Homework # 9: Nazi Ideology Homework # 9: Nazi Ideology Instructions: Read the

Homework # 9: Nazi Ideology
Homework # 9: Nazi Ideology
Instructions:
Read the following documents on Nazi Ideology and then write a reflection that is at least 400 words. You don’t have to answer every question, but you can use them as a starting point. Submit homework on Canvas Assignments.
1) What can we learn about Nazi beliefs from these documents?
2) What did Hitler believe?
3) Choose one quote or passage to analyze and explain why you find it interesting or important.
1919
Gemlich Letter—Adolf Hitler
Dear Herr Gemlich,
The danger posed by Jewry for our people today finds expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people. The cause of this aversion is not to be found in a clear recognition of the consciously or unconsciously systematic and pernicious effect of the Jews as a totality upon our nation. Rather, it arises mostly from personal contact and from the personal impression which the individual JewLinks to an external site. leaves ­­almost always an unfavorable one. For this reason, antisemitism is too easily characterized as a mere emotional phenomenon. And yet this is incorrect. Antisemitism as a political movement may not and cannot be defined by emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts. The facts are these: First, Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association. Even the Jews never designate themselves as Jewish Germans, Jewish Poles, or Jewish Americans but always as German, Polish, or American Jews. Jews have never yet adopted much more than the language of the foreign nations among whom they live. A German who is forced to make use of the French language in France, Italian in Italy, Chinese in China does not thereby become a Frenchman, Italian, or Chinaman. It’s the same with the JewLinks to an external site. who lives among us and is forced to make use of the German language. He does not thereby become a German. Neither does the Mosaic faith, so important for the survival of this race, settle the question of whether someone is a Jew or non-­Jew. There is scarcely a race whose members belong exclusively to just one definite religion.
[The Jew’s] power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the Jew only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination.
In his effects and consequences he is like a racial tuberculosis of the nations.
The deduction from all this is the following: an antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom. An antisemitism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews, that which distinguishes the Jews from the other aliens who live among us (an Aliens Law). The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.
For both these ends a government of national strength, not of national weakness, is necessary.

1920
Nazi 25 point platform—Adolf Hitler
We demand the unification of all Germans in the Greater Germany on the basis of the right of self-determination of peoples.
We demand land and territory (colonies) for the sustenance of our people, and colonization for our surplus population.
Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently no Jew can be a member of the race.
We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
We demand the creation of a healthy middle class
Common national criminals…and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions.
The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
We demand….the formation of a national army.
We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press…. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life, and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands.
We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: common utility precedes individual utility.
For the execution of all of this we demand the formation of a strong central power in the Reich. The leaders of the Party promise, if necessary by sacrificing their own lives, to support by the execution of the points set forth above without consideration.

1925
Mein Kampf—Adolf Hitler
“Common blood belongs in one common realm.”
“Foreign people came in and poisoned the body of our nation.”
“[The two main dangers to Germany’s existence are] Marxism and Jewry.”
“The Jew is the driving force behind the destruction of Germany.”
“By standing guard against the Jew, I am defending the work of the Lord.”
“[The Jew’s] whole existence is a denial of the beauty of God’s creation.”
“Never forget that the highest purpose of man’s existence is the preservation of his own kind and not the maintenance of a state or government. The state is a race based organization and not an economic organization.
“When people are fighting for their existence on this planet and are faced with the fatal question ‘to be or not to be,’ all considerations of humanness or appearances crumble into nothing.”
“A nation that works to cultivate its best racial elements during this era of race poisoning is bound to someday become the lord of the earth.”
“History has always shown that those who rose above the average level did so through the driving force of an individual personality.”
“Intolerance is absolutely indispensable for the growth of any faith.”
“In any age of history, the qualities of a truly great and popular leader consisted on focusing on a single adversary and not distracting the people’s attention. The more unified the people’s will to fight a single object, the greater the magnetic attraction a political movement will have.”
“For me, only nationalism existed.”
“Germany will either be a world power or cease to exist.”
“[Nature] has no hesitation and wipes out what is weak in order to give a rightful place to the strong.”
“In eternal battle, mankind can find greatness; in eternal peace, it will find destruction.”
“the survival of a species depends on its willingness to sacrifice the individual.”
“We must not let political frontiers distract us from the frontiers of Eternal-Justice. If this Earth really has room for everyone, we should have under our feet the land we need to exist…[and] what is denied in peaceful friendship must be taken by force…If European soil was the objective, it could be acquired primarily at the expense of Russia….Who is willing to regain the lost territories by armed force?”
“Before one can conquer foreign enemies, the enemy within must first be annihilated.”
1933
A month after Hitler came to power–Victor Klemperer
“Everything I considered un-German: brutality, injustice, hypocrisy, mass suggestion to the point of intoxication, all of it flourishes here.”
January 21, 1939
–Hitler to Czech Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky
“This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies and at the end of this year there will not be a Jew left in Germany. The day of reckoning has come.”
January 23, 1942
Adolf Hitler
“One must act radically. When one pulls out a tooth, one does it with a single tug, and the pain quickly goes away. The Jew must clear out of Europe. Otherwise no understanding will be possible between Europeans. It’s the Jew who prevents everything. When I think about it, I realize that I’m extraordinarily humane…I restrict myself to telling them they must go away. If they break their pipes on the journey, I can’t do anything about it. But if they refuse to go voluntarily, I see no other solution by extermination.”
January 27, 1942
Adolf Hitler
“The Jews must pack up, disappear from Europe…Where the Jews are concerned, I’m devoid of all sense of pity.”

