Assignment help – Discuss whether the Holocaust was a crime against the German community as a whole rather than only against the victims. Consider further whether the Holocaust was a crime against the world community. Tell me why or why not.
The Holocaust
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The Holocaust
The target victims
The Holocaust was a Greek word used to describe a sacrificial offering that was burned on an altar. The word has a new meaning now since 1945: the systematic and ideological persecutions sponsored by the state and mass murders of many European Jews and other Romani people, dissidents, the intellectually disabled, and homosexuals by the Nazi regime of Germany. According to Adolf Hitler, who was the anti-Semitic leader, Jews used to be an inferior race. It was also considered to be an alien threat to German racial purity and community. After years of the persecution to the Jews when Nazi was ruling in Germany, Hitler decided to come up with a final solution now known as the Holocaust which came to fruition under cover of World War II.
There were mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps where Poland occupied. The Jews were targeted for political, racial, behavioral, and ideological reasons, and among them, six million died in the Holocaust. Most of those who died were children (Hayes, 2017). Generally, the primary victims of the Holocaust were the Jews. The Nazi regime persecuted different groups, which was based on ideological grounds, but the Jews were targeted for systematic persecution and mass murder by the Nazis and those in collaboration. The policies of the Nazis also led to the brutalization and persecution of more other groups that include the Roma and Sinti.
Their policies towards all their target victims were brutal but not identical. The Roma and Sinti were viewed as Gypsy nuisance, who was an inferior group racially, with people who had criminal habits. The other target group was the Germans, who had physical and mental disabilities. They were considered useless eaters and racially defective, and up to two hundred and fifty thousand of these were killed. Poles were also considered as subhuman slaves where they suffered a brutal German occupation. The Polish elites were massively killed or imprisoned as potential leaders of the Polish resistance. The Soviet soldiers captured were also viewed as subhuman slaves and were believed to be linked to the Judeo-Bolshevik threat. The majority were also killed either through intentional starvation or mistreatment.
Crime against the World
The Holocaust was a type of Genocide, and Genocide happens to be the most insidious and destructive threat known to human beings. It is an ultimate crime against humanity, which is condemned worldwide. The Holocaust manifested genocidal horrors that were too bad to have happened, which prompted the UN General Assembly to adopt the convention on the prevention and punishment of Genocide having the force of customary international law. The UN General Assembly also adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in reaction to the Holocaust (Bazyler, 2017). The Holocaust is studied everywhere, even in this course. That means that it was a major concern worldwide. Its remembrance and research are used to inform and guide scholars, activists, and educators responding to emerging mass atrocity crimes today by offering new perspectives and identifying the areas of difference and similarity.
Over sixteen European countries and Israel have laws against the denial of Holocaust. The denial of the Holocaust is a denial of the genocidal killing of six million Jews under the Nazis in Germany. Other countries have implemented broader laws that criminalize genocide denial. These laws have been proposed in many other countries, including the United Kingdom and the united states. These laws have been criticized and faced opposition from civil rights and human rights advocates whose opinion suggests that the laws would violate the freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Holocaust denial is commonly associated with racist propaganda. The holocaust denial is another way of explaining that the Holocaust was a crime against the world community.
References
Hayes, P. (2017). Why?: explaining the Holocaust. WW Norton & Company.
Bazyler, M. (2017). Holocaust, Genocide, and the law: A quest for justice in a post-Holocaust world. Oxford University Press.
