Blog Assignment #1: How can something like the Holocaust happen?

One of the most frequent questions people ask about genocide is how can the people possibly allow these terrible things to happen. Sometimes, a small group in power will be responsible for the killings and tortures, with little public knowledge about them, but the Holocaust was different in that some of the killings happened in the middle of the streets, in the public eye, over a stretch of more than 10 years. This means that there was no chance that most of the public was unaware of the genocide. The main factors that lead the public into accepting, and sometimes participating in, the Holocaust are the use of Propaganda and other programs such as the Hitler Youth.

This propaganda poster above is one of many that you would see all throughout Germany during the Holocaust. The Nazi Party used propaganda as a way of convincing the public that they were superior, and others were inferior. They made their leader, Adolf Hitler, appear God-like so that people would give their complete loyalty to this one man, and not question what he did. They would also dehumanize the groups that they were targeting for the killing, such as this page from a Nazi propaganda childrens book

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In this image, a Jewish pedophile is seen giving candies to little children, most likely in an effort to lure them away. The Nazis used this book, along with movies and posters, to make the Jewish seem as though they were cruel monsters, and anything but human. If people were made to believe that the Jews were not human, then why would they care if the Jews were being beaten and killed?

The Hitler Youth program was another mean for the Nazis to spread their messages and ideas to the people of Germany. Beginning in the early 1930’s, young boys and men would join and immediately be taught that Adolf Hitler is their savior and that Aryan people were superior. Who was going to argue with that? With this sense of superiority, many of these young boys and men joined the Nazis in their quest to destroy the non-Aryans. The German public was not unaware of what was going on, but was miseducated about their government and the people that government was targeting. The German people as a whole do not deserve blame for the Holocaust, but knowing their story will help future generations in identifying and preventing these horrors from happening again.