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Why Jews Were Singled Out For Persecution

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Why Jews Were Singled Out For Persecution

“If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.” This was once written by the young Anne Frank. As Anne Frank was one of the many people to have endured the Holocaust and sadly not survived, we wonder why she and many other Jews were singled out for extermination by the Nazis. During the Holocaust, Jews were mistreated and sent to their deaths in concentration camps due to the uncontrolled authority of false-thinking Nazi rulers. Of course, Jews weren’t really a race as the Nazis had thought, but they were a people dedicated to the …show more content…

Hitler had been a part of the National German Workers Party, or the Nazis. According to the staff of History.com, he was then imprisoned for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. While he was in jail, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract Mein Kampf which means “my struggle.” In this, he foreshadowed the eradication of the Jewish “race” in Germany as a result of an European War. After Hitler was released from jail, he made the Nazis grow into positions that were in charge of great power (“Holocaust”). Hitler had a plan that he referred to as the Final Solution. Of course, the solution was to a problem that wasn’t an actual problem at all, but he decided to follow through with this corrupted plan. The “Final solution” was a term that suggested the Nazis’ path to completely destroy the Jewish people. It is unknown when the Nazi leaders decided to take the pathway of genocide and mass murder, but they used many codes and secret terms to refer to their evil plan to kill the hated Jews (“German Jews”). The origins of Hitler’s hatred for Jews and belief in this type of vicious anti-Semitism isn’t apparent. We do know that he followed a popular view among anti-semitism followers in Germany, which was that Jews were to blame for the country’s defeat in 1918 (“Holocaust”). Clearly, Adolf Hitler’s plan for the …show more content…

Another group that was persecuted in large numbers was the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Nazi Germany targeted Jehovah’s Witnesses because they wouldn’t swear loyalty to the Nazi government. In the beginning of the war, they weren’t persecuted, by they decided to go deliberately against the Nazi government. Jehovah’s Witnesses did this by actively pursuing their missionary works and refusing to serve in the military as it went against their religion (“Search Results”). Gypsies were also persecuted because Hitler feared that minority groups would rise up against larger groups like the Aryans, and essentially take over the world (“Search Results”). Another group that Nazi-Germany discriminated against was the Soviet prisoners of war. On June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union was invaded by Germany. Three million German soldiers were accompanied by the Finnish and cut off the Soviet soldiers from necessities, so the Soviets were forced to surrender. Germany violated every standard of warfare with the disrespectful way that they treated the prisoners of war. Around fifty-seven percent of the 5.7 million Soviets were dead by the end of the war. Consequently, the Soviet prisoners of war were the second largest group persecuted by the Nazis due to racial differences (“Search Results”). As you can see, even though the Jews were treated very harshly, they weren't the only group to be persecuted by the

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