Shadowing-Übung: Why Did Hitler Hate Jews - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit Video
Lektion wird erstellt...
1
People think the Holocaust was the greatest tragedy in human history, all driven by ego and the personal madness of a failed artist.
2
The reality is far more terrifying.
3
In January 1942, 15 senior Nazi officials met at a lakeside villa, not to debate whether it should happen, but how to make it work.
4
Over Cognac, they synchronized a continental operation, treating mass murder as a logistical problem.
5
In just 90 minutes, they decided the fate of millions across Europe.
6
This wasn't a breakdown of civilization, it was a product of it.
7
On January 20th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich summoned 14 other top Nazis to a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.
8
Heydrich, who Hitler once called the man with the iron heart, wouldn't make his mark in popular history like Hitler's inner circle, but he was, without a doubt,
9
one of the most important and most sinister figures in the entire apparatus of the Third Reich.
10
He was a talented violinist, fighter pilot, and fencer who oozed charisma.
11
That saw him rise through the ranks to become the head of the Reich Security Main Office, overseeing the Gestapo, the criminal police, and the SD, the intelligence arm of the SS.
12
Heydrich wasn't so much the epitome of the banality of evil, he was too ruthless to be called banal.
13
But he was a cold, brutal administrator.
14
He was also one of the principal architects of the Nazi policy toward what the regime called the Jewish Question.
15
The Jewish Question, what to do with millions of Jews across Europe.
16
The Nazis called them the Untermensch, subhuman, a parasitic race at the bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy.
17
Naturally, they saw themselves as the Aryans, the master race.
18
The meeting comprised representatives from the ministries of the Interior and Justice, the Reich Chancellery, the Foreign Office, and the Office of the Four -Year Plan,
19
and the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.
20
Also present were representatives from the SS, including the Race and Settlement Main Office and the Office of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood.
21
These weren't fringe fanatics.
22
They were lawyers, administrators, civil servants, and senior government officials, the educated bureaucratic elite of Nazi Germany.
23
Most would be dead within 10 years.
24
But in 1942, they felt on top of the world.
25
One of the most infamous was Adolf Eichmann, a logistics man and an expert in Jewish affairs.
26
After the war, he would go on the run and be captured and hanged in 1962.
27
The big question of the meeting was how to achieve the regime's ambition of nullifying Europe's Jews.
28
The Nazis were masters of euphemism.
29
Rarely in official documents did they openly discuss mass murder, genocide, or extermination.
30
Instead, they talked about evacuation, special treatment, labor deployment, and resettlement, cleansing, and pacification.
31
The Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was more to the point in his private diary.
32
On December 13, 1941, just over a month before Wannsee, he recorded his thoughts following a discussion with Adolf Hitler.
33
Here we can see the stark reality behind the veils of Nazi persecution language.
34
Quote, as regards the Jewish question, the Fuhrer has decided to sweep the floor clean.
35
That was more Nazi metaphor, but he was clearer when he wrote that Hitler had told him, quote, the extermination of the Jews is the necessary consequence,
36
that it should be regarded without any sentimentality.
37
It was the sheer lack of sentimentality or even anger that would surprise many concentration camp inmates.
38
One of the most chilling passages in Holocaust survivor Primo Levi's book, If This Is A Man, is when he watched a German guard beat a prisoner without emotion.
39
He was amazed and he asked himself, how can one hit a man without anger?
40
Levi's question stands as a testament to the bureaucratic, detached nature of Nazi cruelty, But the practical question before any of that happened was how to dispose of so many people.
41
On December 16th, 1941, at a government meeting in Krakow, Hans Frank, the government general of occupied Poland, discussed this same topic when he remarked,
42
We cannot shoot or poison these 3 ,500 ,000 Jews in Poland, but we take the measures which will lead to their annihilation.
43
As for where this would happen and by what means, Frank said that would be determined in due course.
44
And it was.
45
A month later, those men met in Wannsee, an affluent suburb of Berlin associated with bankers, industrialists, scientists, and artists.
46
Inside the lakeside villa, refreshments were served and cigarettes smoked as officials gathered around the conference table.
47
Notes were taken and later distilled into a document that would become known as the Wannsee Protocol.
48
Heydrich had the answer to the question everyone had been asking.
49
The Führer had approved a solution.
50
The Jews would be evacuated to the east, but it was what Heydrich said next that would attract the attention of future historians.
51
These actions are nevertheless to be seen only as temporary relief,
52
but they are providing the practical experience that is of great significance for the coming final solution of the Jewish question.
53
In his presentation, he discussed the approximately 11 million Jews living throughout Europe.
54
4 .3 million were already under Nazi control by early 1942.
55
The number of Jews in each country country was listed on a prepared document.
56
The Jews would be put to work as forced laborers.
57
Heydrich was clear that many would die in the process.
58
Doubtless, the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes, he said.
59
But he added something just as chilling.
60
Any final remnant that survives will have to be dealt with appropriately because otherwise, by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival.
61
Many historians regard this passage as one of the clearest indications for the Nazis.
62
No permanent place existed for Jews within their vision of Europe.
63
The slaughter had already started.
64
The Einsatzgruppen, Nazi death squads, had already executed hundreds of thousands of Jews or more in Soviet territory.
65
That included women and children.
66
They also murdered Soviet political officials, prisoners of war, and others deemed enemies of the Reich.
67
This was how they intended to go on.
68
But as was being discussed in meeting before the slaughter the nazis envisioned jews as being deported eastward germany
69
and the protectorate of bohemia
70
and moravia were among the first areas to be addressed from
71
there the process would be extended across europe men women
72
and children would be concentrated in ghettos deported by rail
73
and subjected to forced labor
74
and ultimately for most death the meeting participants discussed what to do about mixed race jews
75
and jews married to non -jews various exemptions, classifications, and special cases were considered.
76
Sterilization was proposed as a solution to prevent any more Jews from being born.
77
Otto Hoffman of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, who would outlive almost every other participant in the meeting and die in 1982,
78
argued that extensive use should be made of sterilization.
