Germany: Primary Aggressor Of The Holocaust

Countries of the Holocaust
Germany:
Being the primary aggressor of the holocaust, Germany does not have a positive reputation for the time period of 1933-1945. The events building up to the Holocaust began with President Hindenburg appointing Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. This brought Hitler to the attention of many, and created a platform from which his power only grew stronger. In 1933, the SS opened the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich. Soon after, a boycott of Jewish-owned shops and businesses in Germany began. As this continues, the Jews’ struggle continuously worsens. On march 16th of 1935, Germany introduces Military conscription, which casts a negative foreshadow for what is to come. Years later, the times took a turn
Hardly one month later, “Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen of Muenster denounces the “euthanasia” killing program in a public sermon” (USHMM, The Holocaust and WWII: Timeline, point 24). Soon after, Einsatzgruppen shoot about 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, outside Kiev, Ukraine. Time of subsequent harrowing events passes, and in 1942, Germans begin the mass deportation of more than 65,000 Jews from Lodz to the Chelmno killing center. That same year, Germans begin the deportation of more than 65,000 Jews from Drancy, outside Paris, to the east, primarily to Auschwitz. The Germans then continue with their mass deportations with plans to torture and annihilate, and send nearly 100,000 Jews from the occupied Netherlands to the east, yet again, mainly to Auschwitz. Soon after, over 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto are sent to the Treblinka killing center, successfully deporting about 265,000. Within the concentration camps, the Jew were deprived of food and acceptable living conditions. The weak, elderly, women, and babies were gassed and burned upon arrival. The prisoners slept on wooden barracks and were shot, gassed, or beaten if they didn’t obey given orders. Soon after, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began, and mass deportations continue to
The Slovak authorities then transported the Jews to the border of the German Reich and turned them over to German SS and police. German authorities killed nearly all of these Jews in Auschwitz, Lublin/Majdanek, Sobibor, and other locations in German-occupied Poland. About 300 survived the war. Among them were Alfred Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg, who escaped from Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 and compiled the first detailed report on operations there. As the Slovak authorities were helpless to put an end to the uprising, German troops moved in. Einsatzgruppe H of the Security Police and SD duties included rounding up and killing or deporting the remainder of the Slovak Jews. As the USHMM states, “Between September 1944 and the end of the year, German units deported approximately 12,600 Slovak Jews, most of them to Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and other camps in Germany. German and Hlinka Guard units killed a few thousand Jews caught in hiding or fighting with the partisans in Slovakia” (The Holocaust in Slovakia, Par. 6). A survivor, Daisy Gross, states “In the summer of 1943, my parents moved me and Tonka to their native village...my parents bought a lot where they built an underground bunker. When things started to get very bad, they secretly moved us down there...My grandfather had