Persecution Of Jews In Nazi Germany

10 Pages 2394 Words

ically. The government was forced to sign a peace agreement, the Versailles Treaty which stated Germany must accept full responsibility for the war. There were many terms in the Treaty which Germany deemed unacceptable because they were a nation which believed in its own myth of superiority. Many Germans convinced themselves that there was no way they could have lost had they not been ¡§stabbed in the back¡¨ by traitors in their midst. These ¡§traitors¡¨ were the Jews and the Communists.
Unemployment soared. Many people were hungry, out of work, humiliated, and worried about their future. New political movements emerged. These promised new solutions but also contained seeds of an old and cruel fiction. One political group was the National Socialist German Workers which slowly expanded and became the Nazi party.
In their efforts to find others to blame, an ideology took hold in which the German people would ultimately target the Jews as the source of their misery. The Nazis took this much further. They believed the Germans were ¡§racially superior¡¨ and the struggle was for their survival rather than that of the ¡§inferior race¡¨, the Jews. The Jews were a threat to the purity of the ¡§Aryan Race¡¨ or the ¡§Master Race¡¨ of blonde haired, blue eyed Germans.
The Nazis used the Jews as scapegoats for Germany¡¦s problems. Adolf Hitler was a major activist in this group. In November of 1923 he tried to take over Munich in the ¡§BeerHall Putsch¡¨ but this attempt failed and he was imprisoned. In prison he wrote ¡§ Mein Kampf¡¨ which outlined his master plan and how the ¡§lower races¡¨ were the ¡§Enemy Races¡¨. This came from the ideas of eugenics written about by Rosenburg at the end of the 19th century and which influenced many of the Nazis. Hitler advocated the sterilization of the mentally and physically challenged so they should not be able to have children. He also expressed the desire to...