79
Those classified as half -Jews, he believed, would often prefer sterilization to deportation.
80
From the regime's perspective, it offered a way to eliminate what it considered a racial problem
81
while avoiding many of the legal and administrative complications surrounding mixed ancestry and mixed marriages.
82
Considering the topic and the pain it would cause, this was brutally cold language, but for them it was an administrative solution for an existential problem.
83
For Jews already in mixed marriages, they agreed that the matters would be handled on a case -by -case basis.
84
Much depended on who the Jewish spouse was married to, and whether special exemptions might apply.
85
The men agreed that if a Jew was married to a prominent Aryan, deportation could prove politically awkward.
86
Similar concerns arose for Jews working in industries considered vital to the war effort.
87
After all, they might actually need these people.
88
Erich Neumann of the Four Year Plan Organization argued
89
that Jews employed in essential sectors should remain in their positions until suitable replacements could be found.
90
The meeting came to an end after about 90 minutes.
91
In the years that followed, historians, lawyers, and judges would debate precisely how explicit the participants had been about their intentions.
92
The methods of mass murder were not detailed in the surviving minutes.
93
Many post -war investigators would say
94
that the language of the meeting pointed toward a policy whose ultimate objective was the total annihilation of Europe's Jews.
95
If sterilization was presented as a preferable alternative for some categories of Jews, what fate awaited those who were deported?
96
When Adolf Eichmann was captured in 1960, he answered that question.
97
He testified that he remembered discussions about shootings and the quote, business with the engine, but he claimed poison gas hadn't been mentioned in the meeting.
98
By engine, he was referring to the mobile gas vans already being used to murder Jews in occupied territories.
99
Eichmann had witnessed prisoners being shot in 1941, an experience he later claimed had deeply disturbed him.
100
In another case, he saw victims of the gas vans thrown into a pit
101
but only after the gold teeth had been extracted.
102
He also recalled the conversation with Heydrich, He told me the Führer had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.
103
He didn't witness the gas chambers in use, but he had said he had once seen the terrible airtight rooms being prepared at Treblinka extermination camp.
104
What the minutes of the meeting leave out is this.
105
In September 1941 at the Auschwitz -Birkenau concentration camp, the Nazis had already started testing a method of wholesale murder.
106
They were unleashing the deadly gas Zyklon B on Soviet prisoners.
107
But after the Wannsee Conference, Auschwitz would become the largest killing center in the Holocaust.
108
The implementation for what the Nazis called the expulsion of the Jews was ready.
109
But where did the blueprint for this intense enmity begin?
110
Between 9 and 11 million military personnel
111
and about 6 to 13 million civilians died in World war one germany lost over 2 million soldiers
112
and somewhere between 400 000
113
and 763 000 civilians it was a disaster germany was said
114
to be the primary aggressor it had to pay under the
115
treaty of versailles germany was ordered to pay reparations totaling 132
116
billion gold marks around 500 to 600 billion dollars today it lost around 13 of its european territory
117
and all of its overseas colonies.
118
It was a national humiliation.
119
That sentiment was never deeper than after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.
120
The German economy collapsed, unemployment soared, and faith in the political establishment crumbled.
121
Men of working age queued for free soup at the homeless shelters and soup kitchens.
122
Meanwhile, women told their children that they'd have to go hungry.
123
For millions of Germans, the promise of stability and prosperity
124
that their government talked about after the First World War was a lie.
125
The country was broken.
126
It was in this atmosphere of gloom and disenchantment
127
that Adolf Hitler transformed from a minor political agitator into a major political force.
128
He promised that Germany would rise from the ashes and reclaim its lost greatness.
129
But to do so, he needed a legend, a conspiracy theory, one that said Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield in World War I,
130
but had been stabbed in the back by disloyal elements at home.
131
He found it.
132
According to his narrative, liberal Democrats, socialists, and especially Jews had undermined the war effort.
133
They were the people who betrayed the nation at the moment of need.
134
He had taken this partly from a 1919 parliamentary inquiry into Germany's defeat.
135
Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg had stated that the German army had been betrayed from within.
136
Hindenburg's exact words translated were, The German army was stabbed in the back.
137
No guilt applies to the good core of the army.
138
Supporters of the conspiracy theory pointed to labor strikes, political unrest, and anti -war sentiment on the home front at the end of World War I.
139
They blamed the Jews in part for what they said were the strikes in the arms industry
140
that had left soldiers without war materials.
141
Hindenburg had claimed that he hadn't been supported by the new German government.
142
He also claimed that the respected British military writer, General Sir Frederick Maurice, had agreed that Germany was stabbed in the back by certain influential bad actors.
143
On December 18, 1918, the reactionary newspaper Deutsche Tagessaitung printed a story that talked up those claims, which further fired up German nationalists.
144
Maurice later denied he'd ever said that.
145
While civilians letting Germany down had been discussed in some circles in Britain, Maurice confirmed in his 1919 book The Last Four Months that,
146
quote, there is no question that the German armies were completely and decisively beaten in the field.
147
It didn't matter.
148
The conspiracy theorists had already made up their minds.
149
The German National People's Party and Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party or NSDAP ran with it.
150
For them, Maurice's original words were evidence of Jewish sabotage.
151
The myth was further emboldened in Germany by the words of Douglas Hayek, commander of the British and Commonwealth forces on the Western Front.
152
Prior to Germany's surrender, he had said, Germany is not broken in the military sense.
153
Her forces have withdrawn fighting very bravely and in excellent order.
154
But the conspiracy theory didn't include another of Heig's assertions when in October 1918 he had written in his diary, I think we have their army beaten now.
155
The truth was that Germany lost the war on the battlefield worn down by years of attrition and Allied superiority.
156
There was plenty of evidence to support this.
157
Including the words of General Erich Ludendorff, in 1918 he concluded that Germany could no longer win the war and so he urged that peace negotiations begin.
158
Yet after the war, he became one of the most prominent supporters of the stabbed -in -the -back myth.
