First They Came For…

FIRST THEY CAME FOR…..and I did not speak up.

In 1919, Adolph Hitler joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi Party) formed during the post-World War I era to oppose the Democratic government. It advocated extreme nationalism, “Germany first”, and virulent hostility, prejudice and discrimination against another race (Jews).

During the 1920’s, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, in which he argued that the Jewish-Christian ethic was enfeebling Europe, and that Germany needed a man of iron to restore itself and build an empire. Hitler determined that power was to be achieved not through revolution outside of the government, but rather through legal means, within the confines of the democratic system established by Weimar, and bullied his way into leadership of the fledgling Nazi party.

Through the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Nazis gathered enough electoral support to become the largest political party, and Hitler’s blend of political acuity, deceptiveness, and cunning converted the party’s majority (but plurality) status into effective governing power in the ailing Weimar Republic.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 heralded worldwide economic disaster and in 1930 Hitler’s party became the second largest party in Germany when an unprecedented amount of money was thrown behind the campaign pledged to eliminate democracy. The Communists openly announced they would prefer to see the Nazis in power than lift a finger to save the Republic. No middle class liberal party existed strong enough to block the Nazis at the polls, and the German Right made Hitler their partner in a coalition government.

In 1933, Germany’s president appointed Hitler as Chancellor in a majority conservative Cabinet. Both within Germany and abroad there were few fears that Hitler could use his position to establish a dictatorial single-party regime. Rather, the conservatives that helped make him Chancellor were convinced that they could control Hitler and “tame” the Nazi Party. But on March 24 the Enabling Act was passed, giving Hitler the complete and absolute freedom to act without parliamentary consent or constitutional limitations. Hitler and his Cabinet ruled by emergency decree for four years, achieving full dictatorial power after the death of President Hindenburg in 1934.

Hitler and the Nazis promoted a socially conservative view concerning many aspects of life, supported by harsh discipline and a militaristic point of view. Conservative opinions about sexuality led to extreme homophobia. Hitler and his paladins also controlled what constituted acceptable artistic expression, abolishing what they considered to be “degenerate art”. The Nazis strongly discouraged, and in some cases outright rejected, the use of cosmetics, premarital sex, prostitution, racial mixing, pornography, sexual vices, smoking, and excessive drinking. Hitler believed women had no place in public or political life, belonging at home as mothers and wives. Children should be trained and educated to be convinced of their superiority and be taught authority and military discipline with ultimate obedience to their Fuhrer.

Hitler laid great stress on the need to concentrate on a single enemy, an enemy he lumped together as “Marxism and the Jew.” Because Nazism co-opted the popular success of communism among working people, while simultaneously promising to destroy communism and offer an alternative to it, Hitler’s anti-communist program allowed industrialists with traditional conservative views to cast their lot with, and help underwrite, the Nazi rise to power.

Once Hitler was in charge, the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society. Starting in 1933 the Nazis established a network of concentration camps for re-education. After the outbreak of war in 1939 both German and foreign Jews were herded into wartime ghettos. In 1941, as Germany began to conquer new territory in the East, all anti-Jewish measures radicalized. Specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews in mass shootings actions in less than a year. By mid-1942, victims were regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945.

Every arm of the country’s sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders. The universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the crematoria; detailed lists of victims were drawn up by Dehomag (IBM Germany) using the company’s punch card machines.

Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews. This makes the Holocaust distinctive because anti-Semitic policies were able to unfold without the interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies such as industry, small businesses, churches, trade unions, and other vested interests and lobby groups. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, non-pragmatic ideology — which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means.

• Hitler believed the Jewish Question was not only a problem for the German People but for all peoples.
• In the 1920’s Hitler said that the annihilation would be his first and foremost task when he came to power.
• Cultural, racial, and religious anti-Semitism grew as a result of continued government assertions that Jews were causing the economic issues after the war.
• Nazi policies about repression divided people into three types of enemies, the “racial” enemies such as the Jews and the Romani who were viewed as enemies because of their “blood”; political opponents such as Marxists, liberals, Christians and the “reactionaries” who were viewed as wayward “National Comrades”; and moral opponents such as homosexuals, the mentally defective, the “work-shy” and habitual criminals, also seen as wayward “National Comrades”. The last two groups were to be sent to concentration camps for “re-education”, and the moral opponents were to be sterilized or euthanized, as they were regarded as “genetically inferior”.
• From 1933 to the outbreak of WWII, Jews were forcibly deported from Germany, and long-range plans were made to deport Jews from all of Europe.
• The first organized murders of Jews by German forces occurred in 1939 in Germany and in Poland where 90% of the Jewish population died.
• Ghettos were established in Nazi-occupied Europe to confine Jews until they could be deported.
• By 1942 the concentration camps had become extermination camps and the ghettos housing the Jewish populations were emptied into the camps.
• Local populations of occupied territories began to take part in the killing.
• The German historian Hans Buchheim wrote there was no coercion to murder Jews and others, and all who committed such actions did so out of free will. Those of a non-criminal bent who committed crimes did so because they wished to conform to the values of the group they had joined and were afraid of being branded “weak” by their colleagues if they refused.

First they came for….and I did not speak up.