Nazism and the Holocaust

Start here · 1 min read

Overview

Nazism was the ideology of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party, which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. It combined extreme nationalism, racial antisemitism and the cult of a single leader. The Holocaust was the systematic, state-organised murder of about six million European Jews, carried out by Germany and its collaborators. Other groups, including Roma, disabled people, Polish civilians and Soviet prisoners of war, were also murdered or persecuted on a mass scale. It matters because it shows how a modern, educated society can turn law, bureaucracy and technology to mass murder, and how ordinary people take part step by step.

Context

Germany emerged from the First World War defeated and humiliated, then suffered hyperinflation in 1923 and mass unemployment after the 1929 crash. The Weimar Republic was weakened by these crises and by hostility from both the far left and far right. Antisemitism already existed across Europe, but the Nazis made it central state policy. The war created the cover and the conditions for the genocide.