Why was Hitler so cruel? Personal attitude towards Jews

The Holocaust is the systematic persecution and mass extermination by the Nazis of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, the mentally ill and other people considered inferior according to the concepts of “racial hygiene”. The beginning of the Holocaust is associated with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, and the end with the end of World War II in 1945. The word "holocaust" comes from the ancient Greek "burnt offering." In the Jewish tradition, the events of 1933–1945 are usually called the Shoah, translated from Hebrew as “disaster”, “catastrophe”.

1. How many people died during the Holocaust?

There is no exact figure, but most often they say about 5 or 6 million killed. The number is based on a comparison of the Jewish population before and after the war and is confirmed by most studies. It also appears in the verdicts of the Nuremberg trials and is named by the head of the Gestapo department, Adolf Eichmann.

When was the last time you saw Eichmann? - At the end of February 1945 in Berlin. He said then that if the war was lost, he would commit suicide. - Did he then name the total number of Jews who were killed? - Yes, he spoke very cynically then. He said that he would jump into his grave with a smile, because he was especially pleased to know that he was responsible for about 5 million people

From the transcript of the interrogation of Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's assistant, at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg on January 3, 1946

There is no complete list of victims by name. The Israeli Holocaust memorial complex Yad Vashem has collected personal information about 4.5 million victims.

6 million is 30% of the total number of Jews in the world who lived at the beginning of World War II, and 2/3 of the pre-war Jewish population of Europe.

2. Why did the Nazis exterminate Jews?

Germany emerged from the First World War defeated and disappointed. Under the Treaty of Versailles, the country lost a tenth of its lands, almost its entire army and navy. Cash payments to the victorious countries led to economic crisis and poverty. To ordinary citizens, all this seemed unfair. The Nazis took advantage of the discontent. They came to power by playing on the desire of the Germans to return to the pre-war greatness of the German Empire.

German writers and publicists sang the heroism of the soldiers and blamed the weak rear for the defeat. And the Jews, who allegedly spread defeatist sentiments. Jews were portrayed as the culprits of all the troubles in Germany.

The ideology of National Socialism was built around the theme of the historical struggle between the Aryan and Semitic nations. It was believed that the goal of the Jews was to seize world domination, which, accordingly, was a threat to Aryan domination.

The theory fit into the doctrine of eugenics - the science of combating the degeneration of the human gene pool, popular in those years in Germany. The first German textbook on genetics spoke of the existence of “worse” people with low levels of mental development, who reproduce much faster than the “highest” representatives of humanity. Not only Jews, but also the French, Gypsies, and Slavs were considered inferior. As well as disabled people and homosexuals.

3. What is Kristallnacht?

“The Night of Broken Glass,” or “Kristallnacht,” was the name given to the pogrom of Jewish shops and businesses in Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938. This was the first mass act of physical violence of the Third Reich against Jews, and it is also called the beginning of the Holocaust.

Official propaganda presented the pogrom as a spontaneous riot. In fact, the operation was planned by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and carried out by storm troops subordinate to the regime.

The reason for the pogrom was the murder of the German diplomat von Rath in Paris by 17-year-old Jew Herschel Grynszpan. Grynszpan took revenge for his parents deported to Poland (“Zbonshchinsky incident”). In his farewell letter, he wrote: “I must protest so that the whole world knows about it.”

The authorities prohibited Jews from putting out fires and demanded compensation for all damage caused by the pogrom. The fine to the Jewish community (officially compensation for the death of von Rath) amounted to 1 billion Reichsmarks. For comparison, the budget of the Third Reich for 1938 was 99 billion Reichsmarks.

The Holocaust became a “branch of the national economy” that brought enormous profits. Between 1933 and 1938 alone, as a result of the expulsion of Jews and the "forced Aryanization" of businesses, Jewish families lost half of their assets - 6 billion Reichsmarks.

Yuri Kanner

In November 1941, a law was passed according to which all movable and immovable property of Jews in Germany and abroad was confiscated in favor of the Third Reich. “According to the international organization Claims Conference, the total value of Jewish property stolen by the Nazis ranged from 215 to 400 billion dollars in terms of 2005 prices,” says Yuri Kanner.

4. Why didn't the Jews leave Europe when they were persecuted?

In July 1938, US President F. D. Roosevelt convened the Evian Conference to decide how to help Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's regime. Of the 32 countries that took part in the conference, only the Dominican Republic gave consent to the entry of a large number of emigrants. Other countries said they had already done everything possible and, citing their own internal problems, refused to revise migration quotas.

The conditions for Jewish migration to the United States were so strict that 1,244,858 quotas remained unused.

Between 1933 and 1939, 404,809 Jews emigrated from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. By 1943, the number of refugees had increased to 811,000. Under the Kindertransport program, Britain allowed 10,000 Jewish children without parents to enter the country in December 1938. But the St. Louis liner, carrying 937 Jewish refugees, had to return to Europe after Cuba and the United States refused to allow them to disembark. This event was called “The Voyage of the Doomed.”

5. What does the phrase “final solution to the Jewish question” mean?

In government documents, the Nazis often used code or neutral words to disguise what was actually happening. For example, SS officers called the extermination of the disabled population in the ghetto “actions,” and deportation to death camps “relocation.”

“Final Solution” is another euphemism that implies the mass extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe. Adolf Hitler first used this phrase in 1919 in a letter to one of the commanders of the German army. It was actively used at the Wannsee Conference of 1942, where the Nazi leadership decided how to organize the mass deportation of Jews to death camps.

6. Why did the Nazis create ghettos?

In 1939, Hitler proposed isolating Jews in fenced-off city blocks. This was another way to ruin the Jewish population and create a source of cheap, essentially slave labor.