159
He had backed the claim that the Social Democrats, the Catholic Center Party, Socialists, trade unions, and the Jews had betrayed Germany.
160
The conspiracy theory was transformed into a powerful political weapon that poisoned German politics and helped undermine the Weimar Republic.
161
For some, it would advance their political careers.
162
For others, it offered a convenient explanation for defeat that shifted the blame away from the military leadership and onto political enemies.
163
For many ordinary Germans struggling through the turmoil of the 1920s, the myth and betrayal provided a simple explanation for a complex defeat.
164
It helped them to preserve both personal pride and national honor.
165
The narrative provided a scapegoat, not just for losing the war, but for many of Germany's problems.
166
Jews.
167
Around 100 ,000 Jews had served for Germany in the First World War, and roughly 12 ,000 had died fighting.
168
Some were decorated for bravery.
169
The data came from a report after Jews had been accused
170
of being shirkers who had served away from the danger of the front line.
171
The report, published by the War Ministry Census on Jewish Participation in the War, discovered that this wasn't true.
172
But the report was suppressed.
173
The myth of shirking lived on.
174
The German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation, the largest anti -Semitic organization in Germany, claimed that Jews were profiteers,
175
spies, and defeatists undermining the war effort.
176
Nazi propagandists repeated the same story, portraying Jews as disloyal outsiders responsible for Germany's suffering during and after the war.
177
But a giant lie needs a messenger.
178
Enter a traumatized veteran searching for an explanation for his country's humiliation.
179
Historians often disagree as to when exactly Hitler's views hardened into the racial ideology he would later embrace.
180
The first sour notes of his antisemitism seemed to emerge
181
when he was trying and failing to become a professional artist in Vienna.
182
There, the once positive young man became disillusioned as he lived in near poverty among the unemployed and dispossessed.
183
This likely contributed to the bitterness that later shaped his worldview.
184
But those experiences alone don't explain the genocidal policies he would eventually pursue.
185
In fact, one of the Jews Hitler knew during his younger years, he greatly trusted and respected.
186
Dr. Edward Bloch, the Jewish physician who cared for Hitler's mother as she suffered from breast cancer.
187
This was the same man who had once treated young Adolf for colds and tonsillitis.
188
After his mother's death, Hitler wrote to Bloch, I shall be grateful to you forever.
189
He wrote to Bloch often.
190
Some of the postguards, embarrassing for the Nazi party, were later confiscated from Bloch by the Gestapo.
191
On another occasion, Hitler wrote,
192
This was the same man who would later state that all Jewish people were polluting Western civilization.
193
It was a startling contradiction.
194
But Hitler's anti -Semitism wasn't rooted in primarily personal experiences with particular Jewish individuals.
195
Rather, he transformed the Jew into an abstract racial and political enemy.
196
It wasn't personal hatred, he told himself.
197
He He believed he was applying reason, history, and science.
198
His opinion of Jews, he claimed, was a kind of scientific rationalism.
199
The evidence was in letters he sent before he came to power.
200
In September 1919, he wrote to a soldier named Adolf Gemlich on the topic of the Jewish question.
201
The Nazis didn't invent the quote Jewish question.
202
The term emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries as Jews across Europe began gaining civil rights after centuries of exclusion.
203
The question facing many European states was how Jewish emancipation would affect society, what to do with their citizenship and political rights,
204
what about cultural assimilation, immigration, and national identity.
205
And not all of the proposed solutions were rooted in anti -Semitism.
206
Many had argued for Jewish equal rights and full integration into European society.
207
But that wasn't what the Nazis wanted.
208
Hitler made that abundantly clear when he talked to Gemmlish about it.
209
The letter stands as evidence that Hitler had rationalized his hatred toward Jews.
210
Not any particular Jew, but the entire Jewish race for what he conceived was its pernicious effect on German society.
211
Anti -Semitism as a political movement, he wrote, may not and cannot be determined by emotional factors but only by the recognition of facts.
212
He said the fact was, the dangers posed by Jewry find expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people.
213
Hitler already knew he could rouse the rabble if needed, not just the openly antisemitic, but the majority, people he believed were rightly racist.
214
Nonetheless, he wasn't advocating mass murder at that point in his life.
215
He wrote, an antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom.
216
But bloody pogroms weren't the solution for young Hitler, bureaucracy was.
217
He wrote that a healthy antisemitism should be based on reason, and this would, quote, lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews.
218
The legislation would lead to the ultimate objective, the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.
219
It wasn't personal, it was much worse than that.
220
Jews, he believed, were parasites sucking on the lifeblood of the German people.
221
He contended that they stuck together and would eventually have so much power they would destroy Western civilization.
222
At the time, German Jews were disproportionately represented in some fields including finance, law, science, publishing, medicine, and the arts.
223
But what Hitler ignored was that most Jews were shopkeepers, clerks, tailors, teachers, factory workers, and war veterans.
224
Many were poor and almost completely powerless.
225
Like other Germans, they held a wide range of political views and social positions.
226
The vast majority had no influence over government policy, banking, the media, or the course of world events.
227
It didn't matter.
228
With the right propaganda, Hitler knew that many hard -working Germans, some filled with resentment, would express the enmity against Jews he so dearly wanted.
229
He had seen with his own eyes how an anti -Jewish policy can win votes.
230
The mayor of Vienna, Karl Luger, had repeatedly won elections using virally anti -Semitic language that had stirred the masses.
231
He claimed that Jews had control over too many businesses.
232
He said that the poor craftsman had to beg the Jewish furniture dealer.
233
Banking high finance, he said, was in the hands of the Jews, Jews who operated a kind of terrorism on society.
234
Voting for him was to liberate Christian people from the hegemony of Jewry.
235
His radical anti -Semitism depicted Jews as only specialists in vile profits, in what he said amounted to an expropriation of the indigenous population.
236
This tarring of millions of European Jews with the same brush
237
was partly why Hitler would call him the greatest German mayor of all times.
238
Of course, Luger's anti -Semitism was mostly driven by selfish motives.
