who was to blame for the holocaust?

Question

history project please help!

Answer 1

It was actually a man called Reinhard Heidrich. We should all know by now that Hitler was an anti-Semitic mad man, but it was Heidrich and his merry band of evil fascists that thought up the idea of the final solution in 1942.

Answer 2

~In the US, Martin Van Buren got it rolling when he opened the world's first concentration camps for the Cherokee at Ross's Landing (Chattanooga, Tennessee), Fort Payne, Alabama, and Fort Cass (Charleston, Tennessee), but the genocide was already under way thanks to folks like Andrew Jackson, Winfield Scott and William Henry Harrison. The US Bureau of Indian affairs followed-up on their efforts for a few decades and then Gens. Nelson "Bearcoat" Miles, Philip Sheridan and William Tecumseh Sherman pretty much finished the job.

In Cambodia, it would have been Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Credit Idi Amin in Uganda.

The Ottomans, particularly the "Young Turks" did the number on the Armenians.

For the Serbs, the Croats - especially the "Ustaše People's Service" under the guidance of Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić, Miroslav Majstorović and Dinko Šakić - are most responsible.

Saddam Hussein and his Sunni cronies and the Ba'ath Party get much of the credit for the Kurds, but give George Bush his share for his double-cross of the Kurds that left them out to dry.

Oh, you speak of the Nazi holocaust? The Nazi holocaust extended far beyond the Jews. Of the 18 million or so who died in the camps, only about 6 million were Jews. The Nazis were much more effective in their campaigns against the Serbs, the Roma and the Ukraines, and, given the time, they had some 20 million Slavs targeted. They fared reasonably well in the campaign against the Poles. The 10 million Soviet troops and 15 million Soviet civilians killed by the Wehrmacht should get some kind of mention, too. Credit the brilliance of the Treaty of Versailles for giving the Nazis the opportunity to rise to power start the bloodbath, and world apathy and nonchalance to let it reach the heights (or depths) that it did.

Answer 3

Hello,

(ANS) The answer to this question is extremely complex but on a simplistic level the blame lies with:-

a) The post 1st world war economic & political situation in Germany in the late 1930's that left the German people desperate for leadership & a sense of direction. b) Adolf Hitler because the final solution was mainly his vision although others also shared the same vision. c) The German people who colluded with Hitler's vision d) The Nazi party itself which implemented Hitlers policy e) The German people because they denied knowing anything about the death camps or what took place inside them.

**Even though I lost family relatives in Poland to the holocaust, even though the holocaust casts a very black & painful shadow across my family history. I don't blame the present German people, they shouldn't be held totally responsible for something that took place over 60 years ago.

Ivan

Answer 4

The "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem", was decided at the Wannsee Conference - a meeting of various high ranking Nazi's from their respective departments in order to organise the logistics of mass genocide. The meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, so if you are asking from a decision making perspective, it could be argued that he had responsibility for it's implementation. However, the answer is a lot more complex if you're looking at the question from a socio-political standpoint - if that is the case then you need to look further back, to the end of WW1 and the Treaty of Versailles - this created conditions that enabled the rise of the Nazi party

Answer 5

Its a complex issue and its not as easy as saying because adolf hitler was a bad man. After the first word war, the french aimed to humiliate the germans in recommpence for their losses during the war (look up the treaty of versailles of wikipedia) these sanctions led to a feeling of national humiliation and disillusionment in germany. Conditions which supported a rise of nationalism. Hitler and the nazi party fed off this and introduced the jews as a scapegoat (as well as the poles and other groups they believed where exploiting germany). Through propaganda, the party was able to change the midset of the population. A more recent example happened in rhwanda between the tootsis and hutus (check that out too). State sanctioned murder is less heinous if justified. Look at the war in iraq. Troops went to fight a war expecting to kill iraqis. This was murder justified as liberation. The german people believed they were liberating their country from those who oppressed it.

Answer 6

Hitler was the first person to come up with the idea of purifying Germany of anyone who wasn't considered Aryan. It was first discovered in his book Mein Kampf (spelling may be wrong) which he wrote in prison after being convicted of high treason after the National Socialist German Worker's Party (and he was their leader) tried to overthrow the German government in 1923 but failed. In late 1941 Hitler gave Heinrich Himler a verbal order to begin exterminating the Jews. It wasn't until 1942 when there was a secret meeting in Poland which Hitler requested the attendance of all the highest ranking Nazi officers: Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himler, Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Hoess, Dr. Josef Mengele and many others to finalize the "Final Solution." The first concentration camp was constructed in 1933 "Dachau," which was originally used to house political prisoners. However, in 1942 extermination camps were constructed throughout Nazi occupied territory. The Nazi's constructed the extermination camps wherever the largest concentration of Jews happened to be located at that time period throughout Poland and other Nazi controlled countries. There were work camps, concentration camps and extermination camps. However, Jews were killed at all of the camps either through starvation, disease, physical extermination (murdered by gas chambers, shot, medical operations, torture, burned alive in the furnaces, etc.). That is the basic gist of the holocaust and who was responsible.

Answer 7

Hitler, He was the head of the Nazi party and it was his idea to put the Jews to death. At the time the German economy was falling and they blamed the Jews and that's how it began. Hitler was just trying to make Germany a world power.

Answer 8

While Hitler was the absolute ruler of the Nazi regime, it would have been very hard for him to kill six million Jews (and millions of other people) by himself. Even with the help of his closest associates such as Himmler, Hitler needed thousands of Germans to carry out these slaughters.

He also needed the full backing of the German nation. A crime of this magnitude would necessarily involve the acquiescence of millions of ordinary Germans. much of the killing was carried out by ordinary Germans, not by racist indoctrinated Nazi fanatics.

Anti-Semitism - particularly the racist ``eliminatist'' variety that surfaced in the 19th century - had become so imbedded in German political, religious and social life. Hitler had no problem implementing his ``final solution'' with the help of his countrymen.

``The first task in restoring the perpetrators to the center of our understanding of the Holocaust is to restore to them their identities . . . and by eschewing convenient, yet often inappropriate and obfuscating labels, like `Nazis' and `SS men,' and calling them what they were, `Germans.'

``. . . They were Germans acting in the name of Germany and its highly popular leader, Adolf Hitler.''

Answer 9

This question is too broad to assign blame to just one factoe. The easy answer would be to say it was the Nazi's but the rest of the world should partly shoulder the blame for alllowing the situation in nazi germany to reach the level that it did.

Answer 10

You need to know that the word Holocaust is only referring to the murder of the Jews. They were the prominent target, but others were systematically destroyed as well. To neglect that fact would be to produce an incomplete report.