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 feelings and to appoint himself their spearhead" (Reilly 389). But, it is one thing to fear Marxism or revolution, even to accept a right-wing government, it is quite something else to participate in the slaughter of some six million Jews, mentally and physically challenged, gypsies, and homosexuals. While all these were sent to camps and, most of them, killed one way or another, it is the Jews of Europe that suffered the most. They became the scapegoats. They...