239
It was all backed by highly discriminative, dehumanizing language.
240
Luger would describe Jews as, quote, beasts of prey in human form.
241
For Hitler, they were vermin, pests, and parasites.
242
Importantly, such feelings weren't limited to Germany and Austria.
243
Anti -Semitism was rampant all over Europe, especially in Poland, the Russian Empire, Romania, Hungary, and France.
244
Even in Britain, where the Jews had better legal protections, they faced prejudice and were subject to enduring conspiracy theories.
245
Luger and men like him across Europe argued that capitalism's inequalities were deliberate and that Jews were the architects of the system.
246
As Europe searched for answers to poverty, instability, and social upheaval, many found them in anti -Semitism.
247
Hitler knew he could exploit this, he just needed an audience.
248
But when people finally started listening, a secret would emerge that contradicted his entire worldview.
249
When World War I ended and the democratic Weimar Republic was established, many German Jews supported the new government.
250
Meanwhile, in Russia, the Bolsheviks had overthrown the old regime during the Russian Revolution.
251
Several prominent Bolshevik leaders were of Jewish origin, Jews supporting the German government, Jews participating in communist movements.
252
Hitler would claim that this was evidence that the Jews were overrunning Europe.
253
They were orchestrating both capitalism and communism from behind the scenes.
254
At first glance, that seemed like a contradiction.
255
How could Jews be both Marxist revolutionaries and the supposed puppet masters of international finance?
256
Anti -Semites had an answer.
257
They supposedly controlled capitalism through banks and finance, profited from war, and kept ordinary people poor.
258
At that same time, they were accused of using communism to destroy nations from within.
259
The theory didn't need to make sense.
260
Hitler's ideology worked on the basis of turning an entire race of people into villains and caricatures.
261
He would make complex stories a straightforward good versus evil narrative.
262
But his actions and beliefs didn't square with his life.
263
One of his senior officers during the First World War was Ernst Hesse, a highly decorated officer of Jewish ancestry whom Hitler respected.
264
Another superior officer was Hugo Gutmann, who recommended Hitler for the Iron Cross First Class, one of the most important awards he would ever receive.
265
There were other examples, and not just his family doctor.
266
Hitler's former associate Reinhold Heinisch, who knew him during his years in Vienna, later claimed that many of Hitler's acquaintances at the time were Jews.
267
Among them was Josef Neumann, who helped Hitler sell his paintings, and Simon Robinson, a one -eyed locksmith whom Hitler is said to have befriended.
268
Like many from the stories of Hitler's Vienna years, some details remain disputed.
269
What is clear though is that before politics consumed his life, Hitler lived and worked alongside Jews on a daily basis.
270
How could Jews be portrayed as inherently disloyal when many had fought bravely for Germany?
271
How could they be depicted as parasites when some had helped Hitler personally?
272
These people were clearly not a monolithic group sharing identical beliefs, loyalties, or character traits.
273
Yet Hitler would depict them as a single hostile force working against Germany.
274
Rather than abandoning the theory when confronted with seeming contradiction, he treated those exceptions as anomalies.
275
The existence of Jewish soldiers, Jewish patriots, and Jews he personally admired did not alter a worldview.
276
But in those early years, few were listening.
277
It might have stayed that way had something cataclysmic not happened, something that cleared the path for the rise of a tyrant.
278
The hyperinflation of the early 1920s had made money almost useless in Germany.
279
Still, the country recovered and enjoyed what became a golden 20s.
280
Life remained depressingly difficult for many working -class families, but larger sections of the middle class saw their fortunes improve.
281
Berlin became one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, a center of artistic brilliance, technological innovation, and cultural experimentation.
282
And then came the crash.
283
The American financial system imploded, and Germany was hit hard because it was heavily dependent on American loans and investment.
284
The country was suddenly ravaged by severe unemployment and business failures.
285
Families lost their savings.
286
Young men out of work scoured the streets for discarded food.
287
Crime and rates of self -harm increased while political extremists battled in the streets.
288
Germans weren't in this together.
289
Far from it.
290
Some wealthy Germans lost substantial fortunes, but others survived the crisis intact.
291
In certain cases, they even profited by purchasing distressed assets and taking advantage of collapsing prices.
292
To many ordinary Germans, it appeared that those at the top remained protected while everyone else suffered, Adolf Hitler was watching closely.
293
The cynicism Germans now felt at their elites, the anger they felt toward capitalism and its winners, was never more intense.
294
Hitler's furious speeches, once viewed by many as the words of a madman, gained momentum.
295
His ideas and his book Mein Kampf had remained largely on the sidelines since he'd written it, but within a period of about three years, as German banks collapsed and factories closed,
296
many people felt that they had been betrayed by a government that It could not provide stability.
297
betrayal was Hitler's favorite explanation.
298
The Weimar politicians were weak and corrupt, he said.
299
The Versailles Treaty was humiliating.
300
He had reminded the people who had not been listening years ago that their country had been stabbed in the back.
301
Suddenly, this resonated, as did his theory that the Jews were at the center of all the carnage.
302
Germany needed national unity, he said.
303
It needed strong leadership, a man who gets things done and won't bow to selfish elites.
304
With 6 million people unemployed compared to about 1 .3 million before the crash, many people were desperate.
305
Hitler suddenly seemed relevant.
306
To many, he became a savior, the man who would put Germany back on the map.
307
His hyper -nationalist and racist ravings now sounded not like rants, but workable solutions.
308
He had been chairman of the NSDAP since 1921, but in those days it was a small movement of hardline political outsiders.
309
When Hitler was imprisoned for attempting a violent coup, people saw it as proof that he was an extremist.
310
It was a view reflected in the 1928 election when the Nazis won just 2 .6 % of the votes.
311
Yet, by July 1932, when Germany had floundered in a sea of economic gloom, the Nazis had become the largest party in the country, winning 37 .3 % of the vote.
312
Those were not merely votes of extremist thinkers, but farmers, shopkeepers, clerks, laborers, paid soccer players, doctors, and factory workers.
