how dung beetles contribute to racism
The Holocaust: A Reality Made Possible by Ordinary Germans by Jason Yuen The Holocaust is indeed one of modern history’s most diabolic portrayals of humanity in its extremes of cruelty and wickedness. The worst form of tragedy imaginable that could have befallen a civilized people, it continues to haunt and traumatize after the interstice of over 50 years. First-hand accounts of the plight depicted in memoir literature disclose enough horror to send a chill down the spine. Whatever it was in the culture of civilized Germany that had made it so rational a concept for ordinary German people to make this tragic event possible, it had ultimately brought out the most evil of human nature. How could this have happened? This remains an unsettling question at the heart of academic discourse. Historically, the issue had been centered on Hitler, to whom many have thereby come to assign all the responsibility. However, Hitler was not alone and he could not have possibly carried out his plans of genocide without a population who already shared his anti-Semitic mindset. Although he had been instrumental behind the propaganda of Nazi ideology, it was the ordinary German people who made it a reality. German soldiers were the ones who operated the concentration camps, and they were the ones who aimed the rifles and pulled the triggers. So it cannot be disputed that much of the responsibility rests with the ordinary German people, those who took on the feat as perpetrators. At the outset it must be realized that the Holocaust was not inevitable. As pointed out by William S. Parson, director of U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Samuel Totten, Assistant Professor of Curriculum at the University of Arkansas, “just because a historical event took place, and…was documented in textbooks…does not mean that it had to happen.” This is a concept often overlooked in pedagogic reviews of the historical event. The Holocaust occurred because German people allowed it through decisions they made to act or not to act (Parson and Totten). The choice of whether to act in complicity or defiance lied in the free will of each German individual and it was these decisions that determined the consequences. Unfortunately, during Hitler’s Third Reich, much of the German population voluntarily involved themselves in the Nazi persecution of the Jews, which ultimately gave way to the massacre of the Final Solution. It was at that time “open anti-Semitism became increasingly accepted, climaxing in the ‘Night of Broken Glass’…[a single night over which] nearly 1,000 synagogues were set on fire…more than 7,000 Jewish businesses and homes were looted…and as many as 30,000 Jews were arrested and…tormented”(Timeline). Similar events, however, were not uncommon prior to the Nazi’s rise in power. For centuries before the Third Reich, German-Jews have been targets of persecution. And the idea of confining Jews to isolations of ghettos was not a brainchild of Hitler. Though it was during Hitler’s government that the violent bigotry became most prominent, it is imperative to acknowledge that anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews had existed in Germany for hundreds of years (Zukier).