While in prison, Hitler wrote volume one of Mein Kampf (My Struggle) , which was published in 1925. This work detailed Hitler's radical ideas of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Bolshevism. Linked with Social Darwinism, the human struggle that said that might makes right, Hitler's book became the ideological base for the Nazi Party's racist beliefs and murderous practices.
This site discusses many of the ideas contained within Mein Kampf.
After Hitler was released from prison, he formally resurrected the Nazi Party. Hitler began rebuilding and reorganizing the Party, waiting for an opportune time to gain political power in Germany. The Conservative military hero Paul von Hindenburg was elected president in 1925, and Germany stabilized.
Hitler skillfully maneuvered through Nazi Party politics and emerged as the sole leader. The Führerprinzip, or leader principle, established Hitler as the one and only to whom Party members swore loyalty unto death. Final decision making rested with him, and his strategy was to develop a highly centralized and structured party that could compete in Germany's future elections. Hitler hoped to create a bureaucracy, which he envisioned as "the germ of the future state."
The Nazi Party began building a mass movement. From 27,000 members in 1925, the Party grew to 108,000 in 1929. The SA was the paramilitary unit of the Party, a propaganda arm that became known for its strong-arm tactics of street brawling and terror. The SS was established as an elite group with special duties within the SA, but it remained inconsequential until Heinrich Himmler became its leader in 1929. By the late twenties, the Nazi Party started other auxiliary groups. The Hitler Youth , the Student League and the Pupils' League were open to young Germans. The National Socialist Women's League allowed women to get involved. Different professional groups--teachers, lawyers and doctors--had their own auxiliary units.
From 1925 to 1927, the Nazi Party failed to make inroads in the cities and in May 1928, it did poorly in the Reichstag elections, winning only 2.6% of the total vote. The Party shifted its strategy to rural and small town areas and fueled anti-Semitism by calling for expropriation of Jewish agricultural property and by condemning large Jewish department stores. Party propaganda proved effective at winning over university students, veterans' organizations, and professional groups, although the Party became increasingly identified with young men of the lower middle classes.
On August 8, 1938, just a few weeks after the Nazi occupation of Austria, prisoners from the Dachau, concentration camp near Munich, were transferred to the Austrian town of Mauthausen, near Linz.
They were brought to the rock quarry there, known as the "Wiener Graben", where they began to build the granite fortress-prison of the main camp, mostly with their blood, bodies, bare hands and backs. It was known as the “mother camp” for all of Austria, comprising some 49 sub-camps. Between Aug. 8, 1938 and May 5, 1945, about 195, 000 persons, men and women, were forced into these camps. Most of the people were imprisoned under the Nazi “protective custody” laws, that is, they were consider dangerous to the Third Reich of Germany and Austria, and therefore, these two nations, now joined, had to be “protected” from these people because of their racial origin, nationality, political affiliation or religious belief. It should be noted that Austria contributed more volunteers for the SS, per capita , than did Germany.
The Mauthausen camp was one of the most infamous in the entire Nazi alternate universe of human destruction. Many people, most of whom were innocent of any crimes, were tortured to death in its rock quarry, and in the tunnels of Mauthausen-Gusen, the most infamous of the sub-camps. The policy of death through work was instituted by Chief of SS, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. Prisoners were to be given only the most primitive tools, and also, whenever possible, they were to work with their bare hands. This policy was known as “Primitivbauweise”. In Mauthausen it resulted in a harsh, stone world, deprived of any human kindness and compassion. It is there today still... sitting on a small mountain-top in the astonishingly beautiful and bucolic Austrian countryside, maintained by the Austrian government.
In the beginning of the systematic mass murder of Jews, Nazis used mobile killing squads called Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen consisted of four units of between 500 and 900 men each which followed the invading German troops into the Soviet Union. By the time Himmler ordered a halt to the shooting in the fall of 1942, they had murdered approximately 1,500,000 Jews. The death camps proved to be a better, faster, less personal method for killing Jews, one that would spare the shooters, not the victims, emotional anguish.
