Shadowing Practice: Why Did Hitler Hate Jews - Learn English Speaking with Video
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People think the Holocaust was the greatest tragedy in human history, all driven by ego and the personal madness of a failed artist.
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The reality is far more terrifying.
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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.
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Over Cognac, they synchronized a continental operation, treating mass murder as a logistical problem.
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In just 90 minutes, they decided the fate of millions across Europe.
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This wasn't a breakdown of civilization, it was a product of it.
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On January 20th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich summoned 14 other top Nazis to a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.
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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,
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one of the most important and most sinister figures in the entire apparatus of the Third Reich.
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He was a talented violinist, fighter pilot, and fencer who oozed charisma.
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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.
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Heydrich wasn't so much the epitome of the banality of evil, he was too ruthless to be called banal.
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But he was a cold, brutal administrator.
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He was also one of the principal architects of the Nazi policy toward what the regime called the Jewish Question.
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The Jewish Question, what to do with millions of Jews across Europe.
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The Nazis called them the Untermensch, subhuman, a parasitic race at the bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy.
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Naturally, they saw themselves as the Aryans, the master race.
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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,
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and the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.
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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.
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These weren't fringe fanatics.
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They were lawyers, administrators, civil servants, and senior government officials, the educated bureaucratic elite of Nazi Germany.
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Most would be dead within 10 years.
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But in 1942, they felt on top of the world.
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One of the most infamous was Adolf Eichmann, a logistics man and an expert in Jewish affairs.
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After the war, he would go on the run and be captured and hanged in 1962.
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The big question of the meeting was how to achieve the regime's ambition of nullifying Europe's Jews.
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The Nazis were masters of euphemism.
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Rarely in official documents did they openly discuss mass murder, genocide, or extermination.
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Instead, they talked about evacuation, special treatment, labor deployment, and resettlement, cleansing, and pacification.
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The Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was more to the point in his private diary.
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On December 13, 1941, just over a month before Wannsee, he recorded his thoughts following a discussion with Adolf Hitler.
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Here we can see the stark reality behind the veils of Nazi persecution language.
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Quote, as regards the Jewish question, the Fuhrer has decided to sweep the floor clean.
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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,
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that it should be regarded without any sentimentality.
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It was the sheer lack of sentimentality or even anger that would surprise many concentration camp inmates.
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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.
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He was amazed and he asked himself, how can one hit a man without anger?
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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.
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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,
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We cannot shoot or poison these 3 ,500 ,000 Jews in Poland, but we take the measures which will lead to their annihilation.
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As for where this would happen and by what means, Frank said that would be determined in due course.
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And it was.
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A month later, those men met in Wannsee, an affluent suburb of Berlin associated with bankers, industrialists, scientists, and artists.
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Inside the lakeside villa, refreshments were served and cigarettes smoked as officials gathered around the conference table.
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Notes were taken and later distilled into a document that would become known as the Wannsee Protocol.
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Heydrich had the answer to the question everyone had been asking.
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The Führer had approved a solution.
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The Jews would be evacuated to the east, but it was what Heydrich said next that would attract the attention of future historians.
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These actions are nevertheless to be seen only as temporary relief,
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but they are providing the practical experience that is of great significance for the coming final solution of the Jewish question.
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In his presentation, he discussed the approximately 11 million Jews living throughout Europe.
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4 .3 million were already under Nazi control by early 1942.
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The number of Jews in each country country was listed on a prepared document.
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The Jews would be put to work as forced laborers.
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Heydrich was clear that many would die in the process.
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Doubtless, the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes, he said.
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But he added something just as chilling.
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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.
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Many historians regard this passage as one of the clearest indications for the Nazis.
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No permanent place existed for Jews within their vision of Europe.
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The slaughter had already started.
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The Einsatzgruppen, Nazi death squads, had already executed hundreds of thousands of Jews or more in Soviet territory.
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That included women and children.
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They also murdered Soviet political officials, prisoners of war, and others deemed enemies of the Reich.
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This was how they intended to go on.
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But as was being discussed in meeting before the slaughter the nazis envisioned jews as being deported eastward germany
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and the protectorate of bohemia
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and moravia were among the first areas to be addressed from
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there the process would be extended across europe men women
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and children would be concentrated in ghettos deported by rail
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and subjected to forced labor
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and ultimately for most death the meeting participants discussed what to do about mixed race jews
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and jews married to non -jews various exemptions, classifications, and special cases were considered.