313
In just four years, a man once viewed as a malcontent had persuaded nearly half of the country
314
that he could save the country.
315
Under him, other nations would quiver, the economy would prosper, the working people would be happy and proud.
316
The humiliation was over, but not for everyone.
317
For success to happen, someone would have to suffer.
318
The people Hitler blamed for the crash were shrewd and unholy players on Wall Street.
319
Invisible hands he claimed controlled international finance.
320
Jews, German, American, rich, and poor, they were all the same according to Hitler's reasoning.
321
And once in power, the rhetoric that demonized these people had to be codified into law.
322
In the 1930s, Germany was a very homogenous society.
323
Out of a population of between 65 to 67 million, only between 500 ,000 to 525 ,000 people were Jewish.
324
Black and Asian communities were tiny, maybe amounting to a few thousand people, although census data isn't available.
325
Jews were the largest minority, but they were diverse.
326
They differed in wealth, region, politics, and culture.
327
Some of them married non -Jews, thereby seen to be assimilating into a non -Jewish culture.
328
According to an academic paper, about 35 ,000 Jews, or 6 % of the total Jewish population, were married to non -Jews throughout the 1930s.
329
It was a small number, but intermarriage in those days, regardless of ethnicity, was often frowned upon.
330
If the Nazis had their way, these numbers wouldn't even exist.
331
They did everything to unmixed society.
332
The Nazis had a specific term for people with mixed or part -Jewish blood, Michlinge.
333
They created elaborate racial categories to classify them.
334
A Michlinge of the first degree was someone with two Jewish grandparents.
335
A Michlinge of the second degree had one Jewish grandparent.
336
According to the 1939 census, Nazi officials recorded roughly 72 ,000 first -degree Michelin and about 39 ,000 second -degree Michelin.
337
When they introduced the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the horror expanded.
338
The Nazis wanted to know exactly who belonged to what they considered the higher and lower races.
339
They began cataloging people according to ancestry and bloodline.
340
Under the Reich citizenship law, people classified as Jews lost their citizenship and basic rights.
341
Romans.
342
Roma, who were also regarded as racial outsiders, would later face similar treatment.
343
With Slavs, the Nazis' racial thinking was sometimes less straightforward.
344
They were viewed as possessing related blood, but millions still died in German captivity and citizens were annihilated in their villages.
345
The brutality and rigidity of the system was further outlined in the law for protection of German blood and German honor.
346
The law declared that the Jews who married and had children with Germans were polluting the nation's blood.
347
Intermarriage between Jews and Germans was outlawed.
348
For many already married and listed as privileged, they were sent to live in harsh conditions in one of the Nazi's Jew houses.
349
The men were often sent to work in factories where they were often mistreated and humiliated.
350
Extramarital sexual relations were also banned.
351
The Nazis even banned wealthy Jews from hiring German women under 45 as domestic servants.
352
It was partly to prevent the men of the household from having sex with them.
353
Of course, love is a strong motivator, and there were Jews and non -Jews who maintained their romantic or sexual relationships.
354
Some even started relationships, but they risked being exposed by neighbors, co -workers, or disgruntled family members.
355
The Nazi seemed particularly outraged at relationships between Jewish men and non -Jewish women, but not so much the other way around.
356
Nazi propaganda frequently portrayed Jewish men as predators, corrupting German womanhood.
357
But when the woman was Jewish and her husband Aryan, the Nazis deemed this an Aryan household.
358
The women mostly avoided deportation and didn't always have to wear the yellow star marking them as ripe for persecution.
359
Under Himmler's 1943 plan for the elimination of Jews from the Reich territory, many thousands of Jews were rounded up just in Berlin.
360
Many of the non -Jewish wives refused to abandon their Jewish husbands.
361
In February and March 1943, hundreds of them took to the streets and protested against Nazi racial policy.
362
The women stood their ground despite threats from the authorities, and it worked worked.
363
To the embarrassment of the regime, many of the men were eventually released.
364
The protest exposed an uncomfortable truth for the Nazis.
365
They could not always separate people as easily as their racial theories demanded.
366
Their propaganda had failed on those women.
367
Love had won out, not because of Nazi compassion, but because they were trying to Nazi -fy everything and everyone.
368
They didn't want to alienate Aryan people by taking away their family members.
369
It was strategic.
370
They chose pragmatism over ideological purity purely for optics.
371
Same -sex relations were also outlawed, but they were already illegal in Germany before the Nazis came to power.
372
The law hadn't been strictly enforced, though.
373
Big cities like Berlin had an open gay scene.
374
The Nazis cracked down once in power, raiding clubs in suspected gay people's houses.
375
About 100 ,000 were arrested and about half of those were sentenced.
376
It is believed that about 5 ,000 and 15 ,000 were sent to concentration camps.
377
Close to 60 % of them didn't make it out.
378
This was the Nazis' attempt to eliminate all traces of homosexuality from Germany.
379
They often called same -sex attraction a Jewish conspiracy that was undermining German society.
380
To be gay and Jewish was almost unthinkable for the typical Nazi ideologue.
381
But such people existed.
382
There's a famous case of a lesbian couple, Lili Wurst and Feliz Stragenheim.
383
Feliz, a Jewish resistance member living under a false identity, worked for a Nazi newspaper.
384
Lili was the wife of a Wehrmacht soldier.
385
When Lili learned that Feliz was Jewish, she didn't turn her in.
386
She stood by her.
387
Their relationship endured despite a regime built on racial hatred.
388
For them, love proved stronger than ideology.
389
Did they have a happy ending?
390
No. As the Nazis widened the net in Berlin, Felice was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, and later Gross Rosen.
391
It's believed that she was one of the many Jews who died on a death march during an evacuation.
392
If there is a happy ending, it's that Lilly helped other Jews avoid the same fate.
393
One of the sticking points for Heinrich Himmler, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, was all of the half -Jews and quarter -Jews serving in the German military.
394
There were maybe 160 ,000 and in total, some were tolerated and even decorated for bravery, a glaring contradiction at the heart of Nazi racial ideology.
