Why people followed hitler

Before World War II, few could imagine or predict killing squads and killing centers. Those who tried to leave had difficulty finding countries willing to take them in, especially since the Nazi regime did not allow them to take their assets out of the country.

A substantial percentage tried to go to the United States but American immigration law limited the number of immigrants who could enter the country. The ongoing Great Depression meant that Jews attempting to go to the United States or elsewhere had to prove they could financially support themselves—something that was very difficult since they were being robbed by the Germans before they could leave.

Even when a new country could be found, a great deal of time, paperwork, support, and sometimes money was needed to get there. In many cases, these obstacles could not be overcome. By , however, about , German Jews had already left.

Once Germany invaded and occupied Poland, millions of Jews were suddenly living under Nazi occupation. The war made travel very difficult, and other countries—including the United States—were still unwilling to change their immigration laws, now fearing that the new immigrants could be Nazi spies.

In October , Germany made it illegal for Jews to emigrate from any territory under its control; by then, Nazi policy had changed from forced emigration to mass murder. Visit the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition and the Challenges to Escape lesson plan for more information. The idea that Jews did not fight back against the Germans and their allies is false. Against impossible odds, they resisted in ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers. There were many factors that made resistance difficult, however, including a lack of weapons and resources, deception, fear, and the overwhelming power of the Germans and their collaborators.

Read a Holocaust Encyclopedia article about Jewish resistance for more information. In Europe, the Holocaust was not a secret. Even though the Nazi government controlled the German press and did not publicize mass shooting operations or the existence of killing centers, many Europeans knew that Jews were being rounded up and shot, or deported and murdered. Many individuals—in Germany and collaborators in the countries that Germany occupied or that were aligned with Germany during World War II—actively participated in the stigmatization, isolation, impoverishment, and violence culminating in the mass murder of six million European Jews.

People helped in their roles as clerks and confiscators of property; as railway and other transportation employees; as managers or participants in round-ups and deportations; as informants; sometimes as perpetrators of violence against Jews on their own initiative; and sometimes as hand-on killers in killing operations, notably in the mass shootings of Jews and others in occupied Soviet territories in which thousands of eastern Europeans participated as auxiliaries and many more witnessed.

Many more people—the onlookers who witnessed persecution or violence against Jews in Nazi Germany and elsewhere—failed to speak out as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers were isolated and impoverished—socially and legally, then physically. Only a small minority publicly expressed their disapproval.

Other individuals actively assisted the victims by purchasing food or other supplies for households to whom shops were closed; providing false identity papers or warnings about upcoming roundups; storing belongings for those in hiding that could be sold off little by little for food; and sheltering those who evaded capture, a form of help that, if discovered, especially in Nazi Germany and occupied eastern Europe, was punished by arrest and often execution.

Although Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, they were not the only group persecuted. American newspapers reported frequently on Hitler and Nazi Germany throughout the s. Americans read headlines about book burning, about Jews being attacked on the street, and about the Nuremberg Race laws in , when German Jews were stripped of their German citizenship. The Kristallnacht attacks in November were front-page news in the United States for weeks.

Americans staged protests and rallies in support of German Jews, and sent petitions to the US government calling for action. But these protests never became a sustained movement, and most Americans were still not in favor of allowing more immigrants into the United States, particularly if the immigrants were Jewish. It was very difficult to immigrate to the United States. In , the US Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act in order to set limits on the maximum number of immigrant visas that could be issued per year to people born in each country.

Unlike today, the United States had no refugee policy, and Jews could not come as asylum seekers or migrants. Approximately ,, European Jews immigrated to the United States between , most of them between The US Government learned about the systematic killing of Jews almost as soon as it began in the Soviet Union in Yet saving Jews and others targeted for murder by the Nazi regime and its collaborators never became a priority.

As more information about Nazi mass murder reached the United States, public protests and protests within the Roosevelt administration led President Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in January The establishment of the War Refugee Board marked the first time the US government adopted a policy of trying to rescue victims of Nazi persecution. The War Refugee Board coordinated the work of both US and international refugee aid organizations, sending millions of dollars into German-occupied Europe for relief and rescue.

The American people—soldiers and civilians alike—made enormous sacrifices to free Europe from Nazi oppression. The United States could have done more to publicize information about Nazi atrocities, to pressure the other Allies and neutral nations to help endangered Jews, and to support resistance groups against the Nazis.

Prior to the war, the US government could have enlarged or filled its immigration quotas to allow more Jewish refugees to enter the country. These acts together might have reduced the death toll, but they would not have prevented the Holocaust.

Visit the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition for more information. Although the liberation of Nazi camps was not a primary objective of the Allied military campaign, Soviet, US, British, and Canadian troops freed prisoners from their SS guards, provided them with food and badly needed medical support, and collected evidence for war crimes trials. The Holocaust is the best documented case of genocide. Knopf, Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich , trans. Joachim Neugroschel New York: St.

His rapid climb to the top of the Nazi hierarchy, his abrupt moral about-face at the end of the war, and his self-portrayal as an apolitical National Socialist all point to the same thing.

Speer had only one goal in mind: to make history. Joel E. Dimsdale New York: Hemisphere, , — Taylor, Michael R. Hubert, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders , Marrus, Viereck, Robert G. Fred I. See also Neil J. Kressel, ed. Lucy S. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf , trans. Ralph Manheim Boston: Houghton Mifflin, , 51— Historians and biographers have long debated the question of when Hitler became an anti-Semite; many question his own account in Mein Kampf , preferring an earlier or later date.

Moreover, Hitler apparently rewrote the details of his years in Vienna to suit his political purposes, quite consciously attempting to forge a useful personal myth. Jean Steinberg New York: Praeger, Waite, Binion, ; Gertrud M. Israel Gutman New York: Macmillan, , — New York: Holmes and Meier, David E. Stannard delivers a passionate attack on psychohistory. Though he tends to throw out the baby with the bath water, his book should be consulted by those interested in the serious limitations of this mode of explanation.

For discussion of the role of psychology in the historiography of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, see Neil J. Bromberg and Small, 8. Binion, xv. At the same time Goebbels prevented those who opposed Nazi policies from expressing their views. This helped ensure only Nazi messages got across to the public. The Nazi Party was extremely organised. This meant they were able to convey policies to a wide range of people, while appearing to be competent and able to run the country:.

When social unrest increased, after benefits were cut in , Hitler used fear of Communism to get support from indutrialists.

All that counts is that as soldiers of the front we keep out promise to Germany… The Leader is calling, gun in hand! And everything else falls away. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Given an enemy, a purpose, an ideology and a charismatic leader, the ordinary German found a route to glory and prosperity for the entire race.

And nothing would hinder the march on that route. Perhaps if I had met one of the persecuted and oppressed, an old man with the fear of death in his face, perhaps…. Later, when asked how he could take part in the extermination, Stangl says:. It was a matter of survival…The only way I could live was by compartmentalizing my thinking….