The first Jewish ghettos were created in Nazi-occupied Poland in late 1939 and early 1940. The largest Warsaw ghetto in history appeared in November 1940. Formally, it was created to protect the non-Jewish population from infectious diseases that Jews allegedly carried. 113,000 Poles were evicted from the area declared a quarantine zone and 138,000 Jews were resettled there.

In total, according to various estimates, from 800 to 1,150 ghettos were created in the lands occupied by the Nazis. They held at least 1 million people. The ghettos were overcrowded, people were starving, suffering from cold and disease. Attempts to smuggle food from outside were punishable by execution. When moving to the ghetto, you were allowed to take only personal belongings with you.

7. How were concentration camps different from death camps?

Concentration camps were primarily prisons and penal servitudes. The first concentration camp was created in 1933 in Dachau; initially political prisoners and enemies of the Nazi regime were sent here. Since 1938, after Kristallnacht, people began to be sent to concentration camps only for their nationality.

In 1941, the Nazis began building camps specifically designed for the mass extermination of people. There were six of them in total. The first death camp was Chelmno. Three more, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, were built as part of Operation Reinhard, the code name for the Third Reich's government program to exterminate Jews and Gypsies. The largest camp is Auschwitz.

In the death camps, people were shot, poisoned with exhaust gases and Zyklon B gas, and lethal medical experiments were performed on them.

According to holocaustchronicle.org

The extermination of Jews was carried out using an industrial method. Zyklon B gas was supplied to Auschwitz by Degesch, which received 300 thousand marks of profit from this. Physically strong prisoners were forced to work. The average income from the labor of one prisoner was 1,631 Reichsmark. All the victims' valuables were selected and carefully accounted for. In Auschwitz, 1,185,345 men's and women's suits, 43,255 pairs of shoes, and 13,694 carpets were discovered. 2,000 tons of women's hair were found at the Schaeffler textile factory. They served as material for fabric from which work clothes were made.

Yuri Kanner President of the Russian Jewish Congress

8. Were Jews exterminated only in camps and ghettos?

No. In the territories captured by the Nazis, Einsatzgruppen, or “death squads,” operated—military reconnaissance groups and mobile extermination squads. In Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the USSR there were four of them - groups under the letters A, B, C, and D.

The Einsatzgruppen hunted down the “enemies of Nazism” - Jews, gypsies, communists, members of the resistance movement. They were arrested to be moved to a ghetto or sent to a concentration camp. Or they were driven into mines and ravines, and then shot. Sometimes the Sonderkommandos were equipped with gas chambers - machines with devices for poisonous gas.

By the spring of 1943, the Einsatzgruppen had killed 1.25 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of other “enemies.” One of the mass executions took place in the town of Babi Yar in the northwestern part of Kyiv. According to various estimates, from 1941 to 1943, from 33 to 200 thousand Jews, Gypsies and prisoners of war were shot here. The executions were carried out by Sonderkommando 4A.

9. Did the Germans know about the extermination of the Jews? What about other countries?

The Nazis deliberately incited racial hatred. Everyone knew about boycotts and pogroms of Jewish stores, discrimination, and the existence of the ghetto.

But information about concentration camps and especially death camps was not disclosed; mass killings as part of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” were strictly classified. The camps were camouflaged, and the participants in the operations received strict instructions to keep everything in the strictest confidence. However, the information went beyond the camps. Those living nearby saw trains with people arriving and smelled burning bodies.

Since the summer of 1941, British intelligence had been intercepting secret German police reports. The British Prime Minister stated in August 1941:

German troops are literally killing hundreds of thousands of people. We are present at a crime that does not even have a name.

Winston Churchill

Polish resistance member Jan Karski infiltrated the Warsaw ghetto and the Izbica Lubelska ghetto in 1942, whose prisoners were sent to death camps. When he returned, he met with the heads of Great Britain and the United States to report personally what he had seen. His words were treated with distrust - information about living conditions in the ghettos and death camps was considered exaggerated.

In December 1942, the Allies issued a declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews. But no action, including an increase in the migration quota, was forthcoming from Great Britain and the United States.

11. What is denazification?

At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the leaders of the countries that won World War II determined a new political and territorial structure for Germany. The principle of the “four Ds”, according to which the post-war life of the country was to be built, presupposed demilitarization, democratization, decentralization and denazification, that is, the cleansing of society and political institutions from Nazism.

The USSR, Great Britain, the USA and France divided Germany into zones in which they pursued their policies. Denazification in the British and American zones proceeded smoothly. Each adult German filled out a 130-point questionnaire, based on the answers to which the degree of his guilt was determined. Without a mark on filling out the questionnaire, they did not issue food cards and did not hire people. 25 million questionnaires were completed. Some 248,000 people were laid off from public employment and business.

In the Soviet zone, denazification was more severe: 520 thousand people were removed from their posts, 150 thousand former Nazis were exiled to special NKVD camps, 17 thousand were convicted by a military tribunal, 25 thousand people were deported to Poland.

In total, approximately 245,000 people were arrested in the three zones. Of these, 100,000 were released already in 1947.

12. Who are the Righteous Among the Nations?

All non-Jews who unselfishly risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust are given the title of Righteous Among the Nations under the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Law. The Garden and Alley in the Jerusalem memorial Yad Vashem are dedicated to the righteous.

The most famous Righteous One is Oskar Schindler, a German businessman from Krakow who saved about 1,200 people. An employee of the Warsaw Health Department, Irena Sendler, took 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg prevented the destruction of the Budapest ghetto before the advance of the Red Army.

The title of Righteous One was awarded to 197 Russian citizens. These are only those cases of heroism that Yad Vashem is aware of. Now there are 6 people left alive.

13. What is Holocaust revisionism?

Revisionism, or Holocaust denial, is a movement whose supporters deny the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis during World War II. Revisionists try to prove that gas chambers and death camps did not exist, government documents attesting to the Holocaust were forged, and the number of victims was inflated. The thesis is often put forward that the Holocaust was invented by Jews to extort money from Germany.