Five photographs and a map of Einsatzgruppen activities may be viewed in the Resources section.
A chilling report by the commander of one of the Einsatzgruppen, detailing the murders of 137,346 persons in a five month period.
Detailed information about the Einsatzgruppen, with primary source material.
A growing collection of documents related to the Einsatzgruppen is available at this site.
Map of Einsatzgruppen massacres in Eastern Europe, 1941-1942.
In September 1941, the Nazis began using gassing vans--trucks loaded with groups of people who were locked in and asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. These vans were used until the completion of the first death camp, Chelmno, which began operations in late 1941.
Nazi correspondence detailing the operation of gassing vans.
Nazi testimony regarding gassing vans.
On December 7, 1941, the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) order was issued to deter resistance by allowing military courts to swiftly sentence resisters to death. Those arrested under this order were said to have disappeared into the "night and fog."
More on the Night and Fog order from the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
THE DEADLY PHILOSOPHY: RACIAL PURITYDer Untermensch (The Subhuman), a German-produced racial propaganda pamphlet (1942). CL:SWC
The Nazis believed that the "useless mouths" (the chronically ill and the physically and mentally defective) had no right to live. On September 1, 1939, Hitler signed an order "granting" such individuals the right to die. The so-called euthanasia (mercy-killing) program of the Nazis killed hundreds of thousands of individuals by gas or lethal injection.
In 1940-41 special liquidation centers were established throughout Germany to eliminate the mentally or chronically ill. In these centers the first hermetically sealed gas chambers were developed. These deadly chambers, disguised as showers, were the prototypes for the mass extermination chambers later used in the Nazi extermination camps.
On the selection platform at Birkenau, 1944. CL:Archives of the State Museum in Oswiecim
Gypsy mother and child at the Lackenbach transit camp in Burgenland, Austria 1940. CL:DOW / "Be honest, decent, faithful and congenial towards members of our own blood but to no one else."
Heinrich Himmler, October 4, 1943
At the core of the Nazi ideology was a deadly vision of a racially pure society: a vicious form of social, genetic, and population planning that eliminated every individual not fitting its narrow definition of perfection. While Jews were the primary target, Gypsies, Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Polish, homosexuals, the handicapped and political dissidents were also trapped in the deadly grip of Nazi ideology.
A demonstration of Aryan features in Nazi-run schools. CL:SW
Over 500,000 Gypsies were systematically murdered by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945. Like the Jews, Gypsies were stereotyped in Nazi propaganda as vagabonds, criminals, and parasites.
"The Blood Protection Law deals with the segregation of Jewish and German blood from the biological point of view." Stuckart and Globke, Commentaries to the German Race Laws, 1936
Gypsies being deported from Simmering in Vienna to the transit camp of Bruck on the Leitha River, late 1938. CL:DOW
Prisoner Reception: The Sauna
This is where prisoners selected for slave labor were processed. Often people would have to wait outside naked in any weather. Here they would have to give up all their remaining possessions: money, jewels, even wedding rings and photos. In short, the prisoner was left with only one possession, his or her body. In this building planned humiliation was performed on the confused and terrified new arrivals. Men and women were forced to stand on stools, in a room crowded with people while heads, armpits and other intimate parts of one's body were shaved by male prisoners and where numbers were tattooed in each arm. It is also where prisoners already in the camp were deloused. This is because of the raging typhus epidemics. After liberation at Bergen-Belsen, former Auschwitz and Birkenau prisoner Adolf Gawalewicz said to British Army personal during a personal DDT session: "It's not going to work. Even the Germans couldn't get rid of the lice!"