395
But as the war progressed and the regime became more and more radicalized, most Mischlinge soldiers and officers were pushed out.
396
Many faced discrimination, forced labor, or imprisonment.
397
Conditions for them were often harsh, but not comparable to the extermination and starvation policies inflicted on those sent to the concentration in death camps.
398
Historians have said that maybe 90 % of Jews in mixed marriages, including soldiers, survived the war.
399
But they were all counted.
400
They were all condemned.
401
Almost.
402
Eduard Bloch and other Jews he had known were treated with soft hands.
403
Even Hitler's former right -hand man, confidant, and bodyguard, and the SS's second -ever member, Emil Maurice, was discovered to have Jewish ancestry.
404
He was one -eighth Jewish by Nazi racial calculations, Rather than discard a loyal follower, Hitler overrode his own rules.
405
Like a handful of others whose existence exposed the contradictions in Nazi ideology, Maurice was declared an honorary Aryan.
406
The public didn't see this as openly contradictory because the Nazis controlled all the narratives.
407
When it came to information and truth, they were uncompromising and ruthless.
408
Josef Goebbels, a highly educated man with a PhD in literature and a strong knowledge of philosophy and history, understood the power of myth death.
409
He knew how repeating lies constantly can brainwash the public.
410
He helped construct one of the greatest lies many Germans had ever been told -
411
that their country's problems could be traced to a single enemy.
412
The timing was just right.
413
The sense of hopelessness and anxiety that came with the economic crash paved the way for totalitarianism.
414
The Nazis hypnotized the people, making once unthinkable ideas seem reasonable.
415
It's something modern academics have said is more possible after a major crisis or what the writer Naomi Klein called shock therapy.
416
It is a fact.
417
When people are desperate and anxious, they can more easily be molded to believe extreme ideas.
418
Myth -making and villain creation became the task of the ministry of propaganda.
419
In films, Jews were always the bad guys.
420
Toxic, untrustworthy, manipulative, and parasitical.
421
People saw it or heard it in daily radio broadcasts, in cinemas, in the theater, in classrooms, and in heavily censored newspapers.
422
The language used for these Jews was always dehumanizing.
423
Rats, foxes, lice, cockroaches, and vultures.
424
By denying a Jewish person their humanity to feel and think, the Nazis justified the abuse and violence they perpetrated.
425
If citizens wanted to find criticism of those stereotypes, there were few places they could look.
426
Some books were promoted, others were banned and burned.
427
Intellectual stimulation was viewed as dangerous, and what academics have said became a cultural genocide.
428
People had to toe the line.
429
A misplaced joke at work could get a person arrested, maybe even executed, especially if they'd already been labeled as politically unreliable, an artistic degenerate, or worse,
430
a friend of the Jews.
431
The Nazis, like many totalitarian regimes, relied heavily on labels.
432
Citizens were encouraged to report suspicious behavior, and denunciations became a routine part of daily life.
433
Neighbors informed on neighbors, co -workers on co -workers, and in some documented cases, even children reported their own parents.
434
Like the communists in the Soviet Union and later in China, the Nazis sought to dominate the flow of information.
435
They aimed to shape how people thought about almost every aspect of daily life.
436
From cooking food, to falling in love, to smoking cigarettes or how they felt about gardening and sport, they molded it all.
437
Propaganda was not viewed as a dirty word.
438
To Goebbels, it was an essential tool of government, a means of creating unity and binding society, and it was very expensive.
439
The Nazis spent about 14 million Reichsmarks on its Ministry of Propaganda in 1933.
440
By 1941 it had risen to nearly 187 million, an increase of over 1 ,200 percent.
441
Goebbels claimed it would intellectually mobilize Germany.
442
The ministry started off with just five departments and about 350 staff.
443
It eventually grew to 17 departments and 2 ,000 staff.
444
In what was a 10 -year campaign of lies and exaggerations, A minority of Germans actively criticized the Nazis, sometimes for what they perceived to be spreading misinformation.
445
They were usually arrested for it.
446
Historians estimate that between 15 ,000 and 77 ,000 German critics and resistance were executed.
447
But the majority of Germans, their thoughts overwhelmed by propaganda, either supported the Nazi policies or quietly ignored what was happening.
448
They believed their leaders were restoring order.
449
A kind of collective double -think took hold.
450
Peace could only be won through war.
451
Unity would be achieved through exclusion.
452
Compassion became weakness, and brutality became strength.
453
Truth became a rewrite of history.
454
Every morning the radio played and the Reich Broadcasting Corporation talked about the Jewish problem and how it was being dealt with.
455
To think anything else was a crime.
456
Many Germans who kept quiet likely didn't agree with the more extreme measures, but they turned a blind eye because life was indeed improving for them.
457
If it hadn't, the Nazis wouldn't have become so powerful.
458
Some of that working class gained access to cultural events and leisure activities that had once seemed out of reach.
459
Many farmers, the people the Nazis said were the bedrock of the Aryan race, rejoiced at their higher incomes.
460
Some middle -class families saved for radios, vacations in Europe, maybe even a car.
461
After years of depression and instability, millions felt that Germany was finally getting back on its feet.
462
So they said nothing as brutality took place all around them.
463
But over time, these propaganda and laws eventually hit a logistical wall, forcing the regime into its darkest corner.
464
History shows us that totalitarianism is not sustainable.
465
The power devours itself from within as each of its organs vie for a higher kind of ideological purity.
466
Tyrants, bureaucrats, and ideological citizens look to signal their higher virtue and turn on each other.
467
In the Nazi party proper, internal paranoia led to assassinations and bitter power struggles as Hitler's faith in his generals faded.
468
The distrust came to a head on July 20th, 1944, when a coup d 'etat failed and Hitler barely escaped assassination by bomb.
469
The Gestapo cracked down immediately, with pure vengeance.
470
Some of the conspirators were executed by firing squad that same night, and another 7 ,000 people were arrested.