Holocaust denial is promoted by neo-Nazis as a way to rehabilitate Nazism and absolve it of blame for the deaths of millions of people. This movement is supported by some Arab states that dispute with Israel over territory.

Revisionism does not find support either among professional scientists or among states in general. Laws specifically prohibiting public denial, downplaying, approval or justification of crimes committed by the Nazis have been passed in 18 European countries. A UN resolution condemning any denial of the Holocaust was supported by 103 states in 2007. The Holocaust is one of the most documented and studied events in history. Many German government documents, films and photographs, memories and memoirs have been preserved - both from the Nazis and from their victims. There are at least 200 thousand scientific monographs on the Holocaust; more than 100 thousand works have been published on the Auschwitz concentration camp alone.

Yu. Mukhin

A couple of years ago, regarding the creation of an electronic version of my book “The Katyn Detective”, a Swedish independent journalist met with me. From him I first heard that there are people calling themselves “revisionists” who are trying to prove that Hitler’s Germany did not exterminate Jews. I won’t lie, at the time it seemed so nonsense to me that I simply moved the conversation to another topic. And subsequently, the proposals of some readers to engage in an audit of the Holocaust - the extermination of Jews in World War II - did not arouse my enthusiasm. Why?

When I was about eight years old, I was sent to spend the summer with my uncle in a village near Krivoy Rog. My uncle was disabled and worked on a collective farm as a driver of a postal cart (bedarka). Every day he drove it to the regional center to get the mail. Out of boredom, I asked him to go on a whole day trip several times. One day he showed me a whip in the field and said that in that place the Germans shot so many Jews that when the peasants came to look and stepped on the ground of fresh graves, the tracks were filled with blood. Of course, it was hyperbole, but I think that’s what made me remember this fact for the rest of my life. I didn’t know who the Jews were, but when we took the horse into the pond halfway to drink, its hooves pressed through the muddy bank, the tracks filled with water, and I clearly imagined how they could fill with blood. If there had been no execution of Jews, then why would my uncle tell me, a young boy, about this?

After all, we are residents of the USSR, we don’t even need to read books about the extermination of Jews by the Germans. We have so many eyewitnesses that even if you don’t want to know about it, you will still find out, and not even from the Jews. In fact, even in the mail of our newspaper, the newspaper is clearly not for fanatics, 30 percent of letters are from people fixated on some idea, and among them 10 percent are clearly mentally abnormal. And among politicians there are plenty of them. Let's say that Gaidar completely ruined the Russian economy, and look at the way he gives interviews. It’s as if a real economist is Napoleon’s friend. What is Novodvorskaya worth?

Therefore, I was not surprised by the appearance of the fact of revisionism: what else should the world expect after the complete victory of Zionism almost throughout the world?
But not so long ago I bought a thin book (I bought it precisely because it was thin) by Jürgen Graf “The Myth of the Holocaust” and realized that on this issue I was too self-confident. The question turns out to be much more complicated.

What do they want

Revisionists do not try to prove to the world that Jews were not persecuted in Nazi Germany or that there were no casualties among them during the war. They are trying to draw the world's attention to the fact that the Nazis did not specifically destroy the Jews as a nation, did not pursue a policy of genocide of the Jews as such.

The revisionists have more than enough evidence for this. I won’t even mention them, especially since, depending on the personal experience of readers, certain facts may seem more or less convincing. It was enough for me when Yu. Graf poked my nose into the fact that the furnaces in the crematoria of the German camps were muffle, and the notorious Zyklon-B gas is an insecticide (poison for insects) and is released from the granules within 2 hours. For those readers who are familiar with chemistry and heating engineering firsthand, this may not mean anything, but for me, who knows what a muffle is and has worked in gas-hazardous production, I don’t need anything else. I’m even offended - how come I didn’t pay attention to the stupidity of this “Cyclone-B” before?!
There was no killing of Jews in the gas chambers of the Nazi camps, since there were no gas chambers themselves. And I refer those readers who want to get acquainted with the evidence of this for themselves to the book by Yu. Graf.

How many Jews died

Since there was no genocide of Jews (there was genocide of Soviet citizens), the Holocaust quickly grew from a legend into a familiar Jewish scam. The Zionists said that the Germans deliberately killed many millions of Jews in Europe. Now they have finally settled on the figure of 6 million, but Yu. Graf, using the example of the number of “killed” in Auschwitz, showed how the Zionists sucked these millions out of thin air, how these figures changed over the years in the creative kitchen of swindlers. So, according to the Zionists, in Auschwitz the following were “exterminated in gas chambers”:

“- 9 million people, according to the film “Nuit de Brouillard” (Night and Fog);
- 8 million, according to a report published in 1945 by the French Office for the Study of War Crimes;
- 7 million, according to the testimony of prisoner Rafail Feidelson;
- 6 million, according to the Jewish publisher Tiberius Kremer;
- 5 million, of which 4.5 million are Jews, according to Le Monde of April 20, 1978;
- 4 million, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal;
- 3.5 million gassed, of whom 95% were Jews ("many" others died of other causes), according to film director Claude Lanzmann;
- 3.5 million, of which 2.5 million were gassed only before December 1, 1943, according to the confession of the first commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hess;
- 2.5 million, according to the testimony of prisoner Rudolf Vrba;
- 2-3 million killed Jews and thousands of non-Jews, according to the confession of SS man Perry Broad;
- 1.5-3.5 million Jews were poisoned between April 1942 and April 1944 alone, according to a 1982 statement by Israeli “Holocaust expert” Yehuda Bauer;
- 2 million Jews gassed, according to the testimony of Lucy Davidovich;
- 1.6 million, of which 1,352,980 were Jews, according to a statement by Yehuda Bauer made in 1989;
- 1.5 million, according to a statement by the Polish government made in 1995;
- about 1.25 million, of which 1 million are Jews, according to a statement by Raoul Hilberg;
- 1-1.5 million, according to a statement by J.-C. Pressac made in 1989;
- 800-900 thousand, according to Jewish historian Gerald Reitling;
- 775-800 thousand, of which 630 thousand were gassed Jews, according to a statement by J.-C. Pressac made in 1993;
- 670-710 thousand, of which 470-550 thousand Jews were gassed, according to the statement of J.-C. Pressak, made in 1994.

