Introduction
It has been reported five million Jews were executed by the Nazis during the Second World War. ‘Die Endlösung’ (Fleming, 15) or the Final Solution is the name given to the methodical execution of the Jewish population during the Second World War by the Nazis. The chief of this monstrous plan was Heinrich Himmler. The entire process was referred to by Adolf Hitler as “die Endlösung der Judenfrage” or ‘ultimate solution of the question regarding the Jews’ (Longerich, 4). The plan was activated in 1942 but the construction of the entire approach started much earlier during the Berlin Wannsee conference in early 1942.
Background
During this meeting, the official command was put forward by Göring and Reinhard Heydrich was selected to devise a plan. By that time already a million Jews were killed. However, the first time this coinage of “Final Solution” was uttered was in 1943 at the Posen Conference and it was present in the speech of Heinrich Himmler. It was followed by systematic transportation of Jews to concentration camps by trains and executions followed there at places like Uckermark, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Neuengamme, Majdanek, and Herzogenbusch (Browning, 144).
Discussion
In a general sense, discrimination is fuelled by different aspects like low education, unfavorable economic condition, the social structure that is inclined towards a specific religion or cult, and most important of all- ill-fated political motivation. These are few reasons why the well educated, financially well off people tend to be secular in nature though there are exceptions and sometimes with rapid political campaigns, like the Nazi movement in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s by Adolph Hitler, these people start believing in an ideology that is basically racist in nature. Most people with discrimination or racist views don’t want others to label them as racist, so they mitigate their views whenever possible as this racism (like Nazism) comes in a package of camouflaged theoretic philosophy. This paved the path for ‘The final Solution’ and it was the Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews (Baumslag, 89).
The important focus of the paper evaluates the idea that the mass genocide of the Jewish people happened based on logic and the upper echelons of government.
The mass murder of the Jewish people would have presented the Nazis with several difficult problems when planning how to approach the killings. However, the government planning was extremely complex, as well as the killing, which was very critical to the initial success of the extermination.
The process by which the genocide was organized removed everyday individuals psychologically and morally from the actions of the government. This would mean that either the everyday individuals who took part in German society were unaware of the genocide, or may have even perhaps had some kind of resistance to the entire concept. This mentality was painfully and meticulously formulated by the Nazi chiefs as the initial development of the genocide (Fleming, 223).
This yielded results as on the many massacres the German reserve police participated in during the start of the genocide. The actions of the police during this time period are very unsettling and even disrupt the preconceived notion of what the genocide was actually akin to in our original thoughts. The reserve policemen’s position needs to be examined in further detail to understand this.
These policemen were not really members of the Nazi party or working with the SS. They had not been swayed into killing by any means; they were comprised of many married men with families. They would be considered closely with the ordinary, everyday German (Longerich, 116).
However, when they were asked to kill and massacre Jewish men, women, and children, they committed the atrocity without hesitation, even though they were allowed several chances to turn down the offer to kill these innocent people. It could be believed that these policemen never would have thought of committing such a horrible act discovered that they were inspired to do so by the peer pressure they were experiencing from both within and the outside. If the men decided not to kill, under the predispositions of the time, they may have felt they were refusing a very important obligation.
Once they had killed and gotten the first time out of the way, they would be called to kill under the same circumstances again and again, and would more than likely grow cold and emotionless when committing the act (Browning, 167).
Conclusion
However, it could be enumerated that, these policemen were killed with the fanatical cruelty they exhibited because this was part of their ingrained cognitive structure. Basically, these men were predisposed to believing this was okay because they had been culturally and intrinsically brought up to share a common hatred of the Jewish people. This means that their cultural framework allowed them to commit the act, not any response to peer pressure. Such were the ruthless methods of the Nazi chiefs. The meticulous parameters of the Nazi chiefs show the aspects Holocaust in a new light. A light that exposes the weakness of common human beings could be motivated to act on the heinous crime like genocide, in this case, the “Final Solution.
References
Baumslag, Naomi. Murderous Medicine — Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus. London: Praeger Publishers, Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2005.
Browning, Christopher R. The Origins of the Final Solution. London: William Heinemann, 2004.
Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Longerich, Peter. The Unwritten Order — Hitler’s Role in The Final Solution. Stroud: Tempus Publishing Limited, 2003.