World War II and the Holocaust Essay Example for Free

World War II and the Holocaust Essay History would attest that Adolf Hitler is arguably the most influential figure of modern history. Although his persona is filled with notoriety and his legacy is mixed with greatness and disgust, he remains to be an undeniable impetus for the shaping of the world that we know today. He had his dreams of eternal glory, yet his he ended in perpetual shame. The man that has sent the entire globe into a war that brought the world into seven years of hell would always be Hitler. He has enticed an entire nation through his oratory and his speeches and has renewed the human understanding of human atrocity and racial genocide. He has shaped most of the modern day political and international landscape, in terms of foreign policy, racial discrimination, and Zionism. The world that we know today is mainly a product of the scientific advances brought by the demands of the Second World War, the organized extermination of races, and the heroic actions of those who did not allow for evil to prevail (Bullock, 3-12). Having Alois Hitler and Klara Hitler as parents, Adolf was born on the 20th of April in the year 1889 in a small town in Austria called Branau. His early life was filled with poverty and hardships. He became a lowly painter, a military corporal, and even a peddler with a flophouse for shelter. This was a time when he harboured his deep hatred for the Jewish race. This racial dissent has made him infamous for materializing his ruthless intentions of planning an organized mechanism on the elimination of Jews in his entire sphere of influence, and eventually, the world (Bullock 3). Hitler has left an inedible imprint in the European History and even the Worlds Modern History. Despite the fact that Hitler has never been previously engaged in any government position, he became Germanys chancellor and rose to power at the age of 43 in the year 1933. He did not possess formal education on any kind of foreign language and neither did he read intensively nor travelled extensively. Despite this, he managed to create a set of ideas that concern issues regarding foreign policy that were incorporated with his perceptions towards local and domestic affairs (Weinberg 30). Hitler’s rise to power and his capacity for evil are both astonishing. Everything about him was not extraordinary. He had a poor physique and an unimpressive appearance. Even in his execution of salutations was regarded sloppy. He was an Austrian citizen by birth, not German, which should have made the German people regard him as inferior. He was not scholastically impressive and neither did his artistic aspirations flourish. Such an existence laid the seeds of his intolerance, and his hatred of Jews and the prosperous middle classes. He was basically a failure and he only sought comfort through his withdrawal into the surreal world of fanaticism (Warner 9). On the death of Hindenburg in August of 1934, Hitler became both President and Chancellor of Germany. This allowed him to gain full command of the country’s armed forces. This is very crucial in his plans towards another world war. Every serving officer and man now took an oath of allegiance to Hitler personally. Their loyalties no longer lie in the country alone, but to Hitler himself. They vowed to adore and worship their leader and to fight and die protecting him. When, later his actions demonstrated his lack of enough sanity, but their act of pledging their allegiance to Hitler kept them from resorting to actions that would depose Hitler. This is a tremendous factor in enabling the army to fight to their death, long after the war was lost, and Germany had been invaded and overrun. Officers and men had sworn an oath to Hitler as long as they live and would never cease to follow his order and fight for him (Warner 14). A tremendous part of the impact that Hitler had towards Germany, and therefore the world, is primarily due to his strong will and how it affected the German public. He was remarkably successful in impressing his concepts and his ideas on the events that transpired instead of simply allowing these events to alter his own ideas and perception. The realities of those times were not exactly in conformation to Hitlers own, and they have proven stronger than Hitlers fanatic will and intense energies. But the explosive events during the decade of the 1930’s were not a pure random coincidence. These were manipulated by the opportunist Adolf Hitler. This allowed Hitler to corrupt the German public to his Nazi ideologies that primarily concerned the indoctrination of racism, which provided a basis for Germanys hope to arise from her defeat from the previous world war. Germany was did not meet defeat due to inherent weakness, but due to her resilience to continue fighting for long periods with the world as her enemy. This is a deep reflection of the natural racial superiority among the Aryans (Weinberg 30-32). When he formulated his foreign policy, his concepts can be summarized into this statement: The German people were not defeated during the First World War, the Jewish people and their supporters instead stabbed Germany in the back. This racialist doctrine was very significant as it included a very crucial teaching; it rejected the biblical concept that man is separate from other creatures. This novel form of pagan belief implicated that there should be purity of race which can be achieved through breeding selectively. Through this, he exploited Darwinian concepts and took advantage on the then popular belief of the need for racial hegemony. This preached that such breeding method is essential for progress, to which Germanys foreign policy must be directed to. Eliminating the categorization of people could only be judged through standards of utility instead of morality. This is the basis of the perception that the allegedly alien racial stock, which primarily pertains to the Jews, the Sinti and the Roma, was a danger to the society due to their extensive dispersion and tremendous influence and to the