# Regarding the Holocaust: Did this crime benefit the perpetrator's plans? Did they expect it to? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 21, 2019, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regarding-the-holocaust-did-this-crime-benefit-the-perpetrators-plans-did-they-expect-it-to/832857 "2019-04-21T16:44:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2019, 12:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regarding-the-holocaust-did-this-crime-benefit-the-perpetrators-plans-did-they-expect-it-to/832857/61 "2019-04-24T12:41:26Z")
> [@MarvinKitFox](#): > > Simple. > Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s WERE a horridly oppressed people, being punished willy-nilly by (mostly) France , using the very unfair Treaty of Versailles as an excuse for, frankly, pure piracy. > > This oppression created anger. > > This anger needed _someone_ to blame. They could blame the French, but could not actually _do_ anything about them. > They could not blame _themselves_, after all who ever blames themselves for their troubles. > > So they focused their anger into self-pride, and disdain for the “other” ethnic groups. Mainly the Jews (because they were generally more economically powerful) and the Gypsies (because _eww! Gypsies_) > Let’s also lump in mental defectives, and deviants, because they detract from this self-pride image. You did _NOT_ want to be gay, or autistic, or even have a genetic physical defect in Nazi Germany. Bad, bad things happened to those, worse than and well before the persecution of the Jews began. > > So they elect a new, dynamic leader who speaks to their anger and disdain, and fuels both to quite silly levels. And by belittling others, they feel a bit better about themselves. > > Once they are in power, and the speeches continue, of course they declare the “others” to be subhuman, and get rid of them. Blame _them_ for your troubles! > > It was an almost inevitable result of their own oppression, lashing out to hurt others. Rather blame the root cause, that warped Versailles Treaty. And blame the way the US and UK leaned over backwards to allow the Germans to do their own thing, because they felt guilty about that same unfair Treaty. > Germany should not have been punished for WW1, to the extent that the Versailles Treaty did. This directly created the environment that fostered Hitler’s rise to power, and the social attitude that led to the Holocaust. My exact dates may be off but I think the above might be somewhat inaccurate. In the immediate aftermath of WWI, there wasn’t initially widespread antisemitism that would later sweep over Germany in the 1930s when the Nazis took power and made antisemitism a national policy. That’s not to say that antisemitism didn’t exist in Germany - it almost surely did, but in late 1910s and much of the 1920s, there wasn’t the same level of antisemitism as compared to say to say Poland and Russia where there had already been pogroms, or even in neighboring France which had been torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair. That’s partly what was so shocking and sickening about Nazism: their political agenda and propaganda take the seeds of antisemitism and made it flower. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Bravo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_bravo/32/493_2.png) [@Johnny\_Bravo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Bravo)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2019, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regarding-the-holocaust-did-this-crime-benefit-the-perpetrators-plans-did-they-expect-it-to/832857/62 "2019-04-24T14:05:45Z")
“Seeds of antisemitism?” Germany was a focal point of European antisemitism through the 1800s. Even the word “antisemitism” was coined by a German author in an essay entitled “The Victory of Jewry over Germandom.” In 1879. Martin Luther’s own intense hatred of Jews has already been mentioned above, and that was in the 1500s. The only thing unique about the Nazis was the scale and organization of their attempted genocide - not the ideology or intent behind it. Cultural hatred of Jews in pre-war Europe is bedrock, foundational stuff. Forwarding the idea that the Nazis somehow ‘made it flower’ diminishes the scale and pervasiveness of that hatred and likewise minimizes the impact of modern antisemitism. Nazis are not a necessary ingredient for widespread, virulent hatred of Jewish people. Not then, not now. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2019, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regarding-the-holocaust-did-this-crime-benefit-the-perpetrators-plans-did-they-expect-it-to/832857/63 "2019-04-24T14:19:41Z")
> [@Johnny\_Bravo](#): > > “Seeds of antisemitism?” > > Germany was a focal point of European antisemitism through the 1800s. Even the word “antisemitism” was coined by a German author in an essay entitled “The Victory of Jewry over Germandom.” In 1879. Martin Luther’s own intense hatred of Jews has already been mentioned above, and that was in the 1500s. > > The only thing unique about the Nazis was the scale and organization of their attempted genocide - not the ideology or intent behind it. > > Cultural hatred of Jews in pre-war Europe is bedrock, foundational stuff. Forwarding the idea that the Nazis somehow ‘made it flower’ diminishes the scale and pervasiveness of that hatred and likewise minimizes the impact of modern antisemitism. > > Nazis are not a necessary ingredient for widespread, virulent hatred of Jewish people. Not then, not now. Well, it is complicated, while it is true that antisemitism was already present the reality is that Jews in Germany got better opportunities and served in the military \*, science and other industries by the time of WWI and a bit later. Then the Nazis came. It was Hitler and the Nazis though the ones that allowed and made that antisemitism to regrow where it was actually fading a bit. - [https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/07/10/iron-cross-hitler/](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/07/10/iron-cross-hitler/) > [@](#): > > Hitler was recommended for the Iron Cross award in WWI by his superior officer Hugo Gutmann, who was Jewish ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Bravo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_bravo/32/493_2.png) [@Johnny\_Bravo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Bravo)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2019, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regarding-the-holocaust-did-this-crime-benefit-the-perpetrators-plans-did-they-expect-it-to/832857/64 "2019-04-24T14:46:52Z")
