The Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum and it did not happen overnight. The men who carried it out were the products of a particular country at a particular moment. Germany in 1933 was the most cultured and educated nation in Europe, with the highest standard of literacy, the best universities, the world’s leading research institutions in chemistry and physics, and a deeply rooted Christian and humanist tradition. It was also a country that had just spent fifteen years coming apart at the seams. The pages in this section cover what made the Holocaust possible.
What is here
What the Holocaust Was and What It Was Not sets out the basic definitions. What was the Holocaust, who did it, who was killed, when did it begin and end, and where does the line lie between the Holocaust and the wider crimes of the Second World War. It is the page to read first if any of those questions are not already settled in your mind.
The First World War Connection covers the origin point most often skipped over in popular accounts. The Nazis did not invent themselves. They emerged from the trauma of the German defeat in 1918, the stab-in-the-back myth that immediately followed, and the brutalised generation of veterans who could not accept that they had lost. The men who would run the Nazi state in 1933 had mostly been junior officers or non-commissioned officers in the trenches in 1918. Hitler himself had spent four years as a regimental runner and had been gassed at Ypres. The First World War made the Nazi movement possible.
The Weimar Republic covers the German democratic government that ran from 1919 to 1933 and failed. Weimar was not a doomed regime that limped from crisis to crisis. It produced Bauhaus design, Berlin cabaret, the modern social welfare state and a flourishing of arts and sciences. It also faced four interlocking problems: a punitive peace settlement that humiliated the country, a series of attempted coups and political assassinations from both extremes, the hyperinflation of 1923 that wiped out the middle class, and the Great Depression of 1929 that made German democracy ungovernable. The Nazi vote went from 2.6 per cent of the electorate in 1928 to 37.4 per cent in 1932. By the time Hitler was offered the Chancellorship in January 1933, parliamentary government in Germany had effectively ceased to function.
Why these pages matter
The point of this section is not to excuse what came afterwards. Nothing in the pre-history of the Holocaust forgives a single act of murder. The point is to understand how a developed European country, with all the institutions of civilised life, became the regime that built Auschwitz. The answer matters because the conditions that produced the Nazi state, economic shock, political polarisation, the failure of mainstream parties to address public grievance, the willingness of conservative elites to do business with extremists they thought they could control, the breakdown of democratic norms, were not unique to Germany in the 1930s and are not absent from the world today.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards