Nazi Extermination Camp Analysis

In April 1871, following Germany’s unification, the Jews residing in German gained full civil emancipation and citizenship (17). Within 70 years, Jews across Eastern Europe were being systematically exterminated by the hands of the Nazi regime. Antisemitism’s onset during the early twentieth century relied on the mass hysteria surrounding economic instability and the destruction of mainland Europe following the first world war. The Nazi’s meteoric rise to power was due in part to their explanation of “the Jewish conspiracy” complicit in the fall of German might (15). In a two year span starting in 1933, the nascent Weimar Republic dissolved, Adolf Hitler rose to Fuehrer, Dachau (the first concentration camp) opened, and the Nuremburg laws stripped Jews of their citizenship and civil rights. This begs the question: what was daily life like for the average German Jew? Jewish life within extermination camps is well chronicled, but in this intermediary period between exclusion and extermination, less is known. Were the Jews responsible in their own demise, as modern Nazi
The unthinkable atrocities committed in extermination camps, understandably, sometimes have the effect of overshadowing the persecution of Jews before the Final Solution. But beyond the indiscriminate slaughter of Jews, there lies a deeper issue. The SS and Gestapo may have stripped Jews of their property and lives, but the moderate German, complicit in the daily persecution of Jews, stripped Jews of their dignity. For those affected, the reactions to the steady decline of their rights were based in a sense of trust that humanity would prevail. But once that trust and patience waned, escape presented itself as the avenue of survival and when that avenue closed, humanity lost. In twelve years, the German Jews lost everything for a society that gained