Adolf Hitler’s excerpt from “The Nuremberg Law” in our textbook underscores the captivity, humiliation and oppression of the Jewish People by Hitler during his rule in Germany. Adolf Hitler was a maniac, cruel murderer, and military dictator who had a racist ideology in which white, non Jewish Germans were superior over all other races and used his Nuremberg Laws to define, dehumanize, ostracize and expel the Jews from the German society. Hitler was focused on leaving his deep rooted hatred for the Jews as legacy to the German society that in his will, written few hours before his suicide, as he wrote
“Nature is cruel so we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send flowers of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?”(Jewish Virtual Library, Adolf Hitler: On Cruelty) Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau Am Inn, Austria, in April 1889. He grew up as a resentful, discontented, moody young man with an unstable temperament and very hostile to his father. Hitler left home at sixteen with the hope of becoming a painter, did not make much progress in his career but developed a pathological hatred for the Jews and Maxists, Liberalism and the cosmopolitan Hashburg monarchy. He later moved to Vienna where he indulged in grandiose dreams of a greater Germany, acquired his first education in politics where he grasped the stereotyped, obsessive anti-Semitism with its barbaric implications and concern with “the purity of blood.” Adolf Hitler then progressed to Munich, obtained his German citizenship and used his oratory talents and propaganda; to ascend the political ladder to the position of Chancellor and Leader of Germany. (Jewish Virtual Library, Adolf Hitler)
Transiently blinded and compelled to forceless rage by the abortive November 1918 revolution in Germany as well as the military defeat, Hitler was convinced that destiny had commission him to save a humiliated nation from the shackles of the Versailles Treaty, from the Jews and from the Bolshevicks. (Jewish Virtual Library, First Anti-Semitic Writing 1) In 1919, Hitler, was contacted by Adolf Gemlick about the “Jewish question” at the time. In his response to Gemlick’s, Hitler used his charisma and magniloquence to communicate his ingrained hatred for the Jews and subsequently won admiration from his superiors. This paved the way for an opportunity to inoculate the commonality against revolution and using his anti-Semitic rhetoric, he discredited the Weimar Republic in his letter. Hitler presented his anti-Semitic facts as follows
“…..First, Jewelry is absolutely a race and not a religious association. Even the Jews never designate themselves as Jewish Germans, Jewish Poles of Jewish Americans but always as German Jews, Polish Jews or American Jews. Jews have never, yet adopted much more than the language of the foreign nations among whom they live. A German who is forced to make use of the French language in France, Italian in Italy, and Chinese in China does not hereby become Frenchman, Italian or Chinaman. It’s the same with the Jews who live among us and forced to make use of the German Language. He does not thereby become a German, Neither does the Mosaic faith, so important for the survival of the race, settle the question of whether someone is a Jew or non-Jew. There is scarcely a race whose members belong exclusively to just one definite religion….” (Jewish Virtual Library, First Anti- Semitic Writing 2)
In his Nuremberg laws issued on September 15 1935, Hitler personally abated Jews of German citizenship, prohibited Jewish households from having Germans maid below the age of 45, prohibited any non-Jewish German from marrying a Jew and outlawed sexual relationship among Jews and the Germans. To promulgate his evil plans, Hitler went further to define the Jewish race from his personal opinion and not based on any scientific truth as the head of Reich office of Genealogy Research, Dr. Kurt Mayer was never contacted. Hitler’s motive for the law was not reason but the need for an enemy as he had mentioned in one of his speeches that, the Nazi’s would have had to invent the Jews if they did not exist. Hitler asserted that the Nuremberg Law will be helpful to the Jews in that it will form “a level ground on which the German people may find a tolerable relation with the Jewish People.” (Hitler 1935) but this speech was flagrant dissimulation directed at the outside world.
