The Background of the Nazis’ Racial Ideology
==============================================
Wolran Kim
March 2013
The Holocaust refers to the national level of persecution and genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The general meaning of the Holocaust is the act of burning humans or animals, but this proper noun became a reference to the largest massacre of the 20th century and as the most extreme anti-Semitism. The Holocaust shows how far the violence, ferocity, exclusiveness, and madness of human nature can go and also exemplifies the background of racism in the Western civilization and the state of modern bureaucracy. The Nazi regime moved an unimaginable scale of extermination to execution of Jews by precise, advance planning. This report will examine the historical background and the practical process of Nazi racial ideology, and its theoretical foundations of genocide, racism, anti-Semitism, and Nazi propaganda.
First of all, the word, “genocide” did not exist prior to 1944. This word means violent criminal acts toward a specific group with the intention to destroy. In 1944, Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), the Polish Jewish lawyer, was looking for words to describe the Nazis’ systematic slaughter and extermination of the European Jews, and he created ‘genocide’ by combining the word genos, from the Greek meaning of ‘race’ and the word cide, from the Latin meaning of ‘killing'.
The Nazi chiefs were accused of crimes against humanity in the international military tribunals held in Nuremberg, Germany in 1945. The word “genocide” was only a descriptive, not a legal term, though included in the indictment. The United Nations approved the agreement of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by the impact of the Holocaust and Lemkin’s unremitting efforts on December 9, 1948. This agreement defined genocide as an international crime and took measures to prevent and punish genocide to pledged countries.
The history of genocide is as long as the civilization of the human race. The war between Greece and Troy, Rome and Carthage, and Assyria and Babylonia massacred their inhabitants. The Crusaders burnt the Jewish to death in the synagogues when they conquered Jerusalem, aiming to restore the Holy Land in 1099.
Jews were targeted in several genocides; they were the scapegoat of the Black Death by Christianity in the 14th century, the scapegoat of the Bolshevik threat by the Ukrainians after World War I, and the scapegoat of racism by Nazis during World War II. The 20th century genocide is more distinct on the target from the incidents before because issues of religion and racial discrimination mostly killed the other people until the 19th century, compared to political conflicts killing people of the same ethnicity in the 20th century. The scale of the victims has been updated depending on the ease of mass destruction by the development of weapons.
Particularly in the 20th century, there were two times when genocide had over ten million victims; the first one was when the Russian government purged twenty million political opponents for the finishing of the communist revolution throughout the 11 years (1929-1939), and the second one was when Nazis brutally killed Jews and Gypsies in Nazi-occupied territories in Europe during World War II. There were also three other incidents where over one million victims resulted from genocide; the Armenians massacred by the Turkish in 1915, the Bengals massacred by the Pakistan army in 1971, and the compatriot’s massacre by the Cambodian revolution government in the late 1970s.
There were eight incidents of genocide with more than one hundred thousand victims; Serbians by Croatia (1943-1946), ethnic minorities by Russia (1943-1946), Muslims and Hindus by India and Pakistan (1947), South Sudanese by North Sudan (1955-1972), communists by Indonesia (1965-1967), cognate massacres by the dictator Idi Amin of Uganda (1971-1979), Hutus by Tutsis in Burundi (1972-1973), and Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda (1994).
The theory to explain why humans kill humans of the same species is separated into two types. One is the biological theory that describes genocide within human nature, and the other is the sociological theory that is connected to the colonial powers of military policies. Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), who received the Nobel Prize as an ethnologist, argues that the brutality of the human massacre comes from the aggressive instincts of the animal.
Meanwhile, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) insists that genocide has occurred inevitably from capitalist countries creating a colony by force. Sartre’s theory begins with the invasion of Algeria by France in 1830. Algerians were killed in a small town of Algeria during riots in 1945. France attacked the coastal city and the army committed violence through indiscriminate killings, gang rapes, lootings, and arson, in retaliation. The bodies’ genitals were cut and children were beheaded. Deaths were announced as 45,000 Algerians. Sartre began to study the theory of genocide while accusing the French of their brutality.