As we can see, the number of victims has been diligently decreasing over the years. And yet the total number of victims of the “Holocaust” of 5-6 million does not fluctuate from this. You can subtract hundreds of thousands, even millions, from it - it will still remain the same. This is the mathematics of the “Holocaust”!

What documents, what excavations of mass graves do the Holocaustists rely on to reduce the number of victims? Not at all! All the above figures are pure fiction, without the slightest relation to the documentary reality of the Auschwitz camp. According to revisionist calculations, about 150 thousand Jews (Faurisson) or 160-170 thousand (Mattogno) died there; Of these, zero were poisoned by gas. Epidemics, most notably typhus, were the main reason for this horribly high mortality rate.

And Yu. Graf ends his work like this:

“What would happen if the revisionist arguments were accepted?
Let’s imagine that one day the official version of the “Holocaust” will also be officially recognized as false, it will be recognized that in the Third Reich there was persecution of Jews, but extermination was not, that gas chambers, gas cars, like those cut off by German soldiers during the First World War wars, children's hands, soap and lampshades made from the fat and skin of Jews - all this is propaganda feverish nonsense that not 6 million, but about 500 thousand Jews died in the sphere of German rule, and the overwhelming majority were due to typhus and deprivation in camps and ghettos caused by the disasters of war. What would be the consequences of admitting all this?..

... Not only in Germany, but also in other European countries, the powers that be would be completely discredited. People would begin to ask the question: in the name of whose interests, for half a century, an unheard-of scam was supported by means of censorship and terror? Trust in the authorities would collapse completely.
Thus we see that exposing the lies of the “Holocaust” would have devastating consequences not only for Zionism, but also for the political and intellectual ruling caste of the entire world. There would be a revaluation of all values. The former would have faded into oblivion. The cards would have been shuffled." Readers of the forum http://www.forum-orion.com may say: well, why do we care? We buried our dead, we have nothing to feel sorry for the Germans, God forbid they did what they did to us, so what difference does it make to us because the Germans were “inflicted” with another crime? One more, one less – it doesn’t change things. With 50 million killed in that war, 5.5 million here or there will not make a difference. Moreover, all this is already history.

There are a lot of reasons, but the overwhelming number of them are important for us as a state. And working at the newspaper made me a cynic. I know for sure that the majority of citizens who call themselves Russians did not give a damn about the Russian state. And if I show them some bad voucher or MMM promotion, they will sell my own mother. Therefore, I will talk about prosaic, material things. When the war was nearing its end, Stalin raised the issue of reparations from Germany to the allies (England and the USA) to compensate for at least a small share of the damage caused by the war. He proposed to take only 20 billion dollars from Germany. The allies began to insist that it was impossible to take that kind of money from Germany, although they had previously agreed with the USSR’s share of 10 billion. Stalin proposed to take not with money, but with the equipment of a disarmed Germany and the goods that it would produce in the future. The Allies did not agree to this either and proposed not to determine the amount, but to agree on the percentage of the confiscated amount. But when Stalin began to ask for 30% of Germany's gold reserves, which went to the allies, and a share in its foreign enterprises, the allies refused. Moreover, liberating the USSR occupation zone from their troops, they stole everything they could, stole, for example, all the carriages. In short, instead of reparations, the USSR received East Germany, which our devastated country began to restore, bringing its level to a state in which, according to Germany, it was ahead of countries such as Great Britain or Belgium in terms of gross social product per capita. (In 1986, dollars: GDR - 11400; Belgium - 11360; Great Britain - 10430).

So, we asked the allies for only 10 billion dollars in reparations, but they did not give it to us, since Germany, supposedly, was not able to do it.
At the same time, during that war, the Zionists formed troops to found Israel, but did not send a single platoon to fight the Germans. Moreover, apparently, on the side of the Germans only against the USSR (participating in the genocide of our population and Jews as well) a total of about two divisions of Jews fought. Since on September 2, 1945, there were 10,173 Jewish prisoners in our captivity (for example: Finns - 2377; Spaniards - 452).

And now, without paying us not only for 11 million. of our citizens killed in German camps, but also for the destruction, Germany paid Israel almost 90 billion marks, or approximately 60 billion dollars. How to understand this?

Of course, Germany has always been and is now under US occupation, and they made it pay. But now everything is being reviewed. The USSR is no longer a liberator, but an occupier, we are returning the tsarist debts to France, Yeltsin is ready to give Germany trophies. It is obvious that, according to these precedents, we have the right to reconsider not only the issue of reparations from Germany, but also its payment of compensation for our 11 million killed citizens.

But this requires an official clarification of the Holocaust issue. If the Germans really killed Jews, then we have the right to demand, according to already established practice, from Germany for their killed, at least at the same rate as for the Jews, that is, 15,000 marks for each of the 11 million killed. If it turns out that this is a scam, then we have the right to demand that Israel and the world community return this money to us with interest, just like our reparations from Germany acquired as a result of the scam.

What can and should be done

If we had a State Duma, and not what we have today, then it should create a commission of 10-12 deputies to consider the case of the Holocaust. Yeltsin or international law is no obstacle here. From a legal point of view, by the way, the Duma may well create this commission, since this directly concerns us and, in addition, it can create it based on precedent. For example, in September 1951, a special commission of the US House of Representatives reviewed all available documents and interviewed 81 witnesses in the Katyn case, which was completely unrelated to the United States. And God himself ordered us to consider the Holocaust.