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Sterilization was proposed as a solution to prevent any more Jews from being born.
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Otto Hoffman of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, who would outlive almost every other participant in the meeting and die in 1982,
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argued that extensive use should be made of sterilization.
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Those classified as half -Jews, he believed, would often prefer sterilization to deportation.
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From the regime's perspective, it offered a way to eliminate what it considered a racial problem
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while avoiding many of the legal and administrative complications surrounding mixed ancestry and mixed marriages.
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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.
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For Jews already in mixed marriages, they agreed that the matters would be handled on a case -by -case basis.
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Much depended on who the Jewish spouse was married to, and whether special exemptions might apply.
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The men agreed that if a Jew was married to a prominent Aryan, deportation could prove politically awkward.
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Similar concerns arose for Jews working in industries considered vital to the war effort.
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After all, they might actually need these people.
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Erich Neumann of the Four Year Plan Organization argued
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that Jews employed in essential sectors should remain in their positions until suitable replacements could be found.
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The meeting came to an end after about 90 minutes.
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In the years that followed, historians, lawyers, and judges would debate precisely how explicit the participants had been about their intentions.
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The methods of mass murder were not detailed in the surviving minutes.
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Many post -war investigators would say
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that the language of the meeting pointed toward a policy whose ultimate objective was the total annihilation of Europe's Jews.
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If sterilization was presented as a preferable alternative for some categories of Jews, what fate awaited those who were deported?
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When Adolf Eichmann was captured in 1960, he answered that question.
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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.
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By engine, he was referring to the mobile gas vans already being used to murder Jews in occupied territories.
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Eichmann had witnessed prisoners being shot in 1941, an experience he later claimed had deeply disturbed him.
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In another case, he saw victims of the gas vans thrown into a pit
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but only after the gold teeth had been extracted.
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He also recalled the conversation with Heydrich, He told me the Führer had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.
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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.
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What the minutes of the meeting leave out is this.
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In September 1941 at the Auschwitz -Birkenau concentration camp, the Nazis had already started testing a method of wholesale murder.
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They were unleashing the deadly gas Zyklon B on Soviet prisoners.
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But after the Wannsee Conference, Auschwitz would become the largest killing center in the Holocaust.
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The implementation for what the Nazis called the expulsion of the Jews was ready.
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But where did the blueprint for this intense enmity begin?
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Between 9 and 11 million military personnel
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and about 6 to 13 million civilians died in World war one germany lost over 2 million soldiers
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and somewhere between 400 000
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and 763 000 civilians it was a disaster germany was said
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to be the primary aggressor it had to pay under the
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treaty of versailles germany was ordered to pay reparations totaling 132
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billion gold marks around 500 to 600 billion dollars today it lost around 13 of its european territory
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and all of its overseas colonies.
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It was a national humiliation.
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That sentiment was never deeper than after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.
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The German economy collapsed, unemployment soared, and faith in the political establishment crumbled.
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Men of working age queued for free soup at the homeless shelters and soup kitchens.
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Meanwhile, women told their children that they'd have to go hungry.
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For millions of Germans, the promise of stability and prosperity
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that their government talked about after the First World War was a lie.
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The country was broken.
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It was in this atmosphere of gloom and disenchantment
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that Adolf Hitler transformed from a minor political agitator into a major political force.
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He promised that Germany would rise from the ashes and reclaim its lost greatness.
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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,
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but had been stabbed in the back by disloyal elements at home.
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He found it.
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According to his narrative, liberal Democrats, socialists, and especially Jews had undermined the war effort.
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They were the people who betrayed the nation at the moment of need.
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He had taken this partly from a 1919 parliamentary inquiry into Germany's defeat.
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Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg had stated that the German army had been betrayed from within.
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Hindenburg's exact words translated were, The German army was stabbed in the back.
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No guilt applies to the good core of the army.
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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.
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They blamed the Jews in part for what they said were the strikes in the arms industry
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that had left soldiers without war materials.
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Hindenburg had claimed that he hadn't been supported by the new German government.
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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.
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On December 18, 1918, the reactionary newspaper Deutsche Tagessaitung printed a story that talked up those claims, which further fired up German nationalists.
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Maurice later denied he'd ever said that.