January 29, 1939
-Adolf Hitler speech to the Reichstag
“In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it…I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

-January 30, 1942
-Adolf Hitler
“The war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely, with the uprooting of the Aryan peoples of Europe. On the contrary, the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews. Now for the first time they will not bleed other people to death; rather, for the first time the genuine old Jewish law of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ will be applied….And the hour will come when the most evil world-enemy of all times, or at least of the last thousand years, will have played his part to the end.”
October 4, 1943
-Heinrich Himmler speech to SS
It is fundamentally wrong for us to try to carry our naturally innocent nature, our good nature, our idealism, to foreign peoples…Our principle must be absolute for the SS man. We are to be honest, decent, loyal and good comrades to those of our own blood and to ono one else…What exists by way of good blood of our kind among other peoples, we will take for ourselves, stealing their children if necessary and bringing them up among us. Whether other peoples live in prosperity or whether they perish from hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our own culture, otherwise it does not interest me in the least. Whether during the construction of an anti-tank ditch 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion or not interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch is finished for Germany. We will never be brutal or heartless where we do not need to be; that is clear….[but] it is a crime against our own blood to concern ourselves with [other people’s] fate or bring ideals to them…
I want to mention to you here in all openness another, difficult subject. Between ourselves it is to be said out loud once, in a perfectly open manner, and thereafter we will never more speak of it in public…I am speaking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the eradication of the Jewish people. It’s a subject people tend to talk about very easily—The Jewish people is to be eradicated,’ says this or that Party member, ‘of course it is, it’s there in our programme, elimination of the Jews, eradication, let’s do it.’ And then they all come, those decent 80 million Germans, and every one has his good Jew. Of course they know the others are swine, but this one is a first-rate Jew. Among those who talk that way, not one has witnessed the actual thing, not one has seen it through. Most of you will know what it means for a hundred corpses to be laid out in front of you, for five hundred to be lying there or a thousand. To have seen that through to the end and—apart from exceptions due to human weakness—to have behaved correctly is what has made us hard. This is an unwritten and never to be written page of glory in our history…
1992
Rudolf Hoss Memoir—longest serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration/death camp
Before the mass destruction of the Jews began, all the Russian [Communist Party members] and political commissars were killed in almost every camp during 1941 and 1942. According to the secret order given by Hitler, the…[special troops of the SS] searched for and picked up the Russian…commissars from all the POW camps. They transferred all they found to the nearest concentration camp for liquidation…The first small transports were shot by firing squad of SS soldiers.
While I was on an official trip, my second in command, Camp Commander Fritzsch, experimented with gas for these killings. He used a gas called Cyclon B, prussic acid, which was often used as an insecticide in the camp to exterminate lice and vermin. There was always a supply on hand. When I returned Fritzsch reported to me about how he had used the gas. We used it again to kill the next transport.
The gassing was carried out in the basement of Block 11. I viewed the killings wearing a gas mask for protection. Death occurred in the crammed-full cells immediately after the gas was thrown in. Only a brief choking outcry and it was all over. This first gassing of people did not really sink into my mind. Perhaps I was much too impressed by the whole procedure.
I remember well and was much more impressed by the gassing of nine hundred Russians which occurred soon afterwards in the old crematory…
In the spring of 1942 [January] the first transports of Jews arrived from Upper Silesia. All of them were to be exterminated….After arriving at the farmhouse they were told to undress. At first they went very quietly into the rooms where they were supposed to be disinfected. At that point some of them became suspicious and started talking about suffocation and extermination. Immediately a panic started….As soon as unrest was noticed these troublemakers were inconspicuously led behind the farmhouse and killed with a small-caliber pistol, which could not be heard by the others.
I…watched how some women who suspected or knew what was happening, even with the fear of death all over their faces, still managed enough strength to play with their children and to talk to them lovingly. Once a woman with four children, all holding each other by the hand to help the smallest ones over the rough ground, passed by me very slowly. She stepped very close to me and whispered, pointing to her four children, ‘How can you murder these beautiful, darling children? Don’t you have any heart?”
Another time an old man hissed while passing me, ‘Germany will pay a bitter penance for the mass murder of the Jews.’ His eyes glowed with hatred as he spoke. In spite of this he went bravely into the gas chamber without worrying about the others.
Occasionally some women would suddenly start screaming in a terrible way while undressing. They pulled out their hair and acted as if they had gone crazy. Quickly they were led behind the farmhouse and killed by a bullet in the back of the neck from a small-caliber pistol….Sometimes, as [I was] leaving the room, the women realized their fate and began hurling all kinds of curses at us. As the doors were being shut, I saw a woman trying to shove her children out of the chamber, crying out, ‘Why don’t you at least let my precious children live?’
In the spring of 1942 hundreds of people in the full bloom of life walked beneath the budding fruit trees of the farm into the gas chamber to their death, most of them without a hint of what was going to happen to them.