The second motif, racism, is the belief that human behavior is determined by biological genetic traits congenitally, and that lineage is a marker of national ethnic identity. Thus, the value of humans is decided within the framework of the national ethnic collectivity, not the individual’s humanity. Many intellectuals, including scientists, borrowed a non-scientific basis to support racism, and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was influenced from racists, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in the 19th century. The original concept of race was used when the human race, Homo sapiens, was distinguished by biological characteristics such as blood type, skin color, hair, etc.
Racial issues also refer to the confusion or dispute in all areas of political, economic, social, cultural, and mental structures that were attributed from objective or subjective racial differences. The typical form of racism is that whites are superior and colored races are inferior. The whites rationalized racism with their domination and the subjugation of colored races; however, these claims do not provide any historical or theoretical basis. For example, the ancient civilizations of India, China, and the United Arab surpassed the contemporary European culture.
Racism, including anti-Semitism, was always present as the absolute configuration of German National Socialism. The Nazis have been recognized in human history as the struggle between the different ethnic groups, and asserted that political movements of Marxism, communism, fascism, and internationalism are anti-nationalism reflected by the dangerous intellectualism of the Jews. In 1931, the SS established their Race and Settlement Office to research race and determine eligibility for their potential spouses.
They passed legislation with a biological definition of the Jews in 1935, and German doctors began to kill the disabled with the name of euthanasia in 1939. During World War II, Nazi doctors experimented with bogus medical investigations to prove the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of the non-Aryan races. However, they did not find any evidence to support their theories about racial differences in biological humanity despite killing a myriad of non-Aryan prisoners.
The third subject, anti-Semitism, refers to the prejudice or hatred for Jews based on false biological theories. Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904), a German journalist, used the term anti-Semitism first, and this term encompassed the hatred for other political flows of the 18th and 19th centuries that were associated with Jews and liberal cosmopolitanism, not only the hatred of Jews. This anti-Semitism had been attacked for the ideas of equality of civil rights, constitutional democracy, free trade, socialism, capitalism, and pacifism.
However, a special hatred for Jews has existed before modern society and the quickening of the term, ‘anti-Semitism.’ A pogrom was stirred using the wrong rumor that Jews use the blood of Christian children for religious sacrifices and the political dimension added onto this ideological hatred for Jews with the transition to a modern society. At the third part of the 19th century, the political parties advocating anti-Semitism appeared in Germany, France, and Austria. Books such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion supported the international Jewish conspiracy. Politicians often blamed strong Jewish nationalists for being disloyal citizens.
The Bolshevik movement (civil or mass movement) of xenophobia in the 19th century was the foundation of the aspect that Jewish Germans were seen as non-Germans. The Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler, which was founded in 1919, expressed political opinions in reference to racism; thus, the Nazi Party gained popularity due to the publicity of these anti-Semitism political tendencies. Millions of people bought Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, and this book was about the struggle to drive the Jews from Germany. In 1933, the Nazis became powerful and they began to conduct legislation, the incineration of books, and an economic blockade as a target of anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Bill enacted racial ranks through the overall separation between “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” from a pedigree in 1935.
A protection law of German lineage and honor banned the marriage between Germans and Jews, and the civil law defined Jews as the “ruled” or “the second class of citizen.” These laws affected approximately a little more than 1% of the German population at the time including 450,000 pureblood Jews (four generations of Jews) and 250,000 mixed-blood or converted Jews. Nazis destroyed the synagogues and the windows of all Jewish stores across Germany and Austria, and this was called “Kristallnacht,” “Crystal Night,” or “The Night of Broken Glass.” This incident meant the transition from the anti-Semitism movement to the destructive era of the ethnic extermination.
The Nazi propaganda on the background of genocide, racism, and anti-Semitism, often portrayed the Jews as conspirators causing the war. They described Jews as aliens who are causing a loss of food, poisoning the culture, eating at the economy, and creating slaves. This hateful portrayal of the Jews turned into a national point of view, and had influence on various forms of media, such as film, radio, newspaper, poster, and public exhibition. The Nazis engrafted the Jews as a “degenerate culture,” and the most malicious one was The Eternal Jew. This film compared Jews to rats that spread the plague on the entirety of Europe and gnawed a useful resource of the continent. This movie also portrayed Jews as a despicable and vulgar nature through combining the eerie image of Jews slaughtering cattle for their religious rituals.
