Race and class warfare, antisemitism, pro-war ideology, sound like politics today? No we are not talking about politics today but something far mor sinister in history.
To honor those poor souls who perished during the 1941-1945 period of the Holocaust we think about the effects of Hitler’s Nazi Party on the Germans and the world.
Hitler’s facist Nazi Party began in brutal violence against its enemies and would end the same way.
These were the politics of Adolf Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
Hitler’s Nazi ideology was based ultimately on a nationalist fervor fueling a fascist takeover that ended up in a despotic dictatorship.
What made Hitler’s national socialism different than typical liberal socialist ideas?
Hitler expressed a deep hatred for capitalism, communism, Marxist class-struggle socialism, and therefore wanted to redefine socialism itself.
His socialism was to be based on the idea that the German people should embrace political movements as the top priority which would in turn fuel economic upturns.
This is seen in the massive spending and increase in German industrial war efforts.
An example of politically driven German expansionism leading to increased economic output.
Ideological facism is the idea that only certain ideas can be distributed is something his party wielded like a weapon.
They used brutality at the hands of Ernst Röhm and his SA to force out all other political parties in the country’s parliamentary system.
Look at the words used to attack those who deemed incompatible with German society there are symbolic of a socialist political ideology.
German propaganda published this notice with the inscription: “60 000 RM is what this person suffering from hereditary illness costs the community in his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read Neues Volk.”
Hitler’s Nazi Germany set to divide and conquer first starting with itself. The first way it did so was to establish a race hierarchy.
By setting the precedent that only pure Aryan racial records could achieve the highest German legal representation the Nazis effectively alienated all other people from being allowed a normal life.
Alienation of the Jewish people made way for what would come next, mass murder.
The Enabling Act of March 1933 gave Hitler full power this lead to the legal discrimination of German Jews.
Stripped of all legal rights by the Nuremburg Laws in September 1935 German Jews were vulnerable to the growing antisemitism across Germany.
This lead to the 1938 attack on Jewish businesses known as Kristallnacht, “crystal night”. A sight to behold as all the Jewish storefronts were all beaten to glass shards on the streets.
The 1939 invasion of Poland marked the beginning of Jewish ghettos designed to physically segregate Jews from society.
First they had their legal rights stripped now they had physically been removed from being citizens any longer.
Things only escalated from here as the cold calculation of the German Third Reich continued on its mission to implement the “Final Solution”.
By 1942 Jews were being transported by freight trains to concentration camps for the simple purpose of being killed.
The Holocaust continued until May 1945 and it wiped out 2/3 of the Jewish population in Europe.
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