Holocaust The Destruction Process

During the period from the early 1930's to the mid 40's, the Jews in Germany, Poland, and throughout Europe faced intense discrimination from the Nazis. Starting with boycotts and pogroms, the Nazis proceeded to institute legislation against the Jews with the Nuremberg Laws. Institution of ghettos began in the late 1930's. A climate of hostility against Jews had been methodically and relentlessly established. The Holocaust was a systematic destruction process, which, in a very rational, bureaucratic and almost scientific fashion, developed the way for expropriation of property, suppression of rights, and ultimately for extermination camps.

From a legal point of view, the first years of the Nazis in power were very important. Nazi propaganda started with the first phase of the destruction process: defamation. Nazis began to erase the rights of Jews and other party enemies soon after Hitler became Chancellor in January of 1933. To be more specific, on March 23, 1933, the Enabling Act was passed, a law authorizing the government to issue legislation, even if that legislation deviated from the Reich constitution. One example of this legislation is a series of laws that were created for banning "non-Aryans" from civil service, the

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“Re-education” was a bureaucratic euphemism like “special treatment” or “special handling” was for shooting and gassing. No details were left out with respect to when, who and how to punish either prisoners or guards. Any trace of weakness was unworthy of an SS man. The bureaucracy of the machinery of destruction was divided into four independent components or hierarchies -civil service, army, industrial complex, and Nazi party-. Hilberg points out that the ghettoization of the Jewish community (i.

In addition, Richard Rubenstein writes:

"The process was a highly complex series of acts which started simply with the bureaucratic definition of who was a Jew. Then he continues to define a destruction process as “a series of administrative measures that must be aimed at a definite group” (p. Therefore, this leads one to think that ghettoization after the invasion of Poland was a previously planned and logical step towards the Final Solution. The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators, and practically all segments of German society participated in the destruction process. In order to protect the “German Blood and German Honor”, they were forbidden to marry “Aryans” and forbidden to fly the Reich and national flags (Protection of German Blood and German Honor of 1935). According to the Nazis, one of the purposes of Dachau was “re-education. Reason for punishment had to be crystal clear; guards were subject to penalties also (Class notes, July 17). Hilberg claims that “on November 29, 1941, he [Heydrich] sent invitations to a number of Staatssekretäre and chief of SS main offices for a “Final Solution” conference (The Destruction of the European Jews, p164. It was a nation-wide organized pogrom where hundreds of synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed, almost one hundred Jews were killed, and between twenty-six and thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

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