Source #1. Understanding the German People’s Participation in the Third Reich by Theo Bailey In the annals of human barbarism, the cruelties practiced by the Germans over the Jews in Nazi Germany are among the worst remembered. The Holocaust stands out so vividly because it was so recent and also because it was so well documented. The Nazi Party was attractive to the majority of the German people because Hitler and his party proposed a solution to nearly every problem that was facing the various segments of the population. Adolf Hitler speaks out…Come and protest against Germany being burdened with the war guilt. To every German, the idea of tearing the treaty up would bring a sense of empowerment and elation. Hitler, in his twisted logic, believed that because Jewish leaders claimed that the Protocols were forged, then they certainly must be true.
Der Strumer was a widely read weekly newspaper. This quote reveals the cynical, manipulative characteristics of the Fascist mindset. Source #2. In 1919, army veteran Adolf Hitler, frustrated by Germany’s defeat in World War, which had left the nation economically depressed and politically unstable, joined a fledgling political organization called the German Workers’ Party. Founded earlier that same year by a small group of men including locksmith Anton Drexler (1884-1942) and journalist Karl Harrer (1890-1926), the party promoted German nationalism and anti-Semitism, and felt that the Treaty of Versailles, the peace settlement that ended the war, was extremely unjust to Germany by burdening it with reparations it could never pay.
Hitler soon emerged as a charismatic public speaker and began attracting new members with speeches blaming Jews and Marxists for Germany’s problems and espousing extreme nationalism and the concept of an Aryan “master race.” In July 1921, he assumed leadership of the organization, which by then had been renamed the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party.
Source #3. Source #4. The entrance to the core display of the museum of the Holocaust Education Center in Fukuyama, with its replica of the infamous Auschwitz gate, Dec. 27, 2014. (Cnaan Liphshiz) FUKUYAMA, Japan (JTA) — In the auditorium of this country’s main Holocaust education center, a teenage actor explains the dilemma that faced a Japanese diplomat during World War II. “My conscience tells me I must act a certain way, but doing so means defying my commanders,” says the actor portraying Chiune Sugihara, the Empire of Japan’s wartime vice consul in Lithuania. In 1940, Sugihara rescued 6,000 people by granting them transit visas to Japan in defiance of Tokyo’s orders. To Western ears, the play’s message of placing independent thought above blind obedience may seem banal. “It’s a bold position to take in a society that has remained ultra-conservative and extremely hierarchical,” said Alain Lewkowicz, a French Jewish journalist who has studied Japanese society’s attitudes toward the Holocaust.
Source #5. Source #6. German envoys arrive at Versailles for peace treaty ceremony, 1919 World War I left Germany in a complicated and difficult situation that produced conditions Adolf Hitler could exploit, but Germany's defeat in 1918 did not lead directly to Hitler. Germany's Misinformation Campaign The military leadership—specifically Field Marshals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff—convinced the German civilian government to sue for peace in the fall of 1918.
An interpretive essay re-examines conventional wisdom with regard to historical causality and the context in which Hitler and the Nazis rose to power. German forces were overextended and exhausted, and they could not fight on against the French, British, their colonies and dominions, and especially their American allies, which had fresh troops and almost unlimited resources. For many other Germans, the stab-in-the-back idea seemed to make sense. Treaty of Versailles Reparations Encirclement Germany: Again a Leader in Europe Hitler Achieves Power Dr. German territorial losses, Treaty of Versailles, 1919. German territorial losses, Treaty of Versailles, 1919 — US Holocaust Memorial Museum Germany lost World War I. In the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the victorious powers (the United States, Great Britain, France, and other allied states) imposed punitive territorial, military, and economic provisions on defeated Germany. In the west, Germany returned Alsace-Lorraine to France.
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