-As the leader of the Nazi Party, Hitler gave numerous politically charged speeches during which he blamed Germany’s Jewish population for the nation’s turmoil following World War I. He asserted that German Jews sought to control the Weimar Republic, the post-war government. He also claimed that they had influenced the Weimar Republic to accept the Treaty of Versailles which significantly limited the nation’s military power and demanded $33 billion in reparations for World War I. During a 1922 speech in Munich, Hitler proclaimed “There are only two possibilities, either victory of the Aryan or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.”
While in prison for the failed coup d’état of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf. Democrats, communists and internationalists are all targets in this narrative, but it targeted the Jews most bitterly. He declared that the highest racial purity was that of the German people, making them the master race and thus responsible for the elimination of all Jewish people. In this book, Hitler’s proclamations about Jews overtly shifted from those of deportation to murder. Further, he wrote extensively in support of the dismantling of democracy. Before the start of World War II, people purchased more than five million copies.
In 1933, the same year that Hitler assumed total power, concentration camps arose in Germany. Suspected enemies of the Nazi Party faced imprisonment at the camps, the first of which was Dachau. Political opponents, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals comprised the initial target population. Following 1938, Hitler’s forces filled the camps with Jewish prisoners, simply because they were Jews.
Hitler outlawed youth groups like the Boy Scouts and required all non-Jewish boys in Germany to join his Hitler Youth Organization. Through this group, the Nazi Party held the power to condition over 90 percent of Germany’s young men. The boys faced military-like training in weaponry and survival while fostering an almost religious devotion to Hitler. Following years of indoctrination, boys at the age of 17 had to serve in the military.
In 1935, Hitler enacted the Nuremberg Laws which stripped Jewish populations in Germany of their citizenship and banned marriage between Jews and Germans. Many consider these laws the foundation on which Hitler built the ensuing internment and murder of the German Jews. The passing of the Nuremberg Laws legalized the persecution of Jewish people as a part of Hitler’s Final Solution.
On the nights of November 9 and 10 in 1938, German mobs took to the streets to attack Jews, destroying their homes and workplaces as well as burning synagogues. This event, called Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, led to the murder of 96 Jews and the burning of between 1,000 and 2,000 places of worship. Hitler and his administration both introduced the propaganda leading to this riot and offered encouragement for the mobs to continue their harassment. The administration later held Jews financially responsible for the damages incurred during these events.
In early 1939, the Nazi Party secretly began the Child Euthanasia Program under which it murdered disabled children by lethal drug overdoses and starvation. Later that year, the program, shifting to the name Operation T4, extended to target disabled adults who faced murder by gas chamber. Hitler authorized all phases of the Nazi Party’s euthanasia efforts in order to “cleanse” Germany’s Aryan race, leading to the deaths of at least 250,000 physically and mentally disabled people. The infamous use of gas chambers at Hitler’s extermination camps originates from this program.
Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Hitler began a campaign of anti-Jewish propaganda in order to concentrate Poland’s Jewish populations into areas called ghettos. Nazis propagated the idea that Jews carried diseases like typhus and thus required isolation. Ghettos suffered overcrowding and were cold, unsanitary and largely lacked in terms of food.
To facilitate the Final Solution, Hitler authorized the implementation of Jewish extermination camps in 1941. Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau comprised the six camps intended only for the sole purpose of murder. Between 1942 and 1943, Hitler’s Nazi Party attempted to destroy these camps in order to conceal its abhorrent actions from Allied forces.
With the loss inevitable to the Allied forces, Hitler and his frenzied party began recruiting thousands of young men, even those below the 17-year-old age requirement, to fight losing battles. Recruiters offered the children chocolates and candy in exchange for their lives. Thousands died in combat from lack of experience and training while others’ States executed them for refusing to fight.
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