On gaining power, the Nazis began to implement the anti-Jewish policies Hitler and the Nazis had promised in
Mein Kampf and thousands of books, pamphlets, and speeches. Jewish shops were plundered while police looked the other way, Jewish physicians were excluded from hospitals, Jewish judges lost their posts, Jewish students were denied admission to universities, and Jewish veterans were stripped of their benefits. In 1935 the Nazis promulgated the Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of citizenship and outlawed marriage between Jews and non-Jews. In November 1938 the regime organized nationwide violence against Jewish synagogues and shops in what came to be known as Kristallnacht, or “night of the broken glass.”
After the war began in late 1939, conquests in Eastern Europe gave the Nazis new opportunities to address the “Jewish problem.” In early 1941 they began to deport Jews form Germany and conquered territories to Poland and Czechoslovakia, where Jews were employed as slave laborers or placed in concentration camps. In June 1941 special units known as Einsatzgruppe (“special action forces”) were organized to exterminate Jews in territories conquered on the eastern front. In eighteen months, they gunned down over 1 million Jews and smaller numbers of Gypsies and non-Jewish Slavs. Then in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin, the Nazi leadership approved the Final Solution to the so-called Jewish problem. Their goal became the extermination of European Jewry, and to reach it they constructed special camps where their murderous work could be done efficiently and quickly.
When World War II ended, the Nazis had not achieved their goal of annihilating Europe’s 11 million Jews. They did, however, slaughter close to 6 million, thus earning themselves a permanent place in the long history of man’s inhumanity to man.
The document excerpts that I would like you to read comes form the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland between 1940 and 1943. Born in 1900, Höss abandoned plans to become a priest after serving in World War I and became involved in a number of right-wing political movements, including the Nazi Party, which he joined in the early 1920s. After serving a jail sentence for participating in the murder of a teacher suspected of “treason,” Höss became a farmer and then in 1934, on the urging of Heinrich Himmler, a member of the Nazi SS, or Schutzstaffel (Guard Detachment). The SS under Himmler grew from a small security force to guard Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis into a powerful party organization involved in police work, state security, intelligence gathering, administration of conquered territories, and management of the concentration camps. After postings at the Dachau and Sachsenhausen camps, Höss was appointed commandant of Auschwitz, which began as a camp for Polish political prisoers but became a huge, sprawling complex where over a million Jews were gassed or shot and tens of thousands of prisoners served as slave laborers in nearby factories. In 1943 Höss became overseer of all the Third Reich’s concentration camps, but he returned to Auschwitz in 1944 to administer the murder of 400,000 Hungarian Jews. After his capture in 1946, he was tried and convicted for crimes against humanity by the international military tribunal at Nuremberg. He was hanged on April 16, 1947, within sight of the villa where he and his family had lived while he served as commandant at Auschwitz.
While awaiting trial, Höss was encouraged to compose his memoirs to sharpen his recollection of events he experienced. In the document I would like you to read (you can read it by clicking
here), he discusses his views of the Jews and his reaction to the mass killings he planned and witnessed.
After reading the document, I would like you all to reflect on and discuss the following: What does Höss claim to have been his attitude toward the Jews? How do his statements about the Jews accord with his assertion that he was a fanatic National Socialist? Does Höss make any distinction between the Russians and Jews that he had exterminated? What was Höss’ attitude toward the Final Solution? How does Höss characterize his role in the mass extermination of the Jews? How did his involvement in the Holocaust affect him personally? How according to Höss, did it affect other German participants? What would you describe as the key components of Höss’ personality? To what extent was his personality shaped by the Nazi philosophy to which he was dedicated? What insight does this excerpt provide about the issue of how much the German people knew of and participated in the Holocaust? Your thoughts…
Total war engulfed the world powers once again during World War II, and the United States was certainly no exception in this regard. In western democracies, people were not nearly as ready for another 20th century bloodbath as were the people of the angry, disillusioned Axis powers. Thus, President Roosevelt’s first address to Congress in January 1942 shows him trying to rally the American people for what he warns will be another “all-out” war to counter the aggression of the Axis nations (you can read the speech by clicking here). Notice how he links “modern methods of warfare” with “working and producing” as well as “shooting and fighting” and calls for all-out economic mobilization, conceding that “it will mean the dislocation of the lives and occupations of millions.” How much diversion of national labor and income does he say the war will require? Pay attention to his final call for “total victory.” Do either the means he proposes for fighting the war or this end suggest concern with limiting the war?