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While civilians letting Germany down had been discussed in some circles in Britain, Maurice confirmed in his 1919 book The Last Four Months that,
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quote, there is no question that the German armies were completely and decisively beaten in the field.
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It didn't matter.
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The conspiracy theorists had already made up their minds.
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The German National People's Party and Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party or NSDAP ran with it.
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For them, Maurice's original words were evidence of Jewish sabotage.
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The myth was further emboldened in Germany by the words of Douglas Hayek, commander of the British and Commonwealth forces on the Western Front.
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Prior to Germany's surrender, he had said, Germany is not broken in the military sense.
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Her forces have withdrawn fighting very bravely and in excellent order.
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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.
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The truth was that Germany lost the war on the battlefield worn down by years of attrition and Allied superiority.
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There was plenty of evidence to support this.
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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.
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Yet after the war, he became one of the most prominent supporters of the stabbed -in -the -back myth.
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He had backed the claim that the Social Democrats, the Catholic Center Party, Socialists, trade unions, and the Jews had betrayed Germany.
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The conspiracy theory was transformed into a powerful political weapon that poisoned German politics and helped undermine the Weimar Republic.
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For some, it would advance their political careers.
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For others, it offered a convenient explanation for defeat that shifted the blame away from the military leadership and onto political enemies.
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For many ordinary Germans struggling through the turmoil of the 1920s, the myth and betrayal provided a simple explanation for a complex defeat.
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It helped them to preserve both personal pride and national honor.
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The narrative provided a scapegoat, not just for losing the war, but for many of Germany's problems.
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Jews.
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Around 100 ,000 Jews had served for Germany in the First World War, and roughly 12 ,000 had died fighting.
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Some were decorated for bravery.
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The data came from a report after Jews had been accused
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of being shirkers who had served away from the danger of the front line.
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The report, published by the War Ministry Census on Jewish Participation in the War, discovered that this wasn't true.
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But the report was suppressed.
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The myth of shirking lived on.
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The German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation, the largest anti -Semitic organization in Germany, claimed that Jews were profiteers,
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spies, and defeatists undermining the war effort.
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Nazi propagandists repeated the same story, portraying Jews as disloyal outsiders responsible for Germany's suffering during and after the war.
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But a giant lie needs a messenger.
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Enter a traumatized veteran searching for an explanation for his country's humiliation.
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Historians often disagree as to when exactly Hitler's views hardened into the racial ideology he would later embrace.
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The first sour notes of his antisemitism seemed to emerge
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when he was trying and failing to become a professional artist in Vienna.
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There, the once positive young man became disillusioned as he lived in near poverty among the unemployed and dispossessed.
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This likely contributed to the bitterness that later shaped his worldview.
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But those experiences alone don't explain the genocidal policies he would eventually pursue.
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In fact, one of the Jews Hitler knew during his younger years, he greatly trusted and respected.
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Dr. Edward Bloch, the Jewish physician who cared for Hitler's mother as she suffered from breast cancer.
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This was the same man who had once treated young Adolf for colds and tonsillitis.
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After his mother's death, Hitler wrote to Bloch, I shall be grateful to you forever.
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He wrote to Bloch often.
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Some of the postguards, embarrassing for the Nazi party, were later confiscated from Bloch by the Gestapo.
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On another occasion, Hitler wrote,
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This was the same man who would later state that all Jewish people were polluting Western civilization.
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It was a startling contradiction.
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But Hitler's anti -Semitism wasn't rooted in primarily personal experiences with particular Jewish individuals.
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Rather, he transformed the Jew into an abstract racial and political enemy.
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It wasn't personal hatred, he told himself.
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He He believed he was applying reason, history, and science.
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His opinion of Jews, he claimed, was a kind of scientific rationalism.
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The evidence was in letters he sent before he came to power.
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In September 1919, he wrote to a soldier named Adolf Gemlich on the topic of the Jewish question.
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The Nazis didn't invent the quote Jewish question.
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The term emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries as Jews across Europe began gaining civil rights after centuries of exclusion.
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The question facing many European states was how Jewish emancipation would affect society, what to do with their citizenship and political rights,
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what about cultural assimilation, immigration, and national identity.
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And not all of the proposed solutions were rooted in anti -Semitism.
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Many had argued for Jewish equal rights and full integration into European society.
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But that wasn't what the Nazis wanted.
