ANOTHER CENTURY OF WAR: ANALYSIS AND COMMENT

EUROPEAN GENOCIDE AND HOLOCAUST IN THE 20th CENTURY

Fascism and dictatorships and the misery they bring do not arise out of a vacuum. In Russia, 1917 was a revulsion of the Czarist regimes for millennia. In Germany, the end of the first World War brought an end to the Kaiser, but the inability to establish a truly democratic, or republican state. Worse yet, the Armistice and the harsh financial burdens imposed on Germans caused unheard of inflation, joblessness, and the need to blame someone. "To be sure, the Germans were staggering beneath terrible political and psychological burdens: There was the shock of defeat, the moral censure of the Versailles Treaty, the loss of territory, and the demand for reparations" (Reilly 2000 384).

It was this defeatist attitude and economic and political distress which spawned National Socialism and Hitler. It is still curious, generations later, how so many Germans could have believed in, and followed Hitler. The fact is simple: he bred fear: Fear of Communism and Marxism. And, he capitalized on the partially-hidden German anti-Semitism. "Anxiety was the permanent emotion of the time" (Reilly 387). Germany, as Reilly (388) points out had lost its imperialist superiority. Even the bourgeoisie as well as the academics now had some sort of fear- whether of revolution, of failure to find work that sustained their families, even the negative view toward Germany of the rest of the world. "It remained for Hitler to bring together these

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, eventually, when Russia and Communism and Marxism were united in this cleansing of foreigners from Germany). To those skeptics who still doubt the existence of the Holocaust, Benz' book should be an eye-opener. Perhaps the key to the Holocaust was not various anti-Semitic acts in the Nineteen Thirties and the early years of the War. It was the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942. "On the agenda�.was the singularly most monstrous crime committed in the history of mankind: the genocide of the Jews" (Benz 1995 2). It was here, in a friendly breakfast meeting, that the term Final Solution was coined. The decision was aussiedlung (resettlement) of all Jews in Germany. It was here, also, that the idea of mass executions was determined too labor intensive. And, so were created the ovens and gas chambers, mass crematoriums and harsh concentration camps- Theresienstadt, Majdanek, Dachau, Treblinka Auschwitz, among the most notorious. The bureaucratic, detail-oriented Germans kept meticulous notes and journals about the mass extermination, including, of course, the "experiments" of Dr. Josef Mengele. Everything from experimenting on Jewish twins, to the mutilation of women, and the extraction of gold teeth and fillings befo

Category: History - A