All revisionists must be invited to this commission and heard from them. At the same time, listen to the opposite side - invite the Zionists with their evidence of the Holocaust. The commission will report its results to the Duma, and the Duma will adopt an official conclusion on this matter. Moreover, any conclusion will suit Russia.
Based on this conclusion, the future Government of Russia will be able to take any appropriate steps in any direction. I want to warn skeptics that, they say, it will not be possible to take money from either Germany or Israel. There is no need to take them, since Russia already has them. We can simply pay off our loan debts using reparations and leave the West to figure out how, to whom and from whom to collect it.

Based on publications by Yu.I. Mukhina

~~~

Source: forum-orion.com

· Holocaust propaganda helps the communists hide their own enormous crimes against humanity.
· Wiesenthal indirectly acts in the interests of Israel, as he constantly hunts down alleged “Nazi war criminals” in order to thereby revive the memories of the so-called. "Holocaust". If the media did not regularly bombard us with stories about the “Holocaust,” Jews would lose their status as victims, which they know how to turn into hard cash, and we are talking about billions of dollars.
Ahmed Rami . From the book “What is Israel?”

· The Holocaust is a secular version of the idea of ​​the chosen people.
Jewish religious figure Ismar Schorsch

· The Holocaust is essentially a Jewish invention.

Polish Bishop Tadeusz Peronek

· The Holocaust is not studied, it is sold.
Rabbi Arnold Wolf

· Zionists use the Holocaust to justify their crimes.

The decision marks the end of Spain's notorious Holocaust Law 607.2, which was passed in 1996 under pressure from the conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar. This law created a system under which those who wrote historical articles justifying the actions of Nazi Germany were subsequently subjected to pressure. Aznar himself was once an activist in the right-wing “Phalangist” League for Liberation and took part in the activities of right-wing student organizations in the 1970s.

The Supreme Court ruling found that the law violated people's right to freedom of expression, which is guaranteed by the Spanish Constitution. The judges rejected arguments by Holocaust advocates that the Holocaust harmed Jews and threatened their very existence. The judges held that no person or group of people has the right to be offended by the way others freely express their views. In other words, the Spanish court recognized the supremacy of the right to freedom of speech and dissemination of information over the rights and interests of individuals and particular groups. Chief Judge Adolfo Prego de Olivero Tolivar, summing up the process and the decision made, stated:

“We cannot punish those who simply spread an ideology, no matter what that ideology may lead to.”

In order to emphasize that no examples of propaganda, even those that may sound too provocative, are not crimes, the Spanish judges cited as an example the following phrases, for which there is now no punishment in Spain: “The Germans had every reason to burn the Jews,” “The Germans never burned Jews,” “Blacks are at the very bottom of the cultural and social ladder of humanity.”

All of these allegations, Prego said, are “unpalatable.” But in a modern constitutional state no one can be punished for them, because in our society the doors should always be open to all points of view. At the same time, Prego, however, noted that all calls for violence will continue to be considered crimes and prosecuted.

Adolf Hitler was a very ambiguous and contradictory personality. He was a hardworking and witty man who knew how to capture the attention of the crowd and maintain interest in his person during his performance. But at the same time, Hitler went down in history as a man who killed millions of people. A very significant percentage of his victims were Jews.

Theories put forward regarding the origins of hatred

The biography of this historical figure has been covered in many books and scientific works. Of course, they gave a lot of reasons for reflection, although many historians are inclined to believe that the most vivid description of Hitler can only be his own work - the manuscript “My Struggle”.

Turning to the pages of “Mein Kampf”, one can notice that the first mention of Jews is associated with the period of formation of the social democratic views of the future Fuhrer. It was during this period that Hitler turned his attention to representatives of the Jewish people. For the first time, young Adolf met a Jew while still at school: the silent boy aroused dubious feelings and interest in Hitler.

Later, during his youth, Hitler singled out Jews for himself only based on religious differences. In his manuscript he mentions "a figure in a long caftan with black curls" whom he met while walking along the main street of Vienna. The unusual appearance of the passerby aroused such interest in Adolf that he turned to books in order to learn more about people wearing similar clothes. Under the influence of reading a large number of anti-Semitic pamphlets, Hitler develops an acute feeling of hostility towards representatives of the Jewish nationality, and he decides to completely separate himself from them in everyday life.

Why Adolf Hitler viewed Jews with hatred

The fact of Hitler’s extreme hostility towards Jews is one of the fundamental ones in his biography, because it influenced not only the fate of the Fuhrer himself, but also world history. In the book he wrote, “My Struggle” (“Mein Kampf”), Adolf says that his hatred and the ideology that emerged from it were a natural result of the influence of historical events during the First World War.

Meanwhile, this reason does not seem suitable to historians: Hitler never participated directly in hostilities, he served as a liaison officer for the regimental headquarters. So the Fuhrer did not have the opportunity to become saturated with anti-Semitism in the heat of hostilities.

However, in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, where Adolf served, there was indeed a large percentage of radical anti-Semites who became ardent supporters of the ideology during their service.

When exactly did Hitler's hatred of Jews begin?

Regarding this issue, historians tend to relate this moment to 1921. Moreover, the decisive role in the emergence of Hitler as an anti-Semite was played by the events that took place in 1919 in the city of Munich. This point of view is also tended to be considered the most probable by the personal biographer of Goebbels and Hitler, Ralph Reuth. In his work “Hitler’s Hatred of the Jews. Clichés and reality,” he mentions that the revolution that took place that year in the capital of Bavaria had a special influence on the Fuhrer’s worldview.

The Fuhrer's childhood

Before we begin to analyze those events from the young years of little Adolf, which left their mark on his worldview in his adult years, it is worth noting a number of nuances regarding that time, which are often not mentioned at all or are distorted:

