The Perils of Indifference

During World War II, Nazi Germany, under the rule of Adolf Hitler, systematically killed some six million European Jews. These murders were carried out through extrajudicial shootings, state-sponsored pogroms, and the Nazis’ infamous death camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. Nazis referred to these genocidal acts as the Final Solution to the Jewish Question—the question of the proper place of Jews in European society, a debate that dated to the 19th century. After his election in 1933, Hitler began instituting anti-Jewish measures, including a national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. In 1935, the Reichstag (German parliament) passed the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their rights as German citizens and forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. (Those who violated the Nuremberg Laws were arrested, served their terms, and were eventually sent to the concentration camps.) In November 1938, Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, saw Jewish establishments looted and burned in Germany and Austria. Following Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, which unleashed World War II, Germany began segregating Jews in crowded ghettos. The Final Solution blamed Jews for Europe’s problems. Germany had suffered a stinging defeat in World War I, and part of Hitler’s program was to return Germany to an idealized past glory. These measures included rejecting the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, and the promise of victory in World War II.