471
The Nazis eventually executed nearly 5 ,000 of them.
472
Many were just loosely connected to the plot or swept up in the wider purge, along with roughly 200 people directly involved in the conspiracy.
473
People were tortured as the Gestapo attempted to find out who was for and was against them.
474
Again, Hitler and his inner circle claimed that they had been stabbed in the back by traitors.
475
They'd even punished the accused men's families.
476
The exact reasons for the coup have been debated.
477
The plotters were mostly aristocratic Germans who saw the war as a lost cause and planned to make peace with the Allies.
478
For Hitler, they were cowards.
479
But some of them, like General Friedrich Ulbricht, were critical of the extreme nature of the Nazis' anti -Jewish policy.
480
Barbaric, he'd said about Kristallnacht, the 1938 Pogrom, when German Jews were hunted, beaten, and murdered.
481
Businesses were destroyed and plundered while synagogues were burned to the ground.
482
Not all high -ranking Nazis and military officers agreed with the final solution.
483
some viewed the mass murder of Jewish
484
and Soviet civilians as a moral stain on Germany and a betrayal of the values they claimed to defend.
485
Still, the reasons for the coup attempt were much more complicated.
486
Some of the plotters were conservatives, some liberals, some monarchists, and some were motivated primarily by religious conviction.
487
But for many, after watching their countrymen die en masse in the Soviet Union, they concluded that the war was unwinnable and that Hitler had to go.
488
The Germans had been beaten in Britain.
489
Hitler's ambition to take the Soviet Union in 6 to 10 weeks in Operation Barbarossa, had turned into a bloodbath.
490
Troops froze to death in that first winter and later the Battle of Stalingrad was a major loss.
491
Those men had been ordered on a mission of annihilation.
492
They thought that they were fighting to save Western civilization from being overrun by the lower races.
493
Again, Jews were at the forefront of the contempt.
494
Each German soldier had heard the order.
495
This struggle demands ruthless, drastic action against Bolshevik agitators, saboteurs, Jews, and complete elimination of any active or passive resistance.
496
As Heinrich Himmler once had said, the destruction of Asia and Jewry was necessary for evolution of the species.
497
So, when things started to go wrong, the Nazis became even more ruthless toward the Jews at home and in their camps.
498
They escalated their extermination policies.
499
Historians have always debated exactly how the Holocaust evolved.
500
Some of them emphasize Hitler's central role, others focus on the actions of subordinates who anticipated Hitler's wishes and competed to fulfill them.
501
They also disagree about why the killing accelerated so fast.
502
Was mass extermination the plan from the start, or did it radicalize as the war turned against Germany?
503
One of the most influential explanations comes from the British historian Ian Kershaw.
504
He favored the view of what the German historian Hans Mommsen formally coined as a cumulative radicalization.
505
In this theory, rather than following a single detailed blueprint, the Nazi state became trapped in a cycle of escalation.
506
Bureaucrats competed with other bureaucrats.
507
Party officials competed with the military.
508
Each vied to demonstrate loyalty, ideological commitment, and their usefulness to the regime.
509
As military defeats mounted and paranoia spread throughout the leadership, extreme measures expanded.
510
The result was a system that continually radicalized itself, driving the persecution and murder of Europe's Jews to greater extremes.
511
There is no one -size -fits -all explanation, but at the heart of it all lay the total eradication of Jews from Europe
512
that Hitler and the Nazis had discussed at Wannsee.
513
Human beings are often tempted by explanations that reduce complex conditions to the actions of a single villainous group.
514
Jews, minorities, immigrants, the defective - it will likely happen time and time again in the future,
515
and each time the group casting the blame will tell themselves they are the good guys.
516
This kind of thinking is one of humanity's most destructive impulses, and nowhere was it more evident than in Nazi Germany.
517
Unrest was exploited by a group of men who were able to convince ordinary people
518
that a minority was responsible for their suffering.
519
The Holocaust is not just history, it's a warning.
520
It shows what happens when societies abandon in nuance for simple, hateful answers.
521
And once that happens, the outcome is never uncertain.
522
Nazi Germany was built on hatred, but what happens when the regime collapses?
523
Find out, and how did Germany get rid of the Nazis so fast?
524
Or watch this video.
📺 Gleicher Kanal
B21
The Leaked Audit That Exposes OpenAI's Real Financial Crisis
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
6'9" Brilliant Psychopath Who Hunted College Students (America's Most Evil Serial Killers)
University StudentsWorking Adults
B21
What Happens To Your Body When You Don't Eat (Fast)
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B21
Crazy Laws That Still Exist Around The World
University StudentsWorking Adults
B22
20% Speed of Light!! NEW Light Engine is INSANE!
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B21
These Crimes Will Send You To Death Row
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B21
What Happens To Nuclear Waste?
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B21
Insane Assassinations That Changed the World
University StudentsWorking Adults
B24
Warren Buffett Is Selling NOW. The $397 Billion COLLAPSE.
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B21
The 7 Trillion AI Gamble Is Failing. Big Tech is TRAPPED Right NOW.
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
C14
The Limitless AI Lie. The Bubble Is Slowly BURSTING.
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B21
50 Insane Facts About Vietnam War You Didn't Know
University StudentsWorking Adults
B21
15 Surprising Rules That Las Vegas Hotels Strictly Enforce
Travel EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B24
MH370's LAST Hunt. MYSTERY FINALLY SOLVED.
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B24
Innocent on Death Row, Here's What You Actually Get When You're Released
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B21
Countries with the Worst Punishments Today
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B23
Maximum Security Prison Escape And Insane Crime Spree
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B21
Win $20,000 Dollars if You Survive this Haunted House
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
The Next Great Recession Isn't Housing... Its FAR Dumber.
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B22
Why Do You Have Pain Here When You Run
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
✨ Empfohlenes Video
C11
361 Sätze
The Men Who Murdered Himmler? New Documents Reveal MI5 Present When Himmler Died!
