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Kaileb Parker
Mr. Hawkins
Modern World History, Period 3
21 March 2016
Identify some of the 20th century precursors to the Holocaust?

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The 20th century Holocaust is largely seen as something Hitler brought forth entirely himself. The
20th century holocaust was a horrific genocide organized by Hitler but the hatred, anti-semitism,
and ideas for genocide didnt come from his solely. During his rise to power, Hitler had
repeatedly blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I and subsequent
economic hardships. (Website 3) Most of Germany found it easy to blame their failure on the
Jewish people. Hitler had actually come up in a Germany that already felt badly about Jews, he
just promoted it. Germany's hard past gave them plenty to be bitter about and the Jewish were
easy to blame for all of it because they were guest in their native land. With Jews being seen as
the scapegoat in Germany. anti-Semitism grew within the population, the things done to the
Jews by Hitler and his army began to be widely seen as acceptable. Herding Jews into
slums, burning and taking their businesses and finally sending them to camps all became
common (Website 2) When such acts became acceptable amongst the German people it paths
ways for more sinister things too take place. It is important to know that it want immediately the
gols of the Nazi to flat out kill the Jews, they just wanted to get rid of them and contain them.
Many people at the time didnt know that the acts they were committing against the Jews would
grown into genocide down the line. The Jewish people had been loyal members of the German
society for generations but they were gradually shut out of German society by the Nazis
through a never-ending series of laws and decrees, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws of
1935 which deprived them of their German citizenship and forbade intermarriage with
non-Jews. They were removed from schools, banned from the professions, excluded from
military service, and were even forbidden to share a park bench with a non-Jew. (Website
3) This was all apart of Hitlers process of lowering the social status and rights of the Jewish
people. If Hitler could disconnect them from society, then he could more easily simply rip them

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from the cities and send them to camps. Hitler and most of Germany Itself didnt see the Jewish
people as German people. They had been seen as separate from the rest of Germany for
generations. Besides all the things the Nazi did to detach the Jewish from central society they
silenced anyone who suggested anything otherwise. They, the Nazis used the government
apparatus to terrorize the other parties. They arrested their leaders and banned their
political meetings. (Website 1) Because no one was around to appose them, their ideology,
there word became the ultimatum for the people. In the beginning the Nazi party had many
political enemies. They would go and destroy government buildings and blame it on other
parties, boosting their popularity. With this police infrastructure in place opponents of the
Nazis were terrorized, beaten, or sent to one of the concentration camps the Germans built
to incarcerate them. Dachau, just outside of Munich, was the first such camp built for
political prisoners. Dachau's purpose changed over time and eventually became another
brutal concentration camp for Jews. (Website 1) Since the camps were already seen as
places for the enemies of the Nazi party and the people to go, it only made sense to start sending
the Jews there too since they were also seen as enemies. The camps the Nazi used for their so
called enemies were at this point just for Concentration of their populations, not for killing in
so called kill camps. As other nations came together to discuss the mass immigration of Jews
Surprisingly, by the end of the conference, only the Dominican Republic had opened their
boundaries for the Jews fleeing away from the Germans. At the time the Jews were free to
leave Germany and were encouraged to do so. With no countries to run too, the Jews were
trapped in Germany were their welcome became less and less stable. When Hitler saw that the
Jews werent wanted by anyone he sought to solve the problem himself since they could not run
away. All the social injustice on the Jewish people caused anger and some level of uprising. A

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young man named Joseph Goebbels shot a Nazi officer dead. Nazis used the death of vom
Rath as an excuse to conduct the first State-run pogrom against Jews. Ninety Jews were
killed, 500 synagogues were burned and most Jewish shops had their windows smashed.
The first mass arrest of Jews also occurred as over 25,000 men were hauled off to
concentration camps. (Website 3) This event have the Nazi a taste for blood and the Nazi
liked what they had accomplished in this night knows as the Night of Broken Glass. The events
of this night would set the foundation for many more like it to come. Latter on down the road
Hitler proposed that Germans went just different people but were completely superior to them. In
Hitlers mind the superior race was the "Aryans," the Germans. The word Aryan,
"derived from the study of linguistics, which started in the eighteenth century and
at some point determined that the Indo-Germanic (also known as Aryan)
languages were superior in their structures, variety, and vocabulary to the Semitic
languages that had evolved in the Near East. This judgment led to a certain
conjecture about the character of the peoples who spoke these languages; the
conclusion was that the 'Aryan' peoples were likewise superior to the 'Semitic'
ones". (Website 1) Hitlers view point on the Jewish people made it much easier to see
them as animals and not as people. Hitlers claimed it was just their destiny to die and
go extinct.