• Hitler's family was not at all wealthy or wealthy;
• at that time, ordinary people were not familiar with the word “tolerance”;
• often the people were inclined to see representatives of national minorities as the culprit of all their problems;
• human life was valued much less than it is now;
• at that time there were no declared basic human rights.

It is not surprising that in such an environment Hitler absorbed a negative attitude, which subsequently greatly influenced his picture of the world. The knowledge base that is instilled in a person in childhood has a very strong influence on his subsequent perception of information, and this influence cannot be underestimated.

Attitudes towards Jews in society

It is worth noting the fact that Jews were not only a national, but also a religious minority. Forced to wander from one country to another, they did not have their own state. As a rule, due to natural personality traits, when arriving in a new place, Jews quickly achieved career success.

Some areas of business were exclusively Jewish, because entrepreneurs of other nationalities were eliminated as soon as they reached the level of serious competition.

Often the Jews settled in a new place of residence very crowded and behaved in such a way that the native residents felt uncomfortable. There was especially a lot of negativity towards them in this regard during the years of crisis, when poverty and misery reigned everywhere. The united and wealthy Jews attracted many angry glances from the locals. It is worth mentioning that the first ghettos in which Jews lived were built in Italy in medieval times.

Taking into account all these facts, it is easy to understand that Hitler did not at all pull the idea of ​​anti-Semitic ideology out of thin air. She flew in the air, surrounded him with the conversations of his neighbors throughout his life. Anti-Semitic sentiments at that time were supported by most of the population.

Often, while listening to the speeches of various political speakers, he could hear accusations against not only Jews, but also the British, as well as communists. The period of Hitler's youth dates back to the revolutionary time, when new political parties arose every now and then, and the level of protest sentiment in society was very high.

Alternative versions of the reasons for Hitler's hatred of Jews

There are also quite original versions of the source of the origin of hatred. According to one of them, Hitler himself was half Jewish, because... his father was a Semitic. There are rumors that Adolf's father drank a lot and behaved like a tyrant, periodically beating Adolf's mother and the boy himself.

For this reason, or because, against the background of general hostility towards Jews, Hitler’s own Semitic roots gave rise to complexes, he chose anti-Semitism as his ideology. It is not known for certain whether these facts are true or they are fictitious. In any case, such reasons are clearly not enough to instill in a person a fierce hatred of the entire nation and organize genocide.

Why did the Nazis exterminate Jews?

We will never be able to find out the true cause of the events that took place during the Second World War, but we can highlight the main points that are most often mentioned when discussing this issue:

1. The Nazis, like Adolf Hitler, had a strong sense of hatred of Jews, reinforced by their leader's impressive persuasion skills, which he used at rallies.
2. Hitler developed a theory about “superior” and “inferior” races, according to which all people were divided into “Aryans” and “subhumans.” At the same time, those who belonged to the lower race were subject to destruction. It was this program that the Nazis implemented by exterminating Jews in concentration camps.
3. The German fascists saw Jews as a threat not only to their country, but to the entire planet.
4. According to Hitler, the Jews were building an insidious plan to enslave the German nation and further use Germany as a springboard for their further conquests. He believed that by destroying the Jews he would save the world and create a healthy economy, and he convinced other government officials of this.
5. The Fuhrer saw no other way than the complete extermination of the Jews, because... believed that they were very resourceful and would easily seize power under other circumstances. His policy towards representatives of this nationality was uncompromising.

It is known that during his entire reign, Hitler never visited concentration camps in person. This gives a lot to think about.

Reasons for Hitler's hatred of the Jewish people

Hitler himself usually explained his extreme hostility towards Semites with the following reasons:

• he believed that for Jews the desire for profit is higher than moral principles;
• as a rule, all Jews occupied a high position in society, and their natural character traits allowed them to quickly achieve success in their work;
• the average Jew lived much more richly than German people, which was especially striking during the crisis;
• the horrors of wartime, psychological trauma of childhood and anger at the outside world aggravated the already existing hostility;
• a great desire to “save” the world and eliminate the Jewish threat.

View from the outside

Adolf Hitler, as a strategist, believed that the best defense is an attack. Since he saw a threat to the existing economic and political system in the person of representatives of the Jewish people, he decided to try on the role of a savior and take significant measures. Since hostility towards Jews among the German population was at its maximum in those years, Hitler's ideas were readily embraced by the masses, and Nazi ideology quickly spread throughout the country.

Hitler's open appearance, pleasant, simple features and impressive speaking skills helped him easily promote his idea to the masses. Citizens willingly listened to his speeches at rallies and immediately gained confidence in the leader. For this reason, racism developed very quickly in Germany, falling into the fertile soil of popular dissatisfaction.

The Germans saw Hitler's calls for the extermination of the Jews as an opportunity to build a better future, which seemed especially attractive in the conditions of poverty and unemployment in the present. That is why the Fuhrer’s ideology was received with a bang, and ordinary citizens quickly began building a “bright” future.

The personality of Hitler and his influence on the formation of fascism as an ideology have always been of interest to historians and biographers, as well as directors and screenwriters. In 2012, producers Nico Hoffman and Jan Moito began filming an eight-part film about the Fuhrer.

Director Thomas Weber noted the particular importance of careful attention when implementing the script to the process of formation of Hitler's personality, as well as his character traits, both coldness and inviting demeanor.

“Only if we try to preserve the energy inherent in Hitler, with which he influenced many Germans, will we be able to explain the relationship between Hitler and the Germans.” – he says in one of his interviews.

Why did Hitler carry out the Holocaust but leave Switzerland alone?

