The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.
At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The twin goals of racial purity and spatial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “Mein Kampf”(My Struggle), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.” Soon after the war ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis.
Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. The roots of Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes. More than one million of those who perished were children.ĭid you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Approximately six million Jews and some 5 million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitler’s “final solution”-now known as the Holocaust-came to fruition under the cover of World War II, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland. To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community. Since 1945, the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the ideological and systematic state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews (as well as millions of others, including Romani people, the intellectually disabled, dissidents and homosexuals) by the German Nazi regime between 19. The word “Holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. Aftermath & Lasting Impact of the Holocaust.Nazi Rule Comes to an End, as Holocaust Continues to Claim Lives, 1945.Towards the “Final Solution,” 1940-1941.Before the Holocaust: Historical Anti-Semitism & Hitler’s Rise to Power.
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