And that cycle of “Jews migrate somewhere (because they escaped/were expelled from somewhere else), Jews become successful but retain their cultural identity, persecution and violence grows until a terrible culmination” is ancient and well documented. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2019, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regarding-the-holocaust-did-this-crime-benefit-the-perpetrators-plans-did-they-expect-it-to/832857/65 "2019-04-24T15:26:58Z")
> [@Johnny\_Bravo](#): > > And that cycle of “Jews migrate somewhere (because they escaped/were expelled from somewhere else), Jews become successful but retain their cultural identity, persecution and violence grows until a terrible culmination” is ancient and well documented. Yes, but then if that was the usual, then in the USA that would had taken place too. > **[Trump Needs to Demilitarize His Rhetoric](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/americas-long-history-anti-semitism/574234/)** > > Anti-Semitism in the U.S. is nothing new. Still, it’s shocking to hear coded language—whatever the intention—come from the top. > [@](#): > > Anti-Semitism manifested itself at every level of society and across the country. In the South, the Ku Klux Klan also targeted Jews as it went after African Americans. Jews “procured” young women to “enhance their own monetary interests,” the Klan stated in the 1920s. In Dorchester, Massachusetts, Irish Catholic gangs in the 1940s roved the streets in “Jew Hunts” that culminated in physical assaults. Even as Jews started to break into certain industries, such as entertainment, in the 1930s and ’40s, they confronted tight restrictions that kept them out of law firms, medical professions, universities and colleges, fraternities, hotels, country clubs, and more. One hotel boasted in an advertisement, “No Hebrews or tubercular guests received.” Elite institutions of higher learning such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton imposed strict quotas on how many Jews they would admit. The application for Sarah Lawrence College asked, “Has your daughter been brought up to strict Sunday observance?” Like African Americans, Jews were subject to restrictive real-estate covenants that prevented “Hebrews” from living in particular neighborhoods. > > Conditions improved after World War II. The horror of the Holocaust made overtly anti-Semitic ideas and policies unacceptable in mainstream U.S. society. The number of Americans who heard “criticism or talk against Jews,” according to the historian Leonard Dinnerstein, declined from 64 percent in 1946 to 12 percent in 1959. > > Much of the Jewish community prospered, securing middle-class jobs across a number of industries and settling into the growing suburban communities of postwar America. The difference IMHO was that the federal government then was not like the Nazis in the way the Nazis applied ‘Miracle-gro’ to the antisemitic saplings. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2019, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regarding-the-holocaust-did-this-crime-benefit-the-perpetrators-plans-did-they-expect-it-to/832857/66 "2019-04-24T20:18:22Z")
> [@Johnny\_Bravo](#): > > “Seeds of antisemitism?” > > Germany was a focal point of European antisemitism through the 1800s. Even the word “antisemitism” was coined by a German author in an essay entitled “The Victory of Jewry over Germandom.” In 1879. Martin Luther’s own intense hatred of Jews has already been mentioned above, and that was in the 1500s. > > The only thing unique about the Nazis was the scale and organization of their attempted genocide - not the ideology or intent behind it. > > Cultural hatred of Jews in pre-war Europe is bedrock, foundational stuff. Forwarding the idea that the Nazis somehow ‘made it flower’ diminishes the scale and pervasiveness of that hatred and likewise minimizes the impact of modern antisemitism. > > Nazis are not a necessary ingredient for widespread, virulent hatred of Jewish people. Not then, not now. As anyone who read my post can plainly see, I clearly mentioned that there _was_ antisemitism present in Germany prior to the Nazism. Even during periods of relative tolerance, Jews have lived in a state of unease in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. But to suggest that antisemitism in Germany in the 19th and early 20th Centuries was anything close to the scale of what became what we now know as the Holocaust is not supported by historical evidence. There was episodic antisemitism in German culture and law - I’m not denying or minimizing that. However, there is no evidence that German society was so collectively hateful toward Jews in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that they supported their elimination or even that they endorsed the idea of stripping them of citizenship (the period after Napoleon’s defeat perhaps being the exception). The point I was trying to make - and I get the sense we’re more or less on the same page - was that simmering hostilities can quickly explode into a conflagration of genocide in a very short span of time. We can look back the Holocaust now and say that it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was a surprise. It was even a surprise to many of the Jews who ended up being driven out of the country their families had called home for hundreds of years. Sure, there had been incidents of antisemitism, but nothing like a complete and total genocide. ---
**Author:** ![TimfromNapa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/d26b3c/32.png) [@TimfromNapa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TimfromNapa)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regarding-the-holocaust-did-this-crime-benefit-the-perpetrators-plans-did-they-expect-it-to/832857/67 "2019-04-25T19:19:36Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > This seems to be in the class of “the Nazis were morons” explanations. Obviously no rational person would consider these targetted groups to not be humans and they would not conclude they were an existential threat without evidence of such. Actions driven by mindless hatred require no logic. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/regarding-the-holocaust-did-this-crime-benefit-the-perpetrators-plans-did-they-expect-it-to/832857.md?page=3)