HITLER AND THE HOLOCAUST. Review on Hitler and the Holocaust - Robert S. Wistrich

The missinaries of christianity had said in effect : you have no right to live among us as jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed : you have no right to live among us. The German Nazis had at last decreed : you have no right to live. -raul hilberg(1961)

The Holocaust was aimed at the total annihilation of the Jewish population by the powerful state, the Nazi Reich, which believed that to born a Jew was a crime and unworthy of life. Hitler delegated the final solution to the SS who under the Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler and his closest subordinate Reinherd Heydrich streamlined the industrialised mass killing carried out in death campa like Auschwitz and Tremblinka.

Millions of Jews were also hunted down by the Einsatzqruppen and police battalions and executed in gruesome pit killing, in forests, in ravines and trenches. The Nazis insisted they were fighting an omnipotent Jewish power. The Jews were branded a cesspool of decomposition and racial degeneration. They were identified with chaos, evil, moral degradation and threat of world revolution. Hitler’s rise to power would not have been possible without the failure of the First World War.The Jews were held responsible for the defeat and the economic crises. The once racist anti-Semitism became the official state ideology of the Third Reich. The fuhrer’s (leader) Mein Kampf (my struggle) written in 1924 became the bible for the Nazi movement.

The Germans did not carry out the Holocaust alone, they found others as sympathetic to their cause, namely, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Romanians, Croats and other European nationalities. Robert S Wistrich points out that the Jews were in fact disorganised, relatively powerless, lacking in solidarity or any agreed political agenda. Before and during the Holocaust they did not have any State, an army, a common territory or flag, let alone a coherent organisational centre.

According to Hitler’s genocidal racist ideology, the redemption of Aryan humanity depended on the final solution of the Jewish question and the annihilation of world enemy for peace in an united Europe. From the hatred and destruction, the Jewish people rose up after the Second World War like the phoenix and established their own independent state. The tyranny and the soul chilling cruelty can never be forgotten. The Holocaust should show us the danger of trusting a power with no ethical restrain. Thinking about Holocaust is like looking into an abyss and hoping it will not stare back. It question your very sense of what it means to be human. Robert S Wistrich’s work gives us an insight into the many question which often baffles our minds.The various question which evades any reasonable answers have been given a suitable took in this book. Why were Jews worked to death on senseless, unproductive tasks, even when Reich was suffering an acute labour shortage? Why were skilled Jewish armaments workers killed in the camps despite the military needs of the Wehrmacht?

Though no one can read into the mind of the psychopathic God and why did he create the black hole of history, which questions our very sense of what it means to be human, but this work makes us understand what happens when we don’t resist racism and anti-semitism in a civilised society. Robert deals with the various aspects of the Holocaust.

The anti-Semitism and the anti-Jews wave which was aired by Hitler, the ideology from Weimar to Hitler, the Persecution and Resistance, the gruesome Final Solution, the Aryan sign of the Swastika, collaboration across Europe, the indifference of the Western Allies, the Vatican and the Christian Churches' reaction to the tragic plight of the Jews, modernity and Nazi Genocide, and the various theories relating to Holocaust have been given a fare treatment in this book. Robert deftly explores the various aspects which tries to decipher why six million Jews were murdered in this unprecedented state organized crime against humanity.