Name: Parth Patel Course: ENGL 1103 Instructor: CGR 4/14/2013

The Roots of Nazism and Holocaust

Something happened there that until then nobody would have believed possible. A deep sphere of solidarity between all those who possessed a human face was affected. Despite all that world history has witnessed in the way of crude bestiality, up until that moment people had unquestioningly accepted that the integrity of that deep sphere had remained intact. And since that movement, a link has been broke, a link of naivete from which traditions confidently used to draw their authority and which in general fostered historical continuities. Auschwitz changed the conditions that allowed the historical tissues of life to perpetuate themselves spontaneously. (Habermas 1978b, pg 163) (Traverso 3) -Jurgen Habermas

Something bad happened This is all I knew when I started the research on the Nazi Ideology. My quest begins with a question which all of us might have: What are the roots of Nazism and what is the root cause of Holocaust? Many of us might know the answer to the

question but since I am not familiar to the topic, but I would like to dedicate my time educating myself on Nazi Ideology. While I was researching the topic, I came along a lot of different perspectives of the causes and roots of Nazism. The first book I read during my research was The Origins of Nazi Violence by Enzo Traverso. The book was recommended to me by Dr. John Cox who teaches courses related to Human rights and Holocaust at UNC-Charlotte. According to Traverso, one of the aspects to the Jewish genocide is that it was perpetrated for the specific purpose of a biological remodeling of the human race. It was conceived not instrumentally as a means to an end but as an end in itself. Traverso states that the roots of Nazism lay in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Movement. In Ernst Noltes analysis, the genocide of the Jews is presented as the extreme outcome of a European civil war whose beginnings he dates to 1917 and the Russian Revolution, which led to the founding, two years later in 1919, of the Comintern, a world civil-war party (Traverso 8). Many of us are not familiar with the term Bolshevism. Bolshevism is the first example of a totalitarian political regime that, right from the start of the Russian civil war, practiced a policy of terror and class extermination acted upon German imaginary both as a repellent and as a model. Nazi anti-Semitism was simply of a particular kind of anti-Bolshevism and the Jewish genocide an inverted but every bit as tendentious image of the extermination of a world class by the Bolsheviks.(Traverso 8) In support of the above thesis, Nolte points to an undeniable fact: the massive presence of Jews in the Russian and international Communist movement. Given that the Jews were held to be responsible for the massacres perpetrated by Bolshevism, the conclusion reached was that it was necessary, by way of reprisals and for preventative reasons, to exterminate them (Traverso 9). So my follow up question would be Is the real cause of the horrifying event in history was a mere feeling of revenge?

The fact that National Socialism fist took off as an anti-Communist movement does not mean that its anti-Semitism was born along with the counterrevolution, let alone that is justifiable to represent it as a copy of Bolshevism. There is, of course, more than one cause of the genocide. Nazisms roots were solidly embedded in the tradition of ethnic nationalism that for decades had been permeating the various currents of conservative German culture (Traverso 9). Hitler became anti-Semitic in Vienna at the beginning of the century, at a time when he could not yet have been influenced by anti-Communism of alarmed by the presence of Jews in the Russian Revolution and the political uprisings of central Europe (Traverso 10). The fact points towards another possibility of the genocide. Although the Nazi movement took shape under the Weimar Republic, its ideology was nurtured by a complex of elements that already existed before World War I and the Russian Revolution, and that were then radicalized in the context created by the German defeat and the rise of Communism. It was from the German and European culture of the nineteenth century that Nazism inherited its imperialism, its pan-Germanism, its nationalism, its racism, its eugenics, and its anti-Semitism. Anti-Bolshevism was a later addition to these; it exacerbated them, but it did not create them. My next question would be, how big of a role did religion play during the Jewish genocide? The early Nazi movement was born in Munich, a city whose population was overwhelmingly Catholic. To find the answer to my question, I read some parts of the book Catholicism and the roots of Nazism by Derek Hastings. Hastingss main interest is in the Nazi Partys formative phase, especially in Munich, which was outwardly Catholic and politically highly volatile between 1918 and 1923. The National Socialists achieved their rise as a Catholic-oriented movement, Hastings suggests, whose religious identity consisted in what he calls a CatholicNazi synthesis (Hastings

116). For Catholics, however, it was not possible to go along with the transformation of the partys religious identity into a secular, political religion. The roots of the Catholics who joined the early Nazi Party lay in a reforming Catholicism that was anti-ultramontane and critical of Catholicism. Hastings argues that the religious identity of the emergent Nazi movement in the Bavarian capital, convulsed by post-war chaos, socialist revolution and its violent suppression, was shaped by people influenced by the ideas of reforming Catholicism and disappointed by the Bayerische Volkspartei (Bavarian Peoples Party). So if the protest was an attempt to reform Catholicism, how is it called the Catholic-oriented movement? Dismissing the Nazis as monsters without a conscience is too easy and simplistic. The Nazis were humans like everyone else and their acts, as immortal as they were, followed logically and easily from a set of assumptions and beliefs which constituted a conscience. Koonz analyses how the Nazis developed a philosophy and ethic of racial superiority. The first assumption of the Nazi conscience was the life of a Volk is like that of an organism, marked by stages of birth, growth, expansion, decline and death. In the Third Reich, a Nazi mantra exhorted ethnic Germans to put collective need ahead of individual greed. The alternative was death of the community. The second assumption in the Nazi conscience was the every community develops the values appropriate to its nature and to the environment within which it is evolved (Koonz 7). The third element of the Nazi conscience justified outright aggression against undesirable populations living in conquered lands whenever it served the victors long-term advantage. The fourth assumption underlying the Nazi conscience upheld the right of a government to annul the legal protections of assimilated citizens on the basis of what the government defined as their ethnicity (Koonz 8). A comparison of anti-Semitic acts and attitudes toward Jews in the population press of Germany and four European nations (France, Great Britain, Italy and

Romania) from 1899 through 1939 demonstrates that Germans, before 1933, were among the least anti-Semitic people (Koonz 9).