expanse of the progress which their assimilation had made, most especially in terms of the German society. The nightmare of the massacre of approximately six million Jews and five millions others composed of Gypsies, freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and other enemies of the state shook the world and have redefined the extent of human artistic cruelty (Weinberg 32-33). Hitler, as the leader of the Third Reich, was responsible for the outbreak of World War II. Had he not decided to materialize his plans of expanding the territories of Germany for the purpose of lebensraum, or providing space for the racially superior German people and take those lands that belong to racially inferior people, the world would not have met years of infamy and destruction. But this is just one of the reasons. The main objective of Nazi Germany was to dominate the world and to establish an Empire, comparative to that of the Romans, which would last for an entire Millennium (Bullock 625). Hitler promised the people of Germany to become all powerful, that there was a new hope for the German public that the dynamism of National Socialism could be harnessed to their own limited goals. Hitler was a very promising leader who could lead Germany back to strength. Although many opposed his rise to power, as they have recognized clearly the implications of his policies, especially in the field of foreign affairs, he overcame his critics. Before 1933, the millions who pushed Hitler forward and the small clique who installed him in office, by no means constituted the whole population. But there were vast reservoirs of support for the new leader to draw on, and for many years the support only grew stronger instead of waning. The national acceptance of the leadership principle implied the unconditional surrender of the country to the will of a leader who had explained for years what he would do with power when he secured it. Hitler fulfilled his intentions of the wars favoured by his supporters and has been much loyal to the ideologies he preached until the hour of his demise (Weinberg 53). Part of his â€Å"Final Solution to the Jewish Question,† Hitler tasked General Heydrich to meet with other German officials, political and military, in order to set guidelines as how to systematically exterminate the Jews. This is known as the Wannsee Conference. Through this, Hitler ordered the construction of concentration, labour, and extermination camps all over Europe. This is where the Schutzchaffel, the Gestapo, and the Eizantzgruppen disposed the Jews and forced them to be interned into unimaginable living conditions. The most notorious of the camps built during the Nazi occupation of Europe was the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland. It is the largest of its kind and is most known that once a prisoner enters it, he can never get out alive. This camp did not only send the Jews and other prisoners to their deaths through the gas chambers and intense labour, it experimented on the people in the camps for development of medical treatment. Dr. Mengeles exceptional interests on twins were highly evident as when the camp was liberated, most children that survived the holocaust were identical, physically and genetically. Dwarfs examinations and skeletal scrutiny were also some of the primary subjects of the studies done in these camps. Other forms of experiment included subjects into Siamese twins and even inseminating women with animal sperms. Other relevant experiments concerning warfare included high altitude tolerance, low temperature, and salinity tolerance. These are highly useful for the Lufwaffe, or the German Air Force. For matters concerning first aid, biological warfare, and even immunization, physicians in the camp deliberately injected diseases, exposed prisoners to surgical procedures never tested, and even experimented on wounds usually acquired in battle (Medical Experimentation). Such efforts made by Hitler are very significant in the modern world. It necessitated the world to discover new ways to fight a war, to seek better medical alternatives, and even inventing technologically advance devices. More powerful forms of armaments, tanks, and even aircrafts were primarily developed during the war era. The most notable among them is the dawn of a nuclear era with the race for the invention of the atomic bomb. Today, governments ensure that discrimination is an illegal act, that it would impose sanctions to those who would profile people for their cultural, religious, and even gender orientation. But most of all, because of the holocaust, the Western governments had strengthened their support for the Jews which have led to the establishment of an Israeli state within Palestine. This success of Zionism has impacted the contemporary political situation in West Asia, as this led to years of war between Israeli citizens and their neighbouring Arab nations. Although to other perspectives see that Zionism is providing a people without land with land without people, they cannot deny that it is already occupied by Palestinians who are now evicted from the land of their ancestors (Weinberg 319; Palumbo, Land without a People). The niche of Adolf Hitler in history is quite established and his reputation can possibly be never redeemed. He has waged a war against the world, with Mussolini as his only fully fledged ally, and has in turn sent over 50 million people to their deaths. Hitlers legacy is regarded no longer with admiration and glorification, as his name and the party he had built had become a synonym to the word evil. His doctrines and his actions are now condemned for posterity to remember and never forgive. Although some still hail his name and favour his advocacies and ideologies while other still despise the person that he was, it cannot be denied that he is pivotal for the events that transpired during the mid twentieth century. His role is that he is the driving force, the cause, and the perpetrator of the crimes against humanity that the world has never known (Weinberg 287-290; Adolf Hitler).