Causes of the Holocaust
What were the causes of the Holocaust? This is a complex question in the history of the Holocaust, but not an intractable one. It turns out there are several reasons why the German people and their helpers during World War II rose to round up and murder six million of their Jewish neighbors. But in essence, the causes for the Holocaust all revolve around antisemitism, the ancient hatred of Jews and Judaism spread by Christianity during almost two millennia.
Gabriel Wilensky
Understanding the Holocaust
The history of the Holocaust really begins almost 2,000 years ago, shortly after the death of Jesus Christ. At that time, the early Christian sect began distancing themselves from mainstream Jews and Judaism. Over time, this animosity grew into hatred, and the new replacement theology in which Jews and Judaism had lost their place in the world and ceased to be God’s chosen people became prevalent in Christianity.
“Ultimately, all these accusations were variations and derivations of the original accusation against Jews, namely, that their alleged perfidy, blindness and obstinacy prevented them to see the truth and accept Jesus as the messiah and the son of God.”
After the Enlightenment the original theological antisemitism transformed itself into a secular form, which later became pseudo-scientific and was understood in racial terms. This is the form the Nazis and their contemporaries based their hatred of Jews on.
Often people try to explain the Holocaust by looking for causes in the immediate historical context: the rise of Jews in European society, the loss of WWI, the Versailles Treaty, the collapse of the German economy, the prevalence of Jews in professional jobs, etc. In reality, attempting to find the causes for the Holocaust in these things is a misguided effort, because it fails to understand that blaming Jews for those things was no different from blaming Jews for the death of Jesus, for desecrating the host, for murdering Christian boys to extract their blood to make Passover bread, for being minions of the Devil, and a any number of other things all the common litany of accusations against Jews prevalent in Christian Europe before the Enlightenment. Ultimately, all these accusations were variations and derivations of the original accusation against Jews, namely, that their alleged perfidy, blindness and obstinacy prevented them to see the truth and accept Jesus as the messiah and the son of God.
During the Nazi period the perpetrators were not driven by theological hatred of Jews, but it was the long-standing contempt and hatred of Jews that made them susceptible and receptive to the genocidal message of the Nazis. Thus, the main cause for the Holocaust is antisemitism, a phenomenon that was common to all the perpetrators of the Holocaust, regardless of whether they had been subjected to Nazi racial propaganda or to anti-Jewish sentiments in the New Testament or Sunday sermons.
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Thank you for writing this. My understanding is similar to yours, although I would say that there was a sort of “perfect storm” before the Shoah that made it appeal to so many people. There are many factors there- the starvation of German citizens after the stock market crash of 1929 (thus cancelling the Dawes and Young loan-postponement plans), the Pope’s encyclical in 1907 that declared “Modernism” the greatest heresy ever. (Modernism is an art movement, but also at the time a dogwhistle for socialism. The pope was reacting to the socialist uprising in Finland earlier that year; resulting in voting rights for women for the first time ever.) The Catholic Church and various states were welded together until Vatican II, so when Monarchys toppled, the worry was that the Churches would too.
Hitler’s mother had died of cancer, her Jewish doctor was unable to treat her because it was so advanced. Hitler appealed to his voters because he was wearing a socialist disguise, so to speak (he showed his true feelings when he had the socialists and gay folks in Nazi leadership killed during the Rohm Purge of ’34). He only took 3% of the vote in 1928, and it skyrocketed after 1929. He appealed to women (who were like 58% of Germany due to WWI deaths) because he was a soldier who fought with their dead husbands- voting for him (to them) was a way of honoring their husbands.
Generally, the world agreed with the Final Solution, for the reasons shown in the article. Its why the USA didn’t allow more than their tiny quota of Jewish refugees in after the Shoah. – or really any other country to my knowledge. Times were different around then, moral sensibilities were pretty wack. For instance
President “Teddy” Roosevelt claimed “the most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.” and also “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe 9 out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
He was brimming with pride when he spoke of the reduction in Indian population- around 100 million lives extinguished over the process of about 200 years. Why? Well, they were “savages”, and unChristian.
Jews have a special place in the darkness of the Christian heart, to be certain. But we are not the only people they have wronged. Not by a long shot.
A lot of this was Saul’s fault- he changed his name to Paul and tried making Christianity appealing to the Romans, which included of course blaming Jews for the actions of Pontius Pilate and his guards.
Religious hatred for Jews recently has a strong Russian flavor to it. 6 out of 10 of the Hollywood 10 (2nd Red Scare) were Jews. The Soviets killed 80+% of the Wehrmacht (Nazi military) single-handedly. The Commies (Russia and China) sustained a loss of 47.5 million lives during WW2- some of the Russians were Jews. I take issue with the idea that the Roma and Jews “count” for the Shoah, but Slavs/Russians don’t. Its propaganda, and its disgraceful.
Thank you for your comments, Noah. There are many points there. Let me address some of it:
First, the Shoah cannot be attributed to the “perfect storm” that was brewing before the war. Even though the points you make are valid, and in fact many people hated Jews for those and other modern reasons, the hatred was visceral and predated those events by many centuries. Second, a lot of this hatred has to do with the early days of Christianity. I do, of course, go into detail in the book Six Million Crucifixions, so I am not going to rehash it here. The example of Paul/Saul is just one of many.
Regarding your last point I think it’s important to make a distinction between the Shoah and the deaths of WWII, even the murders of WWII. Sure, the Germans (and the Russians) committed the most heinous atrocities against all sorts of people, and none of them can be justified. But that many millions of Slavs died at the hands of the Germans cannot be equated to the many millions of Jews that were murdered by the Germans. Intent and method matters. The Germans did not empty villages in the Ukraine, Russia, Poland or Lithuania of its inhabitants and took them to a forest nearby and shot them all. They did that to Jews. The Germans did not put entire populations of slavs in ghettos and then deported them to a gas chamber where they were murdered. They did that to Jews. Sure, many slavs died, and many in horrific ways. But it’s not the same by a long shot. Shoah is not a term to describe the death of millions of innocent people during WWII. It’s used to describe the systematic, calculated, industrial murder of a specific population.