controlled corporations and banks were the inevitable cause of the economic misfortunes of small-business owners.

Hitler also studied the völkisch (racist-nationalist) extremist philosophy of politician Georg von Schönerer, who demanded that all culturally German lands within the Hapsburg Empire be incorporated into the Reich. Perhaps the most influential writers shaping Hitler's formulation of race theory were philosopher Eugen Dühring and journalist Wilhelm Marr. Basing their shrill message on pseudoscientific arguments, they expounded a biologically based antisemitism. Warning that the German race was in grave danger, they urged the adoption of special laws against Jews, and--hauntingly--called for their deportation.
Photo: Ullstein Bilderdienst

[Sarah]

October 23, 1907: A Berlin libel case, Moltke v. Harden, leads to the exposure of considerable homosexuality and sodomy in the German military and the Kaiser's inner circle. The case will later help to justify **** abuse of homosexuals. 
  1907-1941: Approximately 38,000 mentally disabled men and women are sterilized in American mental institutions. 
  1910: British Home Secretary Winston Churchill, inspired by eugenics theories of Sir Francis Galton, urges that some 100,000 "degenerate British citizens" be sterilized or interned in labor camps. 
  1911-1913: In Russia, Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jew, is put on trial for the ritual murder of a Christian boy. After two years followed by a "show trial," Beilis is acquitted. 
  1913-1915: The Leo Frank Affair occurs in Atlanta, Georgia. Frank, a northern Jew, is falsely accused of murdering a 13-year-old Christian girl. Amid an intensely antisemitic environment, which makes a fair trial impossible, Frank is convicted. Even though the governor commutes his death sentence, a mob breaks into prison and lynches Frank.

[Sarah]

Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Rosenberg, self-styled National Socialist "philosopher," joined the **** Party in 1919 and became editor of the Party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, four years later. He is most widely remembered for his book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), which made him the chief ideologue of the National Socialist movement.

Rosenberg's book was among the most widely circulated of the **** years, with more than one million copies in print by 1942. Permeated with hatred for the Jews, it promoted "purity of blood" for the German people "under the sign of the swastika." Rosenberg characterized all of history as a conflict between the forces of light (the Nordic or Aryan peoples) and the powers of darkness (the Jews). The Jews were the most virulent enemy of German culture and racial purity, and their influence, according to Rosenberg, had to be eradicated.

From July 1941 Rosenberg had, as minister of Occupied Eastern Territories, the opportunity to put his ideas into practice. In spite of his apparent influence, the **** leadership widely despised him as a crackpot, and his underlings regularly circumvented his authority. This caused him to quit in disgust in October 1944. After the war, Rosenberg was arrested and tried at Nuremberg. Convicted of crimes against humanity, he was hanged on October 16, 1946.
Photo: Ullstein Bilderdienst
 
Up to the end, the German leadership did little to prepare people for war's outcome, which proved to be disastrous. More than 13 million men, almost 20 percent of the German population, had served in the Army. About two million were killed, another five million wounded. Contrary to Hitler's oft-repeated claim, no "stab in the back" had defeated Germany. Rather, superior Allied resources and German exhaustion eventually brought this devastating war to an end. From March to July 1918, 750,000 German soldiers were wounded and about 1.75 million more were incapacitated during one of the world's most severe influenza epidemics. Nevertheless, the Hitler who had gone off to war elated became the revengefully determined Hitler of Mein Kampf, where he recalled his bitterness about the outcome of World War I during his Pasewalk convalescence from gas-attack blindness: "And so it had all been in vain....The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and disgrace burned in my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes compared to this misery?"

[Sarah]

1914: The first American-Jewish movie with an all-Jewish cast, A Passover Miracle, is released. 
  1914-1918: The First World War devastates Europe. 
  1915: The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is created in the wake of the Leo Frank Affair. 
  1917: The Russian Revolution develops. 
  April 6, 1917: The United States declares war on Germany. 
  November 2, 1917: The Balfour Declaration is published. This letter, from British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour to British-Jewish leader Lord Rothschild, promises qualified British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The declaration contradicts the earlier McMahon-Faisal agreement, which promised the same territory to Arabs.
 http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/StaticPages/34.html

[Sarah]

 

 
 

 

 

[Sarah]

   

   

[Sarah]

[Sarah]

1933: The **** State Begins    pg. 53

 
 
 
Hitler addresses a mass rally of SA faithful at Dortmund, Germany, in July 1933.
Photo: AKG 8-1933-1-22-E1

 
During the night of May 10, 1933--100 days after Adolf Hitler legally became chancellor of Germany--more than 20,000 books burned in the Opernplatz (Opera House Square) opposite the Humboldt University in Berlin. This event was not an isolated incident during that night. In some 30 German university towns, brown-shirted **** students along with many of their professors purged "un-German" writings from libraries and shops and set them ablaze. Enthusiastic crowds witnessed the destruction, which was launched with torchlight parades and accented by speeches that proclaimed the death of "Jewish intellectualism" and the purification of German culture. Thus, writings by such Jewish intellectuals as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud fueled the huge bonfires. Also engulfed in flames was the work of Heinrich Heine, a German poet of Jewish origin.
A century earlier Heine had stated, "Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." Heine could scarcely have imagined how true his statement would become, specifically for the European Jews who found themselves under **** domination during the Third Reich. German Jews were harassed, beaten, arrested and imprisoned. Their businesses were boycotted, and Jewish lives were proscribed by a long list of new anti-Jewish laws.