Ultimately, these propagandas played a role in preparing the genocide of the Jews by the Germans. The recurring theme of the Nazi propaganda was that the Jews spread disease. The German authorities banned access for non-Jews to the ghettos to prevent showing Jews to the daily lives of Germans due to the epidemic area. The problems of food shortage, lack of water supply, and nastiness quickly damaged the Jews’ health, and a contagious disease of the ghettos became a truth.
The background of the Nazi racism also includes Hitler’s dictatorship and Darwin’s (1809-1882) theory of evolution. Hitler’s perspective was that genetic characteristics dominate the inner mental mindset, creativity, organizational skills, intellectual ability, cultural taste and perception, physical toughness, and even military courageousness, as well as appearance and physical characteristics. In his perspective, the essence of race or ethnicity is immutable and determined by genetic form. Therefore, human beings cannot exceed racial limits, and human history can be described as ethnic conflicts. The Nazis’ racial ideology used “natural selection” of the Darwinist theory at the end of the19th century. On that account, racial assimilation or influx runs counter to the laws of heredity, and the results of race-mixing is only degeneration.
The Jews were the primary target of the Nazis. They were defined as an inferior race and the first enemy. Other than the Jews, Romani, people with disabilities, Poles, Soviet POW’s, the Afro-Germans, homosexuals, sociopaths, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political uncooperative classes were treated as enemies, and became the target of repression, imprisonment, and extermination. According to the Nazis’ racism, the superior race had the right to conquer or exterminate the inferior race. Their ongoing racial struggles were the laws of nature. The inferior race also included Slavs and Asians (Central Asians in the Soviet and Muslims in the Caucasus region), and the Nazis’ racial vision was often likened to a crusade to save Western society.
The ultimate value of Hitler and the Nazis is in the racial groups rather than the individuals. Therefore, Hitler focused on the collective survival instinct, and this leads to the racial purity and a fight for territorial expansion. Racial mixture leads to degeneration and extinction, and territorial expansion required for an increase in the population. He emphasized that superior Aryans were destined to build a vast empire encompassing all of Eastern Europe.
The reason for the removal of the Jews was that the inferior Jews could sweep out Slavs, Asians, and even Germans, using exploitative systems such as capitalism and communism. He also thought that the Jews could oppress Germany using government institutions, equality of rights, international peace, international cooperation agreement, parliamentary democracy, and a hierarchy conflict. In the same way, racial segregation and encouragement of the highest race are connected to genocide of the inferior race, and justified as the last resort for the survival of Germany.
On these sorts of theoretical background, the Nazis’ first step was discrimination and forced migration policy before the invasion of Poland (1939). They banished the Jews from schools, government positions, and the press, and isolated them socially and economically. The Jews were excluded from the obligation of national defense, and prohibited marriage to non-Jews since the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935. Jewish businesses and shops were confiscated after the Crystal Night in 1938. The second step was exclusion and deportation, and they tried to create a country without Jews after the invasion of Poland. They established the ghetto, and the mortality rate of some places was 50 percent due to such terrible environments.
They attempted to deport the entirety of the Jews to the Madagascar Island on the east coast of Africa and Siberia, but failed because of the seizure of the British Navy. The third step was the “Final Solution.” They decided to exterminate instead of export to eliminate the need to feed the Jews. Six million Jews were massacred until the Auschwitz camp was liberated in January 1945 under the name of ethnic cleansing of the Nazis. Two thirds of all European Jews were killed before World War II, and more than one million of the total victims were children after the war. The Nazis even killed infants with the name of “parasitic vermin".
Then, why did this ugly crime happen in Germany? Germany was running its heyday as the center of Western civilization in the field of arts, science, education, and philosophy. The Germans at the time easily appeared as quite polite men of culture. They were the leaders of civilization and Hegel complimented them that they were an ethnic group possessing a free will and rationality. However, they were sadists who butchered the Jews behind the battlefields by showing absorption into a public conduct. The most serious happening was that Hitler’s illogical propaganda was accepted as orthodoxy. Hitler connected the anti-Semitism to anti-Bolshevism using the fact that Marx (1818-1883) and Trotsky (1879-1940) were Jews. In other words, he pushed anti-Semitism using the fact that Bolshevik forces were Russians, but the majority of the brains were Jewish.