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Hitler made that abundantly clear when he talked to Gemmlish about it.
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The letter stands as evidence that Hitler had rationalized his hatred toward Jews.
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Not any particular Jew, but the entire Jewish race for what he conceived was its pernicious effect on German society.
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Anti -Semitism as a political movement, he wrote, may not and cannot be determined by emotional factors but only by the recognition of facts.
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He said the fact was, the dangers posed by Jewry find expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people.
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Hitler already knew he could rouse the rabble if needed, not just the openly antisemitic, but the majority, people he believed were rightly racist.
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Nonetheless, he wasn't advocating mass murder at that point in his life.
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He wrote, an antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom.
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But bloody pogroms weren't the solution for young Hitler, bureaucracy was.
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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.
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The legislation would lead to the ultimate objective, the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.
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It wasn't personal, it was much worse than that.
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Jews, he believed, were parasites sucking on the lifeblood of the German people.
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He contended that they stuck together and would eventually have so much power they would destroy Western civilization.
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At the time, German Jews were disproportionately represented in some fields including finance, law, science, publishing, medicine, and the arts.
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But what Hitler ignored was that most Jews were shopkeepers, clerks, tailors, teachers, factory workers, and war veterans.
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Many were poor and almost completely powerless.
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Like other Germans, they held a wide range of political views and social positions.
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The vast majority had no influence over government policy, banking, the media, or the course of world events.
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It didn't matter.
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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.
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He had seen with his own eyes how an anti -Jewish policy can win votes.
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The mayor of Vienna, Karl Luger, had repeatedly won elections using virally anti -Semitic language that had stirred the masses.
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He claimed that Jews had control over too many businesses.
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He said that the poor craftsman had to beg the Jewish furniture dealer.
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Banking high finance, he said, was in the hands of the Jews, Jews who operated a kind of terrorism on society.
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Voting for him was to liberate Christian people from the hegemony of Jewry.
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His radical anti -Semitism depicted Jews as only specialists in vile profits, in what he said amounted to an expropriation of the indigenous population.
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This tarring of millions of European Jews with the same brush
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was partly why Hitler would call him the greatest German mayor of all times.
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Of course, Luger's anti -Semitism was mostly driven by selfish motives.
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It was all backed by highly discriminative, dehumanizing language.
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Luger would describe Jews as, quote, beasts of prey in human form.
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For Hitler, they were vermin, pests, and parasites.
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Importantly, such feelings weren't limited to Germany and Austria.
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Anti -Semitism was rampant all over Europe, especially in Poland, the Russian Empire, Romania, Hungary, and France.
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Even in Britain, where the Jews had better legal protections, they faced prejudice and were subject to enduring conspiracy theories.
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Luger and men like him across Europe argued that capitalism's inequalities were deliberate and that Jews were the architects of the system.
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As Europe searched for answers to poverty, instability, and social upheaval, many found them in anti -Semitism.
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Hitler knew he could exploit this, he just needed an audience.
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But when people finally started listening, a secret would emerge that contradicted his entire worldview.
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When World War I ended and the democratic Weimar Republic was established, many German Jews supported the new government.
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Meanwhile, in Russia, the Bolsheviks had overthrown the old regime during the Russian Revolution.
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Several prominent Bolshevik leaders were of Jewish origin, Jews supporting the German government, Jews participating in communist movements.
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Hitler would claim that this was evidence that the Jews were overrunning Europe.
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They were orchestrating both capitalism and communism from behind the scenes.
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At first glance, that seemed like a contradiction.
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How could Jews be both Marxist revolutionaries and the supposed puppet masters of international finance?
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Anti -Semites had an answer.
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They supposedly controlled capitalism through banks and finance, profited from war, and kept ordinary people poor.
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At that same time, they were accused of using communism to destroy nations from within.
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The theory didn't need to make sense.
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Hitler's ideology worked on the basis of turning an entire race of people into villains and caricatures.
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He would make complex stories a straightforward good versus evil narrative.
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But his actions and beliefs didn't square with his life.
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One of his senior officers during the First World War was Ernst Hesse, a highly decorated officer of Jewish ancestry whom Hitler respected.
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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.
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There were other examples, and not just his family doctor.
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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.
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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.
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Like many from the stories of Hitler's Vienna years, some details remain disputed.
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What is clear though is that before politics consumed his life, Hitler lived and worked alongside Jews on a daily basis.
