Rise of Nazism
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Hitler was fully responsible for the order for the mass executions in
Poland in 1939 and 1940. He was also actively engaged in setting up plans for a Jewish reservation in Poland and he backed the Madagascar plan. He was continually preoccupied with further deportations and deportation plans.
In 1941 Hitler ordered the extermination of every potential enemy in the occupied Eastern territories. He was fully aware of mass executions of Jewish civilians in the occupied Eastern territories.
In mid September 1941 Hitler ordered the beginning of mass deportations from Germany to ghettos in Eastern Europe. During Autumn 1941 and the following Winter, when preparation for the “Final Solution” in Europe were in full swing, Hitler spoke at various occasions openly about the annihilation of the Jews in Europe. It can be ruled out that the massive preparations for the systematic murder of European Jews in extermination camps in Poland, undertaken in Spring and Summer of 1942, were taken without his consent or his knowledge.
Private diaries of Nazi propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler unearthed from the secret Soviet archives show that Adolf Hitler personally ordered the mass extermination of Jews on December 12, 1941 during a meeting of Nazi German regional governors in the chancellery. As Goebbels wrote “With regards to the Jewish question, the Fuhrer decided to make a clean sweep.”
And from a number of letters and speeches of Himmler it becomes clear, that the ReichsfÑŒhrer SS referred to the Holocaust as a task which he had to carry out on the behalf of the highest authority in the Third Reich – Adolf Hitler.
In Germany concentration camps were set up after 1933 to detain without legal procedure Jews, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others. During world war II extermination, or death, camps were established for the sole purpose of killing men, women, and children. In the most notorious camps – Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek in Poland, Buchenwald and Dachau in Germany – more than 6 million people, mostly Jews and Poles, were killed in gas chambers. Millions of others were also interned during the war, and a large proportion died of gross mistreatment, malnutrition, and disease.
The idea that the Holocaust represents 11 million lives that abruptly ended is a difficult concept, but this is an important point. The Holocaust was the extermination of people not for who they were but for what they were. Groups such