The Holocaust: A Warning From History

Germany and Russia stunned the world on August 24, 1939, by announcing that they had agreed to a non-aggression pact. The pact was seen as the death warrant for any prospect of alliance with Britain and France. The British and French had been seeking a mutual assistance treaty for more than four months.  The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, colloquially named after Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the "Treaty of Non-aggression between the Third German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and signed in Moscow in the early hours of August 24, 1939 (but dated August 23). It was a Non-Aggression Pact between the two countries and pledged neutrality by either party if the other were attacked by a third party. Each signatory promised not to join any grouping of powers that was "directly or indirectly aimed at the other party." The Soviet Union had been unable to reach a ...

By Robert Leckie The year 1938 was fateful for Europe and the world. Only nineteen year previously Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain had warned his Versailles colleagues of the folly of ringing Germany with small buffer states, some of them with no experience of self-government, all of them containing large masses of Germans. Here was the racial tie, like an unseverable umbilical cord, with which Hitler might draw these states inside his Third Reich, and in 1938 he began to seize it to launch his program of Anschluss , or annexation. The techniques would become familiar. Nazi agents inside the target countries were to excite the Anschluss aspirations of the German communities, to undermine the existing government, with no small assistance from German radio broadcasts, and to create the crisis that would give Hitler his excuse for the takeover. Hitler had tried a coup in Austria three years earlier, when about 150 Austrian Nazis in army uniforms invaded the Chancellery, murd...

Ludwig August Theodor Beck was a German general who served as Chief of the German General Staff from 1933 to 1938. He had no moral objection to the idea of a war of aggression to eliminate Czechoslovakia as a state. However, Beck felt that Germany needed more time to rearm before starting such a war. In Beck's assessment, the earliest date Germany could risk a war was 1940, and any war that was started in 1938 would be a "premature war" that Germany would lose. Most of the generals felt that the idea of starting a war in 1938 was highly risky, but none of them would confront Hitler with a refusal to carry out orders since most of them thought that Beck's arguments against war in 1938 were flawed. In a June 1938 General Staff study, Beck concluded that Germany could defeat Czechoslovakia but that to do so would leave western Germany empty of troops, which could allow the French to seize the Rhineland with little difficulty. Beck maintained that Czechoslovak defenses we...

"In war," writes Ian Kershaw, "Nazism came into its own. The Nazi Movement had been born out of a lost war. As with Hitler personally, the experience of that war and erasing the stain of that defeat were at its heart. 'National renewal' and preparations for another war to establish the dominance in Europe which the first great war had failed to attain drove it forwards. The new war not brought the circumstances and opportunities for the dramatic radicalization of Nazism's ideological crusade. Long-term goals seemed almost overnight to become attainable policy objectives. Persecution which had targeted usually disliked social minorities was now directed at an entire conquered and subjugated people. The Jews, a tiny proportion of the German population were not only far more numerous in Poland, but were despised by many within their native land and were now the lowest of the low in the eyes of the brutal occupiers of the country." But I am getting ahead of ...

The open brutality of the November Pogrom, the round up and incarceration of some 30,000 Jews that followed, and the draconian measures to force Jews out of the economy had, as is made clear by Goebbels' diary entries, all been explicitly approved by Hitler, even if the initiatives had come from others even, above all, the propaganda minister. himself. When Hitler had consented to Goebbels' suggestion to "let the demonstrations continue," Hitler knew full well what those "demonstrations" amounted to. Still, during the days that followed, the Führer took care to remain equivocal, neither praising Goebbels or what had happened, nor condemning the "actions" either in public or private. Goebbels believed that his policy against the Jews met with Hitler's full support. It seems, however, that the Führer was embarrassed when it became clear to him that the pogrom he had approved was meeting with condemnation, even in the highest circles of the regime...

The propaganda line that "Crystal Night" was a spontaneous expression of anger by the people was believed by no one. "The public knows to the last man," the party's own court later admitted, "that political actions like that of 9 November are organized and carried about by the party, whether this is admitted or not. If all the synagogues burn down in a single night, that has somehow to be organized, and can only be organized by the party." Ordinary citizens, affected by the climate of hatred and propaganda appealing to base instincts, motivated too by sheer material envy and greed, nevertheless followed the party's lead in many places and joined in the destruction and looting of Jewish property. Sometimes individuals regarded as the pillars of their communities were involved. At the same time, there is no doubt that many ordinary people were appalled at what met them when they emerged on the morning of 10 November. There was a mixture of motives; s...