Moreover, the frustration of the defeat in WW I was a big reason to Germany. They were faced with a huge debt and high unemployment, and then a Deutche mark had been turned into wastepaper. Their idea of the basic concepts had fallen due to economic chaos. The German working class unwelcomed the Jewish securities traders, and the only reason was that the Jews were better than the Germans. Thus, the hatred for the Jews was derived from jealousy. The public gaze toward the Jews in an academic field was not any good, because 29% of the Nobel Prize winners came from the Jews before 1933 in Germany. Even college scholarships encouraged students to join the Nazis, and Hitler’s anti-Semitism was also influenced among the intellectuals as well as the poor.
Then, why has the specter of racism not disappeared? In the 1960-70s, a consensus of anti-racism was formed and began all forms of legislative action for the elimination of racial discrimination. New racism emerged in the 1980s: the biological dimension faded, and cultural differences and issues of ethnicity appeared. A hatred for Islam is based on religious cause in these categories. The reason for the popularity of the ultra-rightist ideology was the European’s fear and discomfort toward poor colored immigrants coming from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Approaching between ‘all-or-nothing’ is difficult because racism is multidimensional, complex, and contradictory.
Racists think of minorities as parasites to exterminate; however, racism is not an unreasonable deviation, because it has been growing in special historical environments and succeeded to wear a mask of the essence of human culture. In order to escape racism, a cultural and political approach is required rather than biological science, because the biological perspective is already determined by heredity. Racists cannot even define how many races exist and how different the concept is between the past and the present. The reason is simple, because mankind cannot be divided by race.
The most important feature of the Holocaust compared to existing genocide is that the ruling groups being armed with racism justified and enforced the massacre with science. It is no coincidence that the Holocaust happened in the civilized country of Germany. This is the warning that excellent science and civilization has no role in weakening or controlling racism, but even rationalizes racial crime. Human history is the continuation of war, and it repeats itself. The windows of Jewish concentration camps were chosen as the world’s most beautiful windows; the prisoners lamented, “But, how beautiful this world is…” while they were watching other camps’ brethren disappearing as smoke beyond the window. There is no guarantee that another beautiful window will never exist again.
==============================================
Wolran Kim
March 2013
The Holocaust refers to the national level of persecution and genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The general meaning of the Holocaust is the act of burning humans or animals, but this proper noun became a reference to the largest massacre of the 20th century and as the most extreme anti-Semitism. The Holocaust shows how far the violence, ferocity, exclusiveness, and madness of human nature can go and also exemplifies the background of racism in the Western civilization and the state of modern bureaucracy. The Nazi regime moved an unimaginable scale of extermination to execution of Jews by precise, advance planning. This report will examine the historical background and the practical process of Nazi racial ideology, and its theoretical foundations of genocide, racism, anti-Semitism, and Nazi propaganda.
First of all, the word, “genocide” did not exist prior to 1944. This word means violent criminal acts toward a specific group with the intention to destroy. In 1944, Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), the Polish Jewish lawyer, was looking for words to describe the Nazis’ systematic slaughter and extermination of the European Jews, and he created ‘genocide’ by combining the word genos, from the Greek meaning of ‘race’ and the word cide, from the Latin meaning of ‘killing'.
The Nazi chiefs were accused of crimes against humanity in the international military tribunals held in Nuremberg, Germany in 1945. The word “genocide” was only a descriptive, not a legal term, though included in the indictment. The United Nations approved the agreement of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by the impact of the Holocaust and Lemkin’s unremitting efforts on December 9, 1948. This agreement defined genocide as an international crime and took measures to prevent and punish genocide to pledged countries.
The history of genocide is as long as the civilization of the human race. The war between Greece and Troy, Rome and Carthage, and Assyria and Babylonia massacred their inhabitants. The Crusaders burnt the Jewish to death in the synagogues when they conquered Jerusalem, aiming to restore the Holy Land in 1099.
Jews were targeted in several genocides; they were the scapegoat of the Black Death by Christianity in the 14th century, the scapegoat of the Bolshevik threat by the Ukrainians after World War I, and the scapegoat of racism by Nazis during World War II. The 20th century genocide is more distinct on the target from the incidents before because issues of religion and racial discrimination mostly killed the other people until the 19th century, compared to political conflicts killing people of the same ethnicity in the 20th century. The scale of the victims has been updated depending on the ease of mass destruction by the development of weapons.
