Hitler and the Holocaust:

The depraved mind of a mass killer

By N. Kumarakuruparan

Muranow was once the Jewish neighbourhood of Warsaw in Poland. During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, the Nazis turned Muranow into the largest cordoned-off ghetto in Europe. Before the war Warsaw was the home for more than 300,000 Jews. When the Germans occupied Poland, Jews were deported to the Treblinka death camp, where most of them were killed in the gas chambers.

Thousand of people, Jews and Gentiles alike, passed through these death camps during the war, but only a small percentage survived to tell the story. Those thousands of people arrived at Treblinka and Auschwiz death camps in trainload after trainload, men, women and children alike crushed in a human mass inside cattle wagons.

Some were already dead when the trains arrived in the camps; victims of the harsh, crowded conditions inside the wagons. Others suffering from thirst, malnutrition and diseases, were dying when they arrived.

For them the terrible journey would end shortly after arrival. The rest of the victims were marked for doom either at hard labour, or in one of the gas chambers. Most of them were dead by nightfall on the day that they arrived. Treblinka originally a work camp, became a death camp in 1942 and was used especially to eliminate the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. The opening of the death camps heralded a new phase to the 'final solution,' The extermination of Jews.

Murder was no longer a brutal action against innocents, it was an institutionalised, organised operation. Not all Jews were submissive to Nazi tyranny. Many resisted.

Jewish resistance fighters defied Germans in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which was crushed on May 16, 1943. On that fateful day Germans blew up the Synagogue of Warsaw. It was the symbolic end of the now famous Warsaw uprising.

Hitler's plan

Brutality was Hitler's plan for Poland from the very beginning. With the invasion of Poland came the first Nazi murder squads.

It was in Poland, however, that the Nazi murder squads added a new dimension to their activities; wholesale, organised murder. Hitler's advice to them was "close your hearts to pity... act brutally" The result was the holocaust, the mass murder of Jews in thousands.

The holocaust was a crime of such enormity that it was labelled 'crime with no name'. It was a crime of such stunning proportions that human language fails utterly in its description.

The seven years of the holocaust (1938-1945) were a period during which the most civilised nation in history Germany embarked on a premeditated campaign to exterminate one of the oldest nations in history - the Jewish people. This event has been called a 'crime without equal' that is "......... something beyond the imagination of mankind".

The Nazi demagogue Adolf Hitler graduated during these years from thuggery to mass slaughter.

Some people now believe that World War II was started because Hitler needed the chaos of total war to conceal his longstanding plans for the 'final solution to the Jewish problem'. More than 52,000,000 people died because of the war; in the crusible of total global conflict the Nazis exterminated more than 5,700,000 of the 8,300,000 Jews who lived in pre-war Europe.

More than two-thirds of European Jewry - 35 percent of the world Jewish population - died at the hands of Nazi killers.

The Nazi crimes against the Jews were neither the mindless spasm of a people at war, nor a calculated response to the exigencies of total mortal conflict.

The holocaust was a pre-meditated plan in the making for almost three decades!

The plan which had been conceived in the sick mind of a youthful Hitler came to maturity in the anxious and chaotic days of post World War 1 Germany. It was put forth in the early 1920s in speeches, pamphlets, newspaper articles and in Hitler's personal letters.

Hitler had claimed as early as 1919 that he would eradicate the Jewish people of Germany. People who knew Hitler personally agree that his primary personality trait was unparalleled consistency in everything that he said or did.

It is not necessary to explain milder forms of European anti-Semitism than Hitler's, for Central Europe of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was rife with Jew-hatred. But this climate, vile as it was, does not fully explain the hyper-virulent anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler.

Assimilation

In Hitler's native Austria the Jewish population had come close to assimilation and did not stand out as being different nearly as much as did the Jews in the eastern European nations.

In fact, one of the reasons why Nazi hatred so confused and disoriented German and Austrian Jewry is that many of them considered themselves Germans or Austrians of the Jewish faith; they were Germans first and Jews second in many cases.

So, where do we look for clues to Hitler's anti-Semitism? Some scholars would have believe that it developed after World War I when it became popular in Germany to blame the Jews for Germany's defeat in the war. Hitler jumped on an anti-Semitic bandwagon in an excess gush of scapegoatism, but Hitler's anti-Semitism was nurtured by a series of interwoven events and forces. In a man who was so filled with hatred, it is not at all surprising to find that his personal anti-Semitism was brought to such a pinnacle of viciousness.

Emotional traumas

There were two emotional traumas that served to exacerbate in young Hitler's anti-Semitic feelings that were considered 'Normal' in Europe around the turn of the century; the death and disfigurement of his mother by a Jewish surgeon who treated her for cancer, and his own rejection by supposedly Jewish officials at the art school in Vienna as if throwing fuel on a fire. The anti-Semitic activities of certain well-known Jew haters of the era fanned Hitler's flaming hatred and served to conceal his half-formed visceral ideas.

Indeed very few-perhaps none of the racial ideas later expressed by Hitler were original, or even significantly altered by him. Almost all of his principal racial and political ideas were put forth by those vitriolic pamphleteers of pre-World War 1 Vienna.

Therefore, there is no mystery as to where Hitler picked up his anti-Semitism. This particular form of hatred has a long history in Europe specially in central Europe, with Jews as the traditional scapegoat for calamity of every kind - economic collapse and military defeat. Moreover, and more specific significance, late in the 19th century an influential school of thought developed that sought to define a racial basis for the German nation. If the Germans were a superior race, then there had to be a inferior race-so went the argument. Thus degradation of Jews became a compulsory part of German self-identification.

Anti-Semitism

This pervasive anti-Semitism suited Hitler on a personal level. The couse of his anti-Semitism can be tracked from a generalising attitude to political policy and then to mass murder. Fanaticism, hate and lunacy were the hallmarks of Hitler's political philosophy.

Historian Robert G.L. Waite writes, "the horror of Hitler is this: he meant what he said". The Nazi superman who sent millions of humans to death was a beast with very little spiritual light in his eyes, a man who could (and did!) carry out the most heinous crimes on humanity. What is intriguing here is in many instances the organised churches in Europe particularly in Germany remained silent in the face of Nazi outrages.

It is not difficult to see the holocaust as the most depraved period of man's history. As did Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost, a whole people - a cultured and intelligent people-declared "Evil thou my good".It was a time when acts that would normally be condemned as evil and Satanic were hallowed as 'good' and even 'righteous' men who would have been decent people in another time or another place set Satan on the throne and inverted good and evil.

Hitler's life is an enigma that remains shrouded in mystery even decades after scholars and psychologists have done their best to enligten us.

Every time one thinks that one understands Hitler's personality, some other facet of him surfaces to confuse the picture and once again muddies the waters. Hitler was a product of his time. The lesson the mankind learns from Nazi history is it would be foolish to ignore the potential for evil that exists in all populations and institutions. If we are not alert we will learn it at our own peril.