In this video, Valery Viktorovich Pyakin, a political activist and analyst, talks about the reasons that prompted Hitler to actively promote the policy of anti-Semitism and mass extermination of Jews, despite the fact that initially many large businessmen of Jewish nationality helped him in the development of his political career.

A reliable reason for Adolf Hitler's strong hatred of Jews went with him to the grave. Despite the wide variety of versions of varying plausibility, we will never know which of them was real. It is quite possible that the rapid development of Nazi ideology in German society and the mass genocide of Jews was influenced by a whole complex of factors. Whether Hitler caused the Holocaust, or whether society created its own leader, the question remains open.

There are many versions that tell us about the reasons why the once terrible Second World War was unleashed. There is no doubt that the instigator was Germany, in particular its leader, Adolf Hitler.

His biography has been written and rewritten hundreds of times. An attentive reader, having studied it, will understand some of the Fuhrer’s motives, and will also answer the question of why Hitler hated Jews, gypsies, other peoples and races.

Among others, the following reasons can be identified:

1. Hitler had the idea of ​​conquering the world and dividing it into three races. He considered the “true Aryans” to be the first and highest, i.e. native Germans. They were supposed to rule the world. He included the Slavs in the second group, who were assigned the role of slaves. The third group consisted of Jews, Gypsies and so on. They were planned to be completely destroyed. This is one of the most popular and plausible answers to the question of why Hitler hated the Jews.
2. Afterwards, Germany experienced a severe economic downturn. People lived quite poorly and hard. At the same time, most banks and profitable enterprises were owned by Jews. Hitler considered this humiliating and found, in his opinion, the right way out of the situation. In addition, he was convinced that defeat in the war was also the work of capitalists, especially Jews.
3. Hitler's mother was seriously ill. Many historians believe that she died as a result of an unsuccessful operation performed by a Jewish doctor. And this awakened in young Hitler hatred of this people. However, this version is quite controversial. Taking into account that the woman had cancer, and the medicine of that time was not well developed, we can assume that the doctor’s fault here is minimal.
4. Hitler blamed the Jews for the revolution that took place in Russia, for the emergence of Bolshevism, and so on. He sought to destroy the capitalists.
5. According to one version, during the years of his stormy youth, Hitler was “awarded” by one of the Jewish prostitutes with syphilis. The realization that the disease was incurable strengthened his hatred of Jews.
6. During his school years, little Hitler had a Jewish teacher who instilled fear in the boy.
7. Eva Braun's father was Jewish. Before the wedding, he promised his future father-in-law a considerable amount as a dowry. However, things did not go beyond promises. This fact strengthened the growing hatred and hostility towards this race.
8. The genocide of Jews began from the first days of the war. There is clearly another version of this. In order to raise thousands of people and force them to fight, they also need motives. Germany fought to establish world domination. Victories were necessary to maintain the morale of the soldiers. To do this it was necessary to kill someone. Since the Slavs were chosen as future slaves, the role of victims was assigned to Jews and Gypsies. These peoples are small in number, and it seemed to Hitler that it would be easy to destroy them. The realization that they had the power to wipe out an entire people from the face of the earth raised the morale of the soldiers.

Which version of why Hitler hated the Jews to choose and which one to believe is up to everyone to decide for themselves. You can try to prove or disprove any one.

Many historians and psychologists have studied Hitler's personality. Most of them came to the conclusion that he was not entirely mentally healthy. His friends and teachers noted some aggressiveness, unsociability and detachment. He was very quick-tempered and harsh in his judgments. He remained for posterity a mystery and a monster who destroyed millions of people. Many of them, including women, children and old people, did not die on the battlefields, but were tortured in concentration camps and gas chambers. The terrible experiments that were carried out on civilians still excite the imagination. The real reasons why Hitler hated the Jews are not known for certain.

In addition to the German Jews who served in the Wehrmacht, there were also those Jews who guarded the Jewish ghettos, and then, together with the Germans, Lithuanians and Latvians, destroyed their own brothers.

Moreover, currying favor with the Germans, they showed even greater cruelty to the Jews than the most...

Frostbitten Balts. Having occupied Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine and Belarus - the traditional area of ​​​​settlement of Jews, the Germans created ghettos in large cities into which Jews were moved in order to isolate them from the non-Jewish population.

Unlike ordinary policemen, Jewish policemen received neither rations nor salaries, and therefore the only ways to feed themselves were robbery and extortion.

It's like that joke - they gave you a gun, spin around as you want. True, pistols were not issued to ordinary police officers - only squad leaders and commandants had them. Rifles were issued to police officers only during executions.

The Jewish police forces were quite large. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish police numbered about 2,500; in the ghetto of the city of Lodz - 1200; in Lviv up to 500 people; in Vilnius up to 250 people.

Head of the Jewish Police of Krakow Shapiro

The head of the Jewish police of the Warsaw ghetto, Józef Sherinski, receives a report from the head of one of the detachments, Jakub Leikin. Sherinsky was later caught stealing, and Leikin took his place.

Many Jewish policemen made quite decent fortunes from this by the end of the war, but the largest fortunes were made by members and heads of the Judenrat - bodies of Jewish self-government created by the Germans, the heads of which were most often kahal elders. Firstly, they took bribes for the right to join the police, and secondly, the police brought them a share of the loot. They also took bribes from ordinary Jews for the right to delay sending to a concentration camp. Thus, the richest Jews, as a rule, survived, and the leadership of the Judenrat not only survived, but became even richer as a result of the war. They stole wherever they could. They managed to reduce even the 229 grams of rations established by the Germans for Jews to 184.

Jewish Police Armband

