How do you believe that the Holocaust changed the United States, both when it first happened and now?
Answers
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power with an ideology of national and racial superiority. As the Nazis deepened their control over Germany in the 1930s, they implemented policies and passed laws that stigmatized and persecuted many groups of people that they considered to be outsiders and enemies of Germany, including Jews, political opponents, homosexuals, and Roma and Sinti people. Violence against Jews and their property was on the rise. During Kristallnacht in 1938, synagogues, businesses, and homes were burned and thousands of Jews were interned for varying periods of time in concentration camps.
Until 1941, official German policy encouraged Jews to leave the country by making life in Germany increasingly difficult for them. Jews were forbidden from working in certain professions and renting or owning homes in many places; they could not hold on to their financial assets and could not move freely. These policies, together with a campaign of hateful antisemitic propaganda and an increasingly violent climate, made life in Germany impossible for many Jews. Those who had no choice but to flee for their survival and the survival of their families became refugees, seeking safe havens in other parts of Europe and beyond. At first, Jews were allowed to settle in neighboring countries such as Belgium, France, and Czechoslovakia, but as German occupation spread across the continent, these countries were no longer safe and refugees became increasingly desperate to escape. Philosopher Hannah Arendt described Jewish refugees’ predicament in this way:
[The refugees] were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they remained stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth.
Following its defeat in World War I and the punitive peace treaty the followed, Germany fell into a deep and extended economic depression. Nationalist leaders found a willing audience when they looked for scapegoats who could be blamed for the country’s troubles. Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party claimed that the Jewish people were traitors during the war and a blight on the nation. Hitler claimed that the Aryan race (northern Europeans) were genetically superior to all others and that the Jews were inferior. When he rose to power in the early 1930s, he began to impose punitive policies to punish and shame the Jews.