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C17
37 Sätze
3 Reasons Why Nuclear Energy Is Terrible! 2/3
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C1625 Sätze
Richard Dawkins vs. Mehdi Hasan
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B24
236 Sätze
The ENTIRE History of WW2 Explained
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
C11
107 Sätze
THB Israel Never Truly Wanted Peace with Palestine - Avi Mayer - Opp
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B23
155 Sätze
Why Ancient Humans Were The Most TERRIFYING Animal Alive
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B24
13 Sätze
Stalin's 5 Year Plan & Holodomor: Progress Built On Mass Starvation
British AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C14
12 Sätze
Tanya's Words :: The Irrationalism Of Humanity
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B11
53 Sätze
Meyer Lansky Interview 1971
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B21
58 Sätze
Sept. 20, 2001 - Bush Declares War on Terror
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B21
29 Sätze
"Authoritarianism isn’t just policies, it’s an aesthetic.” Jon Stewart on Trump’s despotic decor
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
Wortschatz und Sprechhinweise zu dieser Lektion
Dieses Video enthält 524 Sätze und 7406 Wörter zum Nachsprechen. Der gesprochene Teil dauert 43:30. Der Sprecher spricht in natürlichem Tempo, etwa 170 Wörter pro Minute, ähnlich wie im Alltagsgespräch. Nur 75 % der Wörter gehören zu den 3.000 häufigsten im Englischen, der Wortschatz ist also anspruchsvoll.
Wichtiger Wortschatz in diesem Video
15 lernenswerte Wörter aus dem Video, mit Aussprache und Bedeutung:
| Wort | Aussprache | Bedeutung |
|---|---|---|
| racial Adjektiv | /ˈɹeɪʃəl/ | rassisch, Rassen- |
| historian Substantiv | /hɪˈstɔɹi.ən/ | Historiker, Historikerin |
| regime Substantiv | /ɹəˈʒiːm/ | Regime |
| conspiracy Substantiv | /kənˈspɪɹəsi/ | Verschwörung |
| explanation Substantiv | /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/ | Erläuterung, Erklärung |
| myth Substantiv | /mɪθ/ | Mythos |
| stab Verb | /stæb/ | stechen, erstechen |
| ideology Substantiv | /aɪ.diˈɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/ | Ideologie |
| execute Verb | /ˈɛksɪˌkjuːt/ | hinrichten, exekutieren |
| argue Verb | /ˈɑɹ.ɡju/ | diskutieren, erörtern |
| ordinary Adjektiv | /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/ | gewöhnlich, normal |
| concentration Substantiv | /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/ | Konzentration |
| hatred Substantiv | /ˈheɪtɹɪd/ | Hass |
| civilization Substantiv | /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/ | Zivilisation, Kultur |
| coup Substantiv | /ku/ | Coup |
Phrasal Verbs, die du hören wirst
| Wort | Aussprache | Bedeutung |
|---|---|---|
| crack down Verb | /kɹæk ˈdaʊn/ | hart durchgreifen (bei), scharf vorgehen (gegen) |
| find out Verb | herausfinden, erfahren | |
| make up Verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | wiedergutmachen, kompensieren |
| take away Verb | /ˌteɪk əˈweɪ/ | wegnehmen |
| wear down Verb | verschleißen |
Grammatik in diesem Video
Die Strukturen, die der Sprecher am häufigsten verwendet, mit den genauen Worten aus dem Video:
| Struktur | Im Video |
|---|---|
| Bedingungssätze if + Satz, will/would + Verb – eine Bedingung und ihre Folge | If it hadn't, the Nazis wouldn't have |
| Passiv be + Partizip Perfekt – wichtig ist, was geschieht, nicht wer es tut | be called · be captured · should be regarded |
| Relativsätze who / which + Satz – eine Zusatzinformation über eine Person oder Sache | measures which will · those who were · people who betrayed |
| Present Perfect have/has + Partizip Perfekt – eine vergangene Handlung, die jetzt noch wichtig ist | has decided · have withdrawn · have said |
Aussprache, auf die du achten solltest
Der Sprecher verwendet 41 Kurzformen und abgeschwächte Formen, zum Beispiel didn't, wasn't, hadn't. Sprich sie in der kurzen Form, so wie du sie hörst.
- Die „th“-Laute: myth /mɪθ/, ruthless /ˈɹuːθləs/, wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/
- Die Laute „sh“ und „zh“: racial /ˈɹeɪʃəl/, regime /ɹəˈʒiːm/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/
- Lange Wörter – auf die Betonung achten: historian /hɪˈstɔɹi.ən/, conspiracy /kənˈspɪɹəsi/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, ideology /aɪ.diˈɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/
So übst du mit diesem Video
- Höre dir das ganze Video einmal an, ohne zu sprechen, und notiere die Wörter, die du nicht kennst.
- Beginne mit 0,75-facher Geschwindigkeit, sprich Satz für Satz nach und wechsle zur normalen Geschwindigkeit, sobald es leichtfällt.
- Nimm dich auf und vergleiche mit dem Original; achte dabei auf Wörter wie racial, historian, regime.
Was ist die Shadowing-Technik?
Shadowing ist eine wissenschaftlich fundierte Sprachlerntechnik, die ursprünglich für die professionelle Dolmetscherausbildung entwickelt und durch den Polyglotten Dr. Alexander Arguelles populär gemacht wurde. Die Methode ist einfach aber wirkungsvoll: Du hörst englisches Audio von Muttersprachlern und wiederholst es sofort laut — wie ein Schatten, der dem Sprecher mit nur 1–2 Sekunden Verzögerung folgt. Anders als passives Hören oder Grammatikübungen zwingt Shadowing dein Gehirn und deine Mundmuskulatur, gleichzeitig echte Sprachmuster zu verarbeiten und zu reproduzieren. Studien zeigen, dass es Aussprachegenauigkeit, Intonation, Rhythmus, verbundene Sprache, Hörverständnis und Sprechflüssigkeit signifikant verbessert — was es zu einer der effektivsten Methoden für die IELTS Speaking-Vorbereitung und reale englische Kommunikation macht.