Particularly in the 20th century, there were two times when genocide had over ten million victims; the first one was when the Russian government purged twenty million political opponents for the finishing of the communist revolution throughout the 11 years (1929-1939), and the second one was when Nazis brutally killed Jews and Gypsies in Nazi-occupied territories in Europe during World War II. There were also three other incidents where over one million victims resulted from genocide; the Armenians massacred by the Turkish in 1915, the Bengals massacred by the Pakistan army in 1971, and the compatriot’s massacre by the Cambodian revolution government in the late 1970s.
There were eight incidents of genocide with more than one hundred thousand victims; Serbians by Croatia (1943-1946), ethnic minorities by Russia (1943-1946), Muslims and Hindus by India and Pakistan (1947), South Sudanese by North Sudan (1955-1972), communists by Indonesia (1965-1967), cognate massacres by the dictator Idi Amin of Uganda (1971-1979), Hutus by Tutsis in Burundi (1972-1973), and Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda (1994).
The theory to explain why humans kill humans of the same species is separated into two types. One is the biological theory that describes genocide within human nature, and the other is the sociological theory that is connected to the colonial powers of military policies. Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), who received the Nobel Prize as an ethnologist, argues that the brutality of the human massacre comes from the aggressive instincts of the animal.
Meanwhile, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) insists that genocide has occurred inevitably from capitalist countries creating a colony by force. Sartre’s theory begins with the invasion of Algeria by France in 1830. Algerians were killed in a small town of Algeria during riots in 1945. France attacked the coastal city and the army committed violence through indiscriminate killings, gang rapes, lootings, and arson, in retaliation. The bodies’ genitals were cut and children were beheaded. Deaths were announced as 45,000 Algerians. Sartre began to study the theory of genocide while accusing the French of their brutality.
The second motif, racism, is the belief that human behavior is determined by biological genetic traits congenitally, and that lineage is a marker of national ethnic identity. Thus, the value of humans is decided within the framework of the national ethnic collectivity, not the individual’s humanity. Many intellectuals, including scientists, borrowed a non-scientific basis to support racism, and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was influenced from racists, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in the 19th century. The original concept of race was used when the human race, Homo sapiens, was distinguished by biological characteristics such as blood type, skin color, hair, etc.
Racial issues also refer to the confusion or dispute in all areas of political, economic, social, cultural, and mental structures that were attributed from objective or subjective racial differences. The typical form of racism is that whites are superior and colored races are inferior. The whites rationalized racism with their domination and the subjugation of colored races; however, these claims do not provide any historical or theoretical basis. For example, the ancient civilizations of India, China, and the United Arab surpassed the contemporary European culture.
Racism, including anti-Semitism, was always present as the absolute configuration of German National Socialism. The Nazis have been recognized in human history as the struggle between the different ethnic groups, and asserted that political movements of Marxism, communism, fascism, and internationalism are anti-nationalism reflected by the dangerous intellectualism of the Jews. In 1931, the SS established their Race and Settlement Office to research race and determine eligibility for their potential spouses.
They passed legislation with a biological definition of the Jews in 1935, and German doctors began to kill the disabled with the name of euthanasia in 1939. During World War II, Nazi doctors experimented with bogus medical investigations to prove the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of the non-Aryan races. However, they did not find any evidence to support their theories about racial differences in biological humanity despite killing a myriad of non-Aryan prisoners.
The third subject, anti-Semitism, refers to the prejudice or hatred for Jews based on false biological theories. Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904), a German journalist, used the term anti-Semitism first, and this term encompassed the hatred for other political flows of the 18th and 19th centuries that were associated with Jews and liberal cosmopolitanism, not only the hatred of Jews. This anti-Semitism had been attacked for the ideas of equality of civil rights, constitutional democracy, free trade, socialism, capitalism, and pacifism.
However, a special hatred for Jews has existed before modern society and the quickening of the term, ‘anti-Semitism.’ A pogrom was stirred using the wrong rumor that Jews use the blood of Christian children for religious sacrifices and the political dimension added onto this ideological hatred for Jews with the transition to a modern society. At the third part of the 19th century, the political parties advocating anti-Semitism appeared in Germany, France, and Austria. Books such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion supported the international Jewish conspiracy. Politicians often blamed strong Jewish nationalists for being disloyal citizens.