Though antisemitism in Germany had simmered for centuries, it had reached a boiling point by 1933. The reasons were largely economical. In the early '30s Germany was suffering the effects of a severe worldwide economic depression. It put millions out of work, increased social unrest, and undermined confidence in the post-World War I German government, which was known as the Weimar Republic. These discouraging conditions were made even worse by the bitterness many Germans felt over Germany's defeat in World War I. They wanted decisive leadership and national rebirth, yet political instability left both of those aims in doubt.

Although the National Socialists (****s) could never win an absolute majority in any freely contested national election, by 1932 they were the largest political party in Germany. Fearing continued chaos and unable to see a better solution, Germany President Paul von Hindenburg, age 85, reluctantly made a fateful decision on January 29. He used his constitutional authority to appoint Hitler as the head of a coalition government. Hitler took the chancellor's oath on January 30, and that night ****s celebrated the victory with spirited torchlight parades in Berlin


http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/StaticPages/53.html

[sevens]

Hi Sarah

I just want to say that I admire your work and your commitment to truth.  I just really pray and hope for good things to come in the future where healing will come for all the nations through an obvious expansion.

An expansion that would be long lasting and of a eternal nature that provides the conditions for the Brotherhood of Mankind in the real sense so that this barbarity is never experience by a nation or of a people.

All the best in your endeavours I appreciate your work and yet sad that these people lost there lives for such an untruth that was promoted.

Isaiah 51

Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.

2 Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him.

3 For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.

and this piece of reassurance

The Glory of the New Temple

2 In the seventh month, in the one and twentieth day of the month, came the word of the Lord by the prophet Haggai, saying,

2 Speak now to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Josedech, the high priest, and to the residue of the people, saying,

3 Who is left among you that saw this house in her first glory? and how do ye see it now? is it not in your eyes in comparison of it as nothing?

4 Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, saith the Lord; and be strong, O Joshua, son of Josedech, the high priest; and be strong, all ye people of the land, saith the Lord, and work: for I am with you, saith the Lord of hosts:

5 According to the word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt, so my spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not.

6 For thus saith the Lord of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land;

7 And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of hosts.

8 The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the Lord of hosts.

9 The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the Lord of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts.

All the best Sarah most good.
sevens

[Sarah]

Thank you for your kind words, sevens.

You a wise, compassionate and kind-hearted, all the things that a human being shouild strive to be, and yet most fail to approach. 

I would like to say that I honestly value your friendship and am truly glad that you are here.  I hope that your stay here is a long one.

Shalom

Sarah

[Sarah]

German students eagerly participate in the public torching of "un-German" books.
Photo: National Archives/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive



The ****s opened 50 concentration camps in 1933, including this one at Dachau, Germany.
Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive

Hindenburg and his conservative advisers hoped Hitler could restore social order and yet be controlled. The plan backfired disastrously. Six months after Hitler's appointment, democracy was dead in Germany. Hitler's decrees had the force of law, civil rights had disappeared, and the ****s were the only legal political party.
As the terror tactics of the **** state became ever more obvious, thousands of the Third Reich's suspected political opponents were sent to concentration camps, such as the one established at Dachau, Germany, on March 20. In 1933 50 concentration camps were opened in various parts of Germany. By July more than 25,000 Socialists, Communists, and Jews had been sent to concentration camps or to prison.

Jews were especially hard hit by the **** takeover, for Hitler and his followers had long been convinced that Jews posed the most deadly threat to German life. According to the **** worldview, Jewish "blood" was indelibly different and inferior to that of the German "master race." Although the Jewish population of Germany--it numbered about 565,000--was less than one percent of the nation's total when Hitler became chancellor, **** ideology required the elimination of Jews from German life. Soon after taking power, Hitler began to implement the racial antisemitism that stood at the center of his party's policy.

During the first two months of **** rule, anti-Jewish violence mostly hit individuals. Those circumstances changed irrevocably on April 1, when the ****s took their first nationwide, planned action specifically against German Jewry as a whole. It was a boycott of Jewish businesses. All across the country, **** Storm Troopers and SS men posted signs that advised "Don't Buy from Jews" and "The Jews Are Our Misfortune." They smeared the word Jude (Jew) and painted the six-pointed Star of David in yellow and black across thousands of doors and windows. They stood menacingly in front of the homes of Jewish lawyers and doctors as well as at the entrances of Jewish-owned businesses. Germans were "encouraged" not to enter, while Jews were arrested, beaten, harassed, and humiliated.