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How could Jews be portrayed as inherently disloyal when many had fought bravely for Germany?
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How could they be depicted as parasites when some had helped Hitler personally?
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These people were clearly not a monolithic group sharing identical beliefs, loyalties, or character traits.
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Yet Hitler would depict them as a single hostile force working against Germany.
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Rather than abandoning the theory when confronted with seeming contradiction, he treated those exceptions as anomalies.
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The existence of Jewish soldiers, Jewish patriots, and Jews he personally admired did not alter a worldview.
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But in those early years, few were listening.
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It might have stayed that way had something cataclysmic not happened, something that cleared the path for the rise of a tyrant.
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The hyperinflation of the early 1920s had made money almost useless in Germany.
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Still, the country recovered and enjoyed what became a golden 20s.
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Life remained depressingly difficult for many working -class families, but larger sections of the middle class saw their fortunes improve.
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Berlin became one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, a center of artistic brilliance, technological innovation, and cultural experimentation.
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And then came the crash.
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The American financial system imploded, and Germany was hit hard because it was heavily dependent on American loans and investment.
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The country was suddenly ravaged by severe unemployment and business failures.
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Families lost their savings.
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Young men out of work scoured the streets for discarded food.
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Crime and rates of self -harm increased while political extremists battled in the streets.
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Germans weren't in this together.
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Far from it.
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Some wealthy Germans lost substantial fortunes, but others survived the crisis intact.
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In certain cases, they even profited by purchasing distressed assets and taking advantage of collapsing prices.
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To many ordinary Germans, it appeared that those at the top remained protected while everyone else suffered, Adolf Hitler was watching closely.
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The cynicism Germans now felt at their elites, the anger they felt toward capitalism and its winners, was never more intense.
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Hitler's furious speeches, once viewed by many as the words of a madman, gained momentum.
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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,
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many people felt that they had been betrayed by a government that It could not provide stability.
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betrayal was Hitler's favorite explanation.
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The Weimar politicians were weak and corrupt, he said.
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The Versailles Treaty was humiliating.
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He had reminded the people who had not been listening years ago that their country had been stabbed in the back.
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Suddenly, this resonated, as did his theory that the Jews were at the center of all the carnage.
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Germany needed national unity, he said.
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It needed strong leadership, a man who gets things done and won't bow to selfish elites.
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With 6 million people unemployed compared to about 1 .3 million before the crash, many people were desperate.
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Hitler suddenly seemed relevant.
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To many, he became a savior, the man who would put Germany back on the map.
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His hyper -nationalist and racist ravings now sounded not like rants, but workable solutions.
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He had been chairman of the NSDAP since 1921, but in those days it was a small movement of hardline political outsiders.
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When Hitler was imprisoned for attempting a violent coup, people saw it as proof that he was an extremist.
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It was a view reflected in the 1928 election when the Nazis won just 2 .6 % of the votes.
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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.
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Those were not merely votes of extremist thinkers, but farmers, shopkeepers, clerks, laborers, paid soccer players, doctors, and factory workers.
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In just four years, a man once viewed as a malcontent had persuaded nearly half of the country
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that he could save the country.
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Under him, other nations would quiver, the economy would prosper, the working people would be happy and proud.
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The humiliation was over, but not for everyone.
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For success to happen, someone would have to suffer.
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The people Hitler blamed for the crash were shrewd and unholy players on Wall Street.
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Invisible hands he claimed controlled international finance.
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Jews, German, American, rich, and poor, they were all the same according to Hitler's reasoning.
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And once in power, the rhetoric that demonized these people had to be codified into law.
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In the 1930s, Germany was a very homogenous society.
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Out of a population of between 65 to 67 million, only between 500 ,000 to 525 ,000 people were Jewish.
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Black and Asian communities were tiny, maybe amounting to a few thousand people, although census data isn't available.
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Jews were the largest minority, but they were diverse.
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They differed in wealth, region, politics, and culture.
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Some of them married non -Jews, thereby seen to be assimilating into a non -Jewish culture.
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According to an academic paper, about 35 ,000 Jews, or 6 % of the total Jewish population, were married to non -Jews throughout the 1930s.
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It was a small number, but intermarriage in those days, regardless of ethnicity, was often frowned upon.
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If the Nazis had their way, these numbers wouldn't even exist.
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They did everything to unmixed society.
