The causes of the Holocaust … They can be named after substantiating the premises. But none of these reasons, and all of them taken together, will never be able to justify or explain why what happened became possible. Why the Catastrophe happened. Why did the so-called "cultured nation" calmly and measuredly annihilate 6 million people? For humanity, this will forever remain beyond comprehension.
Historians, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, religious scholars, theologians, psychologists - dozens of scientists are struggling to solve the question "what are the causes of the Holocaust." Perhaps they can give the closest answer to the truth - then - and - if they can ever unite. Now, the causes of the Holocaust are considered by each of them from their narrow-profile point of view.
Questions, questions, questions …
Is anti-Semitism the main reason? Or maybe the "strangely" interpreted economic "necessity" - an asymmetric response to the countries that won the First World War? Or a perverted understanding of medical research? Or does the blame lie with the people themselves, who have departed from their God, thereby violating God's chosenness? Or was the Holocaust a consequence of the struggle against the Bolshevik communists? Or maybe everything is simpler: the evil will of one psychopath who had seized power and nurtured a shameful irrational hatred in himself, found support from people like him - “like-minded people in the party,” with a psychologically related sadistic pathology?
In any case, the ideologists and perpetrators of the Holocaust for some reason thought that they justified themselves in front of their descendants at least twice: by adopting the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and securing them in 1942 in the programmatic plan of the genocide at the Wannsee Conference.
However, none of the war criminals convicted at the Nuremberg and Israeli trials, from Kaltenbrunner to Eichmann, were helped by referring to any of the adopted laws, orders, doctrines, decisions or decrees requiring the extermination of Jews, Roma and other peoples, since there and simple human, and complex legal concept - "criminal order".
Anti-Semitism as a premise of the Holocaust
Irrational hatred of the Jewish people has been rooted in the earth from time immemorial. The origins of this hatred can be found in the dimness of the popular crowds, subject to the belligerent influence of the first Christian priests, and in many other things. This hatred has long become the archetype of attitudes towards foreigners in general, and not like everyone else, in particular. Therefore, there is no need to talk about any special German anti-Semitism. Repeatedly in any of the centuries from the birth of Christ, here and there, emerged from the darkness, and are still emerging now, bared with the malice of the fighters for the purity of the nation: whether Spanish, American, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Arab Islamists and they are innumerable. When their critical mass accumulates, waiting for pogroms becomes a common practice for the Jewish people.
After the First World War, and before the Second World War, the bells of anti-Semitism for German Jews sounded many times, from time to time becoming unbearably loud. But the turning point for the entire history of mankind - January 30, 1933 - the day when President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich Chancellor of Germany, passed almost unnoticed for them.
However, Hitler's Nuremberg racial laws that deprived Jews of their civil rights and the Kristallnacht massacre sobered many who still believed in humanity and common sense.
Why did the German Jews not leave the brutalized country en masse "overnight" was it still possible? There are also a number of reasons for this.
The new German government really diligently squeezed the Jews out of the country, but at the same time they were not going to let them go for nothing. All sorts of bureaucratic obstacles were arranged from which it was necessary to pay off and not everyone could afford it. For those who could, the usual philistine adaptability often worked, as well as an irrational hope for the best, and a rational belief that their social status is still unshakable. It was the Jews who remained in Germany and Austria who became the first settlers of the methodically arranged ghettos and concentration camps - and the first victims of the Holocaust.
Economic reasons
At the end of the First World War, Germany was in the deepest depression and economic crisis. In the presence of a wealthy and successful stratum of citizens with Jewish surnames.
The concept of a constant and ever-increasing joy of being and national unity, formulated by Goebbels, demanded that funds be urgently found for arranging a universal celebration of life and a common enemy for the nation, around which it would be possible to unite.
The solution chosen by Goebbels was, as some Russian political scientists now believe, to geniusly simple: the enemy was appointed close and conceptually odious - the Jews. After the appointment of such an enemy, the issue of replenishing the state treasury and personal accounts of the Nazi elite in Swiss banks was resolved by itself. Nobody looked for difficult decisions or demanded.
Expropriation from the disenfranchised Jewish population of considerable funds, bank deposits, property, jewelry, enterprises, shops, farms, etc. - legalized robbery in broad daylight, plus extortion on a gigantic scale - buying off those traveling abroad, greatly improved the German economy. And the loyal "purebred Aryans" received practically for nothing all of the above and much more that remained after the "disappeared" into oblivion.
Stolpersteine
If earlier everything that was undertaken by the German state machine for the extermination of Jews and other peoples carried a massive, but not fully formulated plan, then after the outbreak of World War II the German leadership considered it necessary to systematize and develop the accumulated experience.
The Fuehrer's favorite slogan about the final solution of the Jewish question, which he announced back in the early 1920s, was formally shaped into a program at a special conference convened on January 20, 1942 near Lake Wannsee, not far from Berlin. The authors of the program planned and structured everything that was necessary for the genocide of absolutely the entire Jewish population in Europe in stages. They called their plan very simply: "On the final solution of the Jewish question."
It was after January 20, 1942 that the machine for the extermination of Jews, and at the same time gypsies and other nationalities, was put on stream, and none of the performers was interested in the question - why? It was just a job. Daily and routine. The disciplined employees of the Great Reich sincerely sought to find the best solution to optimize labor and production. Is good job performance the cause of the Holocaust? Maybe. In any case, the moral aspect of this work did not exactly bother those who performed it.
Immorality. Immorality elevated to an absolute, lovingly nurtured by the pseudo-Puritan "morality" of the whole society: from propagandists, deputies, generals, to ordinary perpetrators of genocide, immorality as a state ideology is probably the main reason for the Holocaust.
