Language:
English
Year of publication:
2010
Titel der Quelle:
The Cambridge Guide to Jewish History, Religion, and Culture
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2010) 233-257
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) History
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
National socialism
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
Abstract:
A brief examination of the Holocaust and its most important effects. The origins of the Holocaust lie in a long tradition in Christian Europe of despising and persecuting Jews; the modern period added pseudoscientific racist motifs to this religious animosity. Antisemitism was on the rise in Germany from World War I, and became a prominent principle of Nazi ideology. However, it was not antisemitism that secured popular support for the Nazis in the early 1930s, nor was the "Jewish problem" the main preoccupation of the Nazi regime in 1933-38. It was the growing self-confidence of the regime in the late 1930s that prompted the Nazis to radicalize their anti-Jewish policies. In the early stages of the war, the Nazis conceived their Final Solution as a mass resettlement of the Jews; by the latter half of 1941 Nazi leaders concluded that it should be the physical extinction of all Jews within their reach. Describes briefly the process of the mass murder, either by shooting squads or in death camps. The Nazi genocide was almost total in the territories under direct German rule and in the long-contested areas like Bessarabia, Northern Transylvania, etc. The survival rate was higher in countries that preserved a semblance of independence. Among the effects of the Holocaust, emphasizes the annihilation of the vibrant Yiddish civilization, the development of international human rights laws, and the intellectual and cultural creativity which came about in the West from attempts to comprehend this event.
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