When creating the Judenrat, the Germans, as a rule, relied on the top of the Kahal. The fact is that since ancient times, each Jewish community had its own kagal - a self-government body that acted as an intermediary between the Jews and the authorities of the state in whose territory this community lived. The kagal was headed by four elders (roshi); behind them were “honorable persons” (Tuvians). The kahal always had a detachment of kahal terror led by a shamesh subordinate to them. Having driven the Jews into the ghetto, the Germans simply renamed the Kahals into Judenrat, and the Shamesh became chiefs of police.

Some former members of the Jewish police of Vilnius, Kaunas and Siauliai were arrested by the NKVD in the summer of 1944 and convicted of collaborating with the Germans. The same policemen and members of the Judenrat who did not fall into the hands of the NKVD safely repatriated to Israel, and enjoyed honor and respect there. Their “exploits” were justified even in the Talmud, which calls for preserving at least a drop of Jewish blood by any means. The Jews reasoned this way: if the policemen had not gone to serve the Germans, the Germans would have killed them along with the rest of the Jews, and by killing their fellow tribesmen, who would have been killed by the Germans anyway, they saved at least part of the Jews - themselves - from destruction.

Bicycle squad of Jewish police in the Warsaw Ghetto

150 thousand Jews served in the Wehrmacht

Among the 4 million 126 thousand 964 prisoners of different nationalities we took, there were 10 thousand 137 Jews.
Were there really any Jews who fought on Hitler’s side?

Imagine, there were many such Jews.

The ban on recruiting Jews for military service was first introduced in Germany on November 11, 1935. However, as early as 1933, the dismissal of Jews who held officer ranks began. True, many veteran officers of Jewish origin were then allowed to remain in the army at the personal request of Hindenburg, but after his death they were gradually escorted out into retirement. By the end of 1938, 238 such officers were expelled from the Wehrmacht. On January 20, 1939, Hitler ordered the dismissal of all Jewish officers, as well as all officers married to Jewish women.

However, all these orders were not unconditional, and Jews were allowed to serve in the Wehrmacht with special permits. In addition, the dismissals took place with difficulty - each boss of the dismissed Jew zealously proved that his subordinate Jew was indispensable in the position he occupied. The Jewish quartermasters held their positions especially tightly. On August 10, 1940, in the VII Military District (Munich) alone, there were 2,269 Jewish officers who served in the Wehrmacht on the basis of special permission. In all 17 districts, the number of Jewish officers was about 16 thousand people.

For their exploits in the military field, Jews could be Aryanized, that is, assigned German nationality. During 1942, 328 Jewish officers were Aryanized.

Testing for Jewish affiliation was provided only for officers. For the lower rank, only his own assurance was required that neither he nor his wife were Jews. In this case, it was possible to rise to the rank of staffsfeldwebel, but if someone aspired to become an officer, then his origin was carefully checked. There were also those who admitted Jewish origin when entering the army, but they could not receive a rank higher than senior rifleman.

It turns out that Jews sought to join the army en masse, considering it the safest place for themselves in the conditions of the Third Reich. It was not difficult to hide Jewish origin - most German Jews bore German names and surnames, and their nationality was not written in their passports.

Checks for Jewishness among privates and non-commissioned officers began to be carried out only after the assassination attempt on Hitler. Such checks covered not only the Wehrmacht, but also the Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, and even the SS. By the end of 1944, 65 soldiers and sailors, 5 SS soldiers, 4 non-commissioned officers, 13 lieutenants,
one Untersturmführer, one Obersturmführer of the SS troops, three captains, two majors, one lieutenant colonel - battalion commander in the 213th Infantry Division Ernst Bloch, one colonel and one rear admiral - Karl Kühlenthal. The latter served as a naval attaché in Madrid and carried out orders for the Abwehr. One of the identified Jews was immediately Aryanized for his military merits. The documents are silent about the fate of the others. What is known is that Kühlenthal, thanks to the intercession of Dönitz, was allowed to retire with the right to wear a uniform.

There is evidence that Grand Admiral Erich Johann Albert Raeder also turned out to be a Jew. His father was a schoolteacher who converted to Lutheranism in his youth. According to these very data, it was the revealed Jewry that became the true reason for Raeder’s resignation on January 3, 1943.

Many Jews named their nationality only in captivity. Thus, Wehrmacht Major Robert Borchardt, who received the Knight's Cross for a tank breakthrough on the Russian front in August 1941, was captured by the British near El Alamein, after which it turned out that his Jewish father lived in London. In 1944, Borchardt was released to his father, but in 1946 he returned to Germany. In 1983, shortly before his death, Borchardt told German schoolchildren: “Many Jews and half-Jews who fought for Germany in World War II believed that they should honestly defend their Fatherland by serving in the army.”

Another Jewish hero turned out to be Colonel Walter Hollander. During the war years, he was awarded the Iron Cross of both degrees and a rare insignia - the Golden German Cross. In October 1944, Hollander was captured by us, where he declared his Jewishness. He remained in captivity until 1955, after which he returned to Germany and died in 1972.

There is also a very curious case when for a long time the Nazi press placed on its covers a photograph of a blue-eyed blond man in a steel helmet as a standard representative of the Aryan race. However, one day it turned out that Werner Goldberg, pictured in these photos, turned out to be not only blue-eyed, but also blue-bottomed.

Further investigation into Goldberg's identity revealed that he was also a Jew. Goldberg was fired from the army, and he got a job as a clerk in a company that sews military uniforms. From 1959-79 Goldberg was a deputy in the West Berlin Chamber of Deputies.

The highest-ranking Jewish Nazi is considered to be Goering's Deputy, Inspector General of the Luftwaffe, Field Marshal Erhard Milch. In order not to discredit Milch in the eyes of ordinary Nazis, the party leadership stated that Milch’s mother did not have sex with her Jewish husband, and Erhard’s true father was Baron von Bier. Goering laughed for a long time about this: “Yes, we made Milch a bastard, but an aristocratic bastard.”

On May 4, 1945, Milch was captured by the British at Sicherhagen Castle on the Baltic Sea coast and was sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court. In 1951, the term was reduced to 15 years, and by 1955 he was released early.
Some of the captured Jews died in Soviet captivity and, according to the official position of the Israeli National Holocaust Memorial and Heroism Yad Vashem, are considered victims of the Holocaust