The Bolshevik movement (civil or mass movement) of xenophobia in the 19th century was the foundation of the aspect that Jewish Germans were seen as non-Germans. The Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler, which was founded in 1919, expressed political opinions in reference to racism; thus, the Nazi Party gained popularity due to the publicity of these anti-Semitism political tendencies. Millions of people bought Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, and this book was about the struggle to drive the Jews from Germany. In 1933, the Nazis became powerful and they began to conduct legislation, the incineration of books, and an economic blockade as a target of anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Bill enacted racial ranks through the overall separation between “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” from a pedigree in 1935.
A protection law of German lineage and honor banned the marriage between Germans and Jews, and the civil law defined Jews as the “ruled” or “the second class of citizen.” These laws affected approximately a little more than 1% of the German population at the time including 450,000 pureblood Jews (four generations of Jews) and 250,000 mixed-blood or converted Jews. Nazis destroyed the synagogues and the windows of all Jewish stores across Germany and Austria, and this was called “Kristallnacht,” “Crystal Night,” or “The Night of Broken Glass.” This incident meant the transition from the anti-Semitism movement to the destructive era of the ethnic extermination.
The Nazi propaganda on the background of genocide, racism, and anti-Semitism, often portrayed the Jews as conspirators causing the war. They described Jews as aliens who are causing a loss of food, poisoning the culture, eating at the economy, and creating slaves. This hateful portrayal of the Jews turned into a national point of view, and had influence on various forms of media, such as film, radio, newspaper, poster, and public exhibition. The Nazis engrafted the Jews as a “degenerate culture,” and the most malicious one was The Eternal Jew. This film compared Jews to rats that spread the plague on the entirety of Europe and gnawed a useful resource of the continent. This movie also portrayed Jews as a despicable and vulgar nature through combining the eerie image of Jews slaughtering cattle for their religious rituals.
Ultimately, these propagandas played a role in preparing the genocide of the Jews by the Germans. The recurring theme of the Nazi propaganda was that the Jews spread disease. The German authorities banned access for non-Jews to the ghettos to prevent showing Jews to the daily lives of Germans due to the epidemic area. The problems of food shortage, lack of water supply, and nastiness quickly damaged the Jews’ health, and a contagious disease of the ghettos became a truth.
The background of the Nazi racism also includes Hitler’s dictatorship and Darwin’s (1809-1882) theory of evolution. Hitler’s perspective was that genetic characteristics dominate the inner mental mindset, creativity, organizational skills, intellectual ability, cultural taste and perception, physical toughness, and even military courageousness, as well as appearance and physical characteristics. In his perspective, the essence of race or ethnicity is immutable and determined by genetic form. Therefore, human beings cannot exceed racial limits, and human history can be described as ethnic conflicts. The Nazis’ racial ideology used “natural selection” of the Darwinist theory at the end of the19th century. On that account, racial assimilation or influx runs counter to the laws of heredity, and the results of race-mixing is only degeneration.
The Jews were the primary target of the Nazis. They were defined as an inferior race and the first enemy. Other than the Jews, Romani, people with disabilities, Poles, Soviet POW’s, the Afro-Germans, homosexuals, sociopaths, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political uncooperative classes were treated as enemies, and became the target of repression, imprisonment, and extermination. According to the Nazis’ racism, the superior race had the right to conquer or exterminate the inferior race. Their ongoing racial struggles were the laws of nature. The inferior race also included Slavs and Asians (Central Asians in the Soviet and Muslims in the Caucasus region), and the Nazis’ racial vision was often likened to a crusade to save Western society.
The ultimate value of Hitler and the Nazis is in the racial groups rather than the individuals. Therefore, Hitler focused on the collective survival instinct, and this leads to the racial purity and a fight for territorial expansion. Racial mixture leads to degeneration and extinction, and territorial expansion required for an increase in the population. He emphasized that superior Aryans were destined to build a vast empire encompassing all of Eastern Europe.