The boycott was not a complete success. It caused too much economic and emotional turmoil within Germany and provoked negative international reactions as well. Nevertheless, the boycott marked the beginning of an unrelenting nationwide campaign against all of Germany's Jews.

If the 1933 German economy was too fragile to withstand a boycott's disruptions, other measures could be taken to deprive and isolate the nation's Jews. Within a week of the boycott, the ****s enacted the first of hundreds of national laws that would define, segregate, and impoverish the Third Reich's Jews from 1933 through 1939. The first instance of this "paper violence" was the April 7 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Affecting more than two million state and municipal workers, it was intended to ensure that government employees would be firmly controlled by and loyal to the **** regime. Paragraph 3, which came to be known as the "Aryan paragraph," targeted Jews by requiring that "civil servants of non-Aryan descent must retire." On April 11 a supplement to this law clarified that any person who had a Jewish parent or grandparent was "non-Aryan," a definition that would later be refined.


http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/StaticPages/54.html

[Sarah]

The assault begins: Storm Troopers urge Germans to boycott Jewish-owned shops.
Photo: National Archives/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive

Increasingly, the ****s used law to separate Jews from German society, but such measures could not be effective unless Jews were "defined." The discriminatory and definitional measures enacted in early April became the foundation for many other "legal" persecutions that followed.
In the early months of the **** regime, anti-Jewish laws were enacted on an almost daily basis. Though out of practical necessity the laws were not always thoroughly enforced, in one way after another Jewish life--religious, educational, and cultural as well as professional--was increasingly restricted. On April 21, for example, Jewish ritual preparation of meat was outlawed. A few days later, the April 25 Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools introduced a quota system to restrict the number of "non-Aryan" students in German schools and universities. Its implementation meant that new Jewish students in any German school or university would be limited to 1.5 percent of the total of new applicants. Overall, the number of Jewish students could not be more than five percent.

Additional laws implemented that April barred Jewish physicians from clinics and hospitals that were funded under the national health insurance system. Pharmacy licenses were no longer available to Jews, and Jewish lawyers found severe restrictions on their practices, too. The month ended with the banishment of Jews from German sports organizations.

Meanwhile, millions of non-Jewish Germans felt the effects of the anti-Jewish legislation, for it became essential for them to prove their "Aryan" ancestry. The task of certifying people's Aryan indentities soon fell on priests and pastors, clerks, and archivists. The process led to an expanding network of investigations and bureaucratic offices that became one of the hallmarks of **** Germany's racial state.

Germany's Jews did their best to cope with the mounting decrees that were segregating them, robbing them of liberty, and depriving them of their livelihoods. About 37,000 German Jews emigrated from Germany in 1933, including writers such as Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. However, the costs of flight were high, both financially and psychologically. Thus, most of the German Jews remained in the country that they regarded as home. They hoped that the storm of discrimination would pass, and they rallied their communal solidarity until such time as it did.

Far from passing, the storm was gathering a ferocity that no one could foresee in detail. Still, as the weeks and months accumulated, it became clearer that **** law was excluding Jews from every aspect of German life. Within Germany and throughout the world, it was no secret that Hitler's regime had started a systematic process of persecution that was intended, at the very least, to segregate the German Jews. Although exceptions could be found, inside and outside of Germany relatively few voices were raised in protest as 1933 drew to a close.

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[Sarah]

In 1932 Kurt von Schleicher was appointed German chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg as a last-ditch effort to prevent Hitler from obtaining the post. A veteran of the German Army and an official of the Weimar Republic, Schleicher proved incapable of establishing a coalition government. He was dismissed by Hindenburg on January 28, 1933, paving the way for Hitler to become chancellor January 30.
Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive 


 Newly appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler shakes hands with German President Paul von Hindenburg on January 30, 1933. Fourteen years after he entered the political arena in the chaotic aftermath of World War I--and only seven years after serving a prison sentence for treason--Hitler legally assumed Germany's top elected position. Once in office, Hitler took decisive action against his primary political foes, the Communists and Socialists. By July all political parties besides the NSDAP were outlawed.
Photo: Imperial War Museum, London 



 Hitler's cabinet in 1933. To the right of Hitler are Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, and Foreign Minister Konstantin Baron von Neurath. With only two fellow ****s in the cabinet-- Frick and minister without portfolio Hermann Göring (bottom row, second from left) --Hitler was dependent upon the support of right-wing nationalists Alfred Hugenberg and Fran Seldte (first and third from left in middle row).
Photo: Archive Photos