The Holocaust: A Warning From History

The German Blitzkrieg into Poland in September 1939 involved three elements of air power. First, air attacks destroyed much of the Polish air force while it was still on the ground. Second, bombers hit road and rail communications, assembly areas and munitions dumps. Third, fighters and dive bombers attacked columns of Polish troops as well civilian refugees. On September 2, the Luftwaffe conducted air raids on Warsaw, Gydinia and many other towns. In Warsaw a hospital for Jewish children was bombed. The railway station in Kolo was hit and 111 people were killed, many of them refugees from border towns. Adolf Hitler's aim in Poland was more than just the conquering of territory, he also sought to impose German rule on Poland. To achieve the latter aim, three regiments of SS Death's Head troops were to follow the army's advance and conduct "police and security" operations. The SS were ordered to "incarcerate or annihilate" every enemy of Nazism. Whole vil...

Clemens Augustinus Emmanuel Joseph Pius Anthonius Hubertus Marie Graf von Galen (16 March 1878 – 22 March 1946), better known as Clemens August Graf von Galen, was a German count, Bishop of Münster, and cardinal of the Catholic Church. During World War II, Galen led Catholic protests against Nazi euthanasia and denounced Gestapo lawlessness and the persecution of the Church in Nazi Germany. He was appointed a cardinal by Pope Pius XII in 1946, shortly before his death. After serving in Berlin parishes from 1906 to 1929, he became the pastor of Münster's St. Lamberti Church, where he was noted for his political conservatism before being appointed Bishop of Münster in 1933. Galen began to criticize Hitler's movement in 1934. He condemned the Nazi "worship of race" in a pastoral letter on 29 January 1934, and assumed responsibility for the publication of a collection of essays which fiercely criticized Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and defended the teachings of the Ca...

The wartime atmosphere fostered new programs that would make large a contribution to the technology of the Final Solution. A number of these involved the quiet killing of mental patients and deformed children -- "useless eaters," in the Nazi vernacular -- usually with poison gas and lethal injections. The Fuhrer had personally taken the lead in this program in 1938 when he received a request from the father of a deformed child asking that the child be put to death. Hitler wrote a letter to the parents concurring in their request for the action. He asked his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to attend to the matter. In early 1939, the government established the Reich Committee for Scientific Research of Hereditary and Severe Constitutional Diseases. Its function was to organize the killing of deformed and retarded children. Committee experts asked doctors, midwives and hospital administrators to notify them of eligible children. Then the committee established special children...

In the spring of 1938, after the Anschluss in Austria, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt undertook a conspicuous but feeble rescue program to try and resettle overseas victims of the German Nazi party, both Jews and Christians. The President been under pressure from Jewish leaders as well as notable publicists such as Dorothy Thompson and the Anschluss focused attention on the plight of Jews in Austria. Roosevelt wanted to aid the Jews, but his hands were tied by both Congress and the American people. If there was less of the virulent anti-Semitism in America that was exhibited in Europe, there was still plenty of prejudice, which led to exclusions of Jews from some residential neighborhoods, resorts, and clubs, and also made it difficult to obtain work in some occupations. In the 1920s, many of the elite colleges and universities had instituted quotas. The opposition to admitting refugees into the United States was very strong in 1938. It was believed the refugees would compete for ...

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, many Jews within Germany decided that it was time to leave. Though many German Jews had emigrated in the preceding years, the Jews who remained had a more difficult time leaving the country because emigration policies had been toughened. By 1939, not only were visas needed to be able to enter another country but money was also needed to leave Germany. Since many countries, especially the United States, had immigration quotas, visas were near impossible to acquire within the short time spans in which they were needed. For many, the visas were acquired after it was too late. On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba. On the voyage were 937 passengers. Almost all were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich. Most were German citizens, some were from eastern Europe, and a few were officially "stateless." The majority of the Jewish passengers had applied for US visas, and had planned to ...

On the night of November 7, 1938, a Jewish refugee in Paris named Herschel Grynzpan, angered by the Nazis' maltreatment of his parents, entered the German embassy and shot Ernst von Rath, a minor German diplomat. Rath died two days later, his demise coinciding with nationwide party celebrations commemorating the Nazis killed during the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Orders went out from party headquarters instructing local leaders to mount violent demonstrations against Jews and Jewish businesses. Using the mass-communication facilities at his disposal, Joseph Goebbels exhorted Germans to express their righteous indignation over the murder of Rath by the Jew Grynzpan Throughout the Reich, mobs of Nazis smashed the windows of synagogues and stores owned by Jews, leaving the streets and sidewalks littered with glass shards that gave the night its poetic name --  Kristallnacht , or Crystal Night. Nearly 100 Jews were killed, and thousands more were beaten up and tormented. The Nazi gangs had ...

When Hitler began preaching anti-Semitism, he might have taken his text from 16th century German theologian Martin Luther, who in railing against many groups that opposed his new church declared that the Jews were "like a plague, pestilence, pure misfortune." Luther charged: "They let us work in the sweat of our noses, to earn money and property for them, while they sit behind the oven, lazy, let off gas, bake pears, eat, drink, live softly and well from our wealth." Actually, Martin Luther's anti-Semitism -- and German anti-Semitism for generations after him -- differed little in kind from anti-Semitism anywhere else in Europe. But the ancient prejudice seemed to grow stronger in Germany in the early 19th century with the rise of nationalism; in fact, in Germany the two often inter-meshed. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte was perhaps the first to link the two ideas. In the face of Napoleon's devastating occupation, which began in 1805, Fichte solaced ...