The reason for the removal of the Jews was that the inferior Jews could sweep out Slavs, Asians, and even Germans, using exploitative systems such as capitalism and communism. He also thought that the Jews could oppress Germany using government institutions, equality of rights, international peace, international cooperation agreement, parliamentary democracy, and a hierarchy conflict. In the same way, racial segregation and encouragement of the highest race are connected to genocide of the inferior race, and justified as the last resort for the survival of Germany.
On these sorts of theoretical background, the Nazis’ first step was discrimination and forced migration policy before the invasion of Poland (1939). They banished the Jews from schools, government positions, and the press, and isolated them socially and economically. The Jews were excluded from the obligation of national defense, and prohibited marriage to non-Jews since the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935. Jewish businesses and shops were confiscated after the Crystal Night in 1938. The second step was exclusion and deportation, and they tried to create a country without Jews after the invasion of Poland. They established the ghetto, and the mortality rate of some places was 50 percent due to such terrible environments.
They attempted to deport the entirety of the Jews to the Madagascar Island on the east coast of Africa and Siberia, but failed because of the seizure of the British Navy. The third step was the “Final Solution.” They decided to exterminate instead of export to eliminate the need to feed the Jews. Six million Jews were massacred until the Auschwitz camp was liberated in January 1945 under the name of ethnic cleansing of the Nazis. Two thirds of all European Jews were killed before World War II, and more than one million of the total victims were children after the war. The Nazis even killed infants with the name of “parasitic vermin".
Then, why did this ugly crime happen in Germany? Germany was running its heyday as the center of Western civilization in the field of arts, science, education, and philosophy. The Germans at the time easily appeared as quite polite men of culture. They were the leaders of civilization and Hegel complimented them that they were an ethnic group possessing a free will and rationality. However, they were sadists who butchered the Jews behind the battlefields by showing absorption into a public conduct. The most serious happening was that Hitler’s illogical propaganda was accepted as orthodoxy. Hitler connected the anti-Semitism to anti-Bolshevism using the fact that Marx (1818-1883) and Trotsky (1879-1940) were Jews. In other words, he pushed anti-Semitism using the fact that Bolshevik forces were Russians, but the majority of the brains were Jewish.
Moreover, the frustration of the defeat in WW I was a big reason to Germany. They were faced with a huge debt and high unemployment, and then a Deutche mark had been turned into wastepaper. Their idea of the basic concepts had fallen due to economic chaos. The German working class unwelcomed the Jewish securities traders, and the only reason was that the Jews were better than the Germans. Thus, the hatred for the Jews was derived from jealousy. The public gaze toward the Jews in an academic field was not any good, because 29% of the Nobel Prize winners came from the Jews before 1933 in Germany. Even college scholarships encouraged students to join the Nazis, and Hitler’s anti-Semitism was also influenced among the intellectuals as well as the poor.
Then, why has the specter of racism not disappeared? In the 1960-70s, a consensus of anti-racism was formed and began all forms of legislative action for the elimination of racial discrimination. New racism emerged in the 1980s: the biological dimension faded, and cultural differences and issues of ethnicity appeared. A hatred for Islam is based on religious cause in these categories. The reason for the popularity of the ultra-rightist ideology was the European’s fear and discomfort toward poor colored immigrants coming from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Approaching between ‘all-or-nothing’ is difficult because racism is multidimensional, complex, and contradictory.
Racists think of minorities as parasites to exterminate; however, racism is not an unreasonable deviation, because it has been growing in special historical environments and succeeded to wear a mask of the essence of human culture. In order to escape racism, a cultural and political approach is required rather than biological science, because the biological perspective is already determined by heredity. Racists cannot even define how many races exist and how different the concept is between the past and the present. The reason is simple, because mankind cannot be divided by race.
The most important feature of the Holocaust compared to existing genocide is that the ruling groups being armed with racism justified and enforced the massacre with science. It is no coincidence that the Holocaust happened in the civilized country of Germany. This is the warning that excellent science and civilization has no role in weakening or controlling racism, but even rationalizes racial crime. Human history is the continuation of war, and it repeats itself. The windows of Jewish concentration camps were chosen as the world’s most beautiful windows; the prisoners lamented, “But, how beautiful this world is…” while they were watching other camps’ brethren disappearing as smoke beyond the window. There is no guarantee that another beautiful window will never exist again.