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The Nazis had a specific term for people with mixed or part -Jewish blood, Michlinge.
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They created elaborate racial categories to classify them.
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A Michlinge of the first degree was someone with two Jewish grandparents.
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A Michlinge of the second degree had one Jewish grandparent.
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According to the 1939 census, Nazi officials recorded roughly 72 ,000 first -degree Michelin and about 39 ,000 second -degree Michelin.
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When they introduced the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the horror expanded.
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The Nazis wanted to know exactly who belonged to what they considered the higher and lower races.
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They began cataloging people according to ancestry and bloodline.
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Under the Reich citizenship law, people classified as Jews lost their citizenship and basic rights.
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Romans.
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Roma, who were also regarded as racial outsiders, would later face similar treatment.
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With Slavs, the Nazis' racial thinking was sometimes less straightforward.
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They were viewed as possessing related blood, but millions still died in German captivity and citizens were annihilated in their villages.
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The brutality and rigidity of the system was further outlined in the law for protection of German blood and German honor.
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The law declared that the Jews who married and had children with Germans were polluting the nation's blood.
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Intermarriage between Jews and Germans was outlawed.
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For many already married and listed as privileged, they were sent to live in harsh conditions in one of the Nazi's Jew houses.
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The men were often sent to work in factories where they were often mistreated and humiliated.
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Extramarital sexual relations were also banned.
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The Nazis even banned wealthy Jews from hiring German women under 45 as domestic servants.
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It was partly to prevent the men of the household from having sex with them.
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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.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 524 sentences and 7406 words to shadow. The speech runs for 43:30. The speaker talks at a natural 170 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 75% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| racial adjective | /ˈɹeɪʃəl/ | Of or relating to a race (or a people). |
| historian noun | /hɪˈstɔɹi.ən/ | A writer of history. |
| regime noun | /ɹəˈʒiːm/ | Mode of rule or management. |
| conspiracy noun | /kənˈspɪɹəsi/ | An agreement or arrangement between multiple parties to do something harmful, immoral or subversive; an instance of collusion. |
| explanation noun | /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/ | The act or process of explaining. |
| myth noun | /mɪθ/ | A traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience, and in which often the forces of nature and of the soul are… |
| stab verb | /stæb/ | To pierce or to wound (somebody) with a (usually pointed) tool or weapon, especially a knife or dagger. |
| ideology noun | /aɪ.diˈɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/ | Doctrine, philosophy, body of beliefs or principles belonging to an individual or group. |
| execute verb | /ˈɛksɪˌkjuːt/ | To kill, especially as punishment for a capital crime. |
| argue verb | /ˈɑɹ.ɡju/ | To show grounds for concluding (that); to indicate, imply. |
| ordinary adjective | /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/ | Having regular jurisdiction; now only used in certain phrases. |
| concentration noun | /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/ | The act, process or ability of concentrating; the process of becoming concentrated, or the state of being concentrated. |
| civilians noun | /sɪˈvɪl.jənz/ | Synonym of civvies |
| hatred noun | /ˈheɪtɹɪd/ | A strong aversion; an intense dislike. |
| civilization noun | /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/ | An organized culture encompassing many communities, often on the scale of a nation or a people; a stage or system of social, political, or technical… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| crack down verb | /kɹæk ˈdaʊn/ | To take harsh action (against), as when enforcing a law or rule more stringently than before. |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| leave out verb | To omit, to not include, to neglect to mention. | |
| make up verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | To constitute, to compose. |
| push out verb | To force (someone) to leave a group. | |
| stick together verb | To physically combine or join together by adhesion. | |
| take away verb | /ˌteɪk əˈweɪ/ | To remove something and put it in a different place. |
| talk up verb | To talk about (something or someone) to make it seem as good as possible or to draw positive attention to it. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | If it hadn't, the Nazis wouldn't have |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be called · be captured · should be regarded |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | measures which will · those who were · people who betrayed |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has decided · have withdrawn · have said |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 41 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, wasn't, hadn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: myth /mɪθ/, ruthless /ˈɹuːθləs/, wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: racial /ˈɹeɪʃəl/, regime /ɹəˈʒiːm/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: historian /hɪˈstɔɹi.ən/, conspiracy /kənˈspɪɹəsi/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, ideology /aɪ.diˈɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like racial, historian, regime.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.