Adolf Hitler was a cruel murdered and maniac, who consistently blamed the Jews for the economic hardship in Germany and also for the defeat of the Germans in the first World. In his Nuremberg Law, Hitler coined racial theories, and also claimed that Germans with blonde hair, fair skin and blue eyes were the master race or highest rank of humans while the Jews were the racial opposite. He also established that the Jews were engaged in a global conspiracy to prevent the master race (Germans) from obtaining their rightful place as sovereigns of the planet. (Garvin 1) As if the conditions of his Nuremberg Laws were not harsh enough, Hitler meticulously organized the Holocaust; a series of genocides orchestrated and enacted by Hitler for the extermination and ethnic cleansing of the Jews. The Holocaust started on “The Night of Broken Glass” ’ November 9th to 10th when a German embassy official in Paris, by name Ernst Vom Rath was shot and killed by a seventeen years old Jew in retaliation to ferocious treatment of his parents by the Nazis. The Nazis used this as a pretext to launch a State run pogrom against the Jews which led to the death of ninety Jews, 2500 Jewish males were forcibly dragged to concentration camps, 500 synagogues burnt to ashes, with the destruction of Jewish properties. (Garvin 1) In addition, Hitler spearheaded the construction of Auschwitz, with four large gas chambers, experimental mobile gas chambers, portable gas chambers and extermination camps with several mass shooting squads. Hitler stopped at nothing to ensure complete obliteration of the Jewish race. An estimated eleven million people including six million Jews were killed during the holocaust and Adolf Hitler, being a maniac and murderer had no remorse for his action as he stated in one of his inhuman speeches to his army commander on August 22nd 1933
“Thus for the time being, I have sent to the East only my death head units, with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish race or language. Only in such way will we win the virtual space that we need….” (Hitler 1939)
Drawing from the aforementioned, I hereby conclude that Adolf Hitler was a villain, a fiendish assassin, maniac and a military dictator who used his Nuremburg Laws to further his wicked ends against the Jews. Dictator Hitler used his Nuremberg Laws to disgrace, ostracize and expatriate the Jews from the German society. His Nuremberg Laws was a crime against peace and against humanity and his dire abhorrence for the Jews was made unambiguous in his Nuremberg Laws and in corroboration with his initial response to Adolf Gemlick on “The Question of The Jews.” Hitler had stated “…to his effects and consequences, he is like a racial tuberculosis, of the nation. The deduction from all this is the following: an anti-Semitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom. An anti-Semitism based on reason, however, must lead systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews that which distinguishes the Jews from the aliens who live among us. (An Alien Law). The ultimate objective [of such Legislature] must however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.”(Jewish Virtual Library2)
Works Cited
Adolf Hitler. Bio. A&E Television Networks, 2014.Web. 04 Oct. 2014
“Adolf. Hitler: First Anti-Semitic Writing.” Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014 web. 29 Sept. 2014
“Adolf. Hitler: On Cruelty” Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014 web. 29. Sept. 2014
“Adolf. Hitler: Threats against the Jews” Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014 web. 29 Sept. 2014
“Adolf. Hitler: Nuremberg Laws: Background and Overview” Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014 web. 29 Sept. 2014
Garvin Phillip, “Genocide in the 20th Century.” The History Place 6 Nov. 2000 web 29 Sept. 2014
Litchblau, Eric. “The Holocaust Just got more Shocking. “New York Times 3 Mar. 2013, SR3. Web 29 Sept. 2014
“The Holocaust: The Mufti’s Conversation with Hitler.” Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014 web. 29 Sept. 2014
Cited: Adolf Hitler. Bio. A&E Television Networks, 2014.Web. 04 Oct. 2014 “Adolf. Hitler: First Anti-Semitic Writing.” Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014 web. 29 Sept. 2014 “Adolf. Hitler: On Cruelty” Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014 web. 29. Sept. 2014 “Adolf. Hitler: Threats against the Jews” Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014 web. 29 Sept. 2014 “Adolf. Hitler: Nuremberg Laws: Background and Overview” Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014 web. 29 Sept. 2014 Garvin Phillip, “Genocide in the 20th Century.” The History Place 6 Nov. 2000 web 29 Sept. 2014 Litchblau, Eric. “The Holocaust Just got more Shocking. “New York Times 3 Mar. 2013, SR3. Web 29 Sept. 2014 “The Holocaust: The Mufti’s Conversation with Hitler.” Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014 web. 29 Sept. 2014