The Holocaust: A Warning From History

While serving his prison sentence for his failed beer hall putsch, Adolf Hitler made some adjustments to "world-view."  By Ian Kershaw Ideas which had been taking shape in his mind since late 1922, if not earlier, on the direction of future foreign policy were now elaborated into the notion of a quest for "living space," to be gained at the expense of Russia. Blended into his obsessive antisemitism, aimed at the destruction of "Jewish Bolshevism," the concept of a war for "living space" -- an idea which Hitler would repeatedly emphasize in the following years -- rounded off his "world view." Thereafter, there would be tactical adjustments, but no further alteration of substance. The modifications in Hitler's "world-view" that were already forming in the year before the putsch are clearly evident in Mein Kampf . Hitler's book offered nothing new. But it was the plainest and most expansive statement of his "world vi...

On January 8, 2025, in an essay for the Atlantic titled "How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days," historian Timothy W. Ryback, the director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, described the process by which Hitler dismantled Germany's constitutional republic in just 53 days. What follows are excerpts from that essay: Ninety-two years ago, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time -- specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered. Hans Frank served as Hitler’...

What follows are excerpts from Richard J. Evans' book   The Coming of the Third Reich : The Nazi assault on the Jews in the first months of 1933 was the first step in a longer-term process of removing them from German society. By the summer of 1933 this process was well under way. It was the core of Hitler's cultural revolution, the key, in the Nazi mind, to the wider cultural transformation of Germany that was to purge the German spirit of "alien" influences such as communism, Marxism, socialism, liberalism, pacifism, conservatism, artistic experimentation, sexual freedom and much more besides. All of these influences were ascribed to by the Nazis to the malign influence of the Jews, despite massive evidence to the contrary. Excluding Jews from the economy, from the media, from state employment and from the professions was thus an essential part of the process of redeeming and purifying the German race, and preparing it to wreak its revenge on those who had humiliate...