The United States government response to Nazi anti-Semitic policy is best viewed in the context American foreign policy and the domestic economic crisis of the 1930s. During the refugee phase (1933 - 1941), there was a reluctance to accept Jewish refugees. As the situation developed, there was some response. Hugh R. Wilson, the United States ambassador to Germany, was "recalled for consultation" after Kristallnacht. After the annexation of Austria, the German and Austrian immigration quotas were unified in order not to lose the latter, and the existing quotas were fully utilized. But a bill to admit ten thousand Jewish refugee children outside the quota (the Wagner - Rogers Bill), introduced in 1939 and again in 1940, did not emerge from committee. During World War II, the "Jewish question" maintained the low priority it had had before the war.
The initial context of the United States relationship to Germany was its policy of isolationism, which prevented the Roosevelt administration from assuming an interventionist posture. More difficult to appraise is the direct link between isolationism and antisemitism. The Jewish community, because of its close ties to the Roosevelt administration, acted as a magnet for anti - New Deal sentiment. They earned thereby the opposition of isolationist spokesmen like Charles Lindbergh. During the 1930s antisemitism was a sentiment that stemmed primarily from the right wing of the political spectrum, from men like Charles E. Coughlin, and Gerald L. K. Smith. The possibilities of forming the necessary coalitions to shape rescue policy were thus limited to the liberal side of the political spectrum. Moreover, the fear that refugees would increase unemployment was one of the main arguments of antirescue policy. As a consequence, efforts to rescue Jews by means of refugee ships, like the St. Louis, failed.
The American Entry into the War.
American's entry into the war hardly stilled the strident antisemitism. Antirefugee and antirescue sentiment was now buttressed by a new fear that Germany would infiltrate spies into the refugee stream. Perceiving these popular passions, Roosevelt beleived that the war, which he considered necessary, must never be allowed to be depicted in terms of a war to save the Jews. The existing indifference to the refugees extended to the question of rescuing those in camps. Even when it became clear that Berlin had actually embarked on the "Final Solution, " no immediate change came about.
The Evian Conference.
Most of the steps taken by the Roosevelt administration were intended more as gestures than as a consistent policy to ameliorate the plight of the victims. The Evian Conference, called at Roosevelt's behest in mid - 1938, was foredoomed to failure since the American delegation was instructed that no tampering with the immigration laws would be countenanced. Without taking the lead, the US could not convince other nations to take in masses of Jewish refugees.
Rescue of Jews - Not a War Priority.
Between 1942 and the end of the war in Europe in 1945, the Allies gave no priority in their war aims to the rescue of Jews. Repeated suggestions for retribution, negotiations, or ameliorating the situation, were rejected because it was felt that such steps would interfere with the prosecution of the war. The murder of the Jews was not mentioned at any of the Allied war conferences. As news continued to reach the West between May and December 1942, the British government was subjected to growing pressure to do something to help the Jews. When told of the British desire to make some sort of gesture, the United States responded by favoring the issuing of a declaration. A joint statement issued on December 17, 1942, in the names of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the USSR, Great Britain, the United States, and the French National Committee, clearly condemned the "bestial policy of cold - blooded extermination."
The Bermuda Conference.
The Bermuda Conference, called in the aftermath of the swell of information about the mass murder of the Jews, was the next "gesture." It soon became apparent that the purpose of this conference was to assuage public opinion. So meager were its results that it was decided not to make them public, and rescue advocates dubbed the conference a "cruel mockery."
The Creation of the War Refugee Board._7E
Firm action on the rescue question came from the Treasury Department, headed by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the closest Jew to Roosevelt. Josiah E. DuBois, Jr., an official in the Treasury Department, discovered evidence that the State Department had sought to undermine all efforts at rescue. That information was delivered to the President on January 16, 1944, together with a plan to create an interdepartmental rescue agency. Subsequently Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board (WRB), which was financed by the Joint Distribution Committee.
The War Refugee Board's Activities.
Almost immediately, the WRB was faced with a crisis in Hungary. It urged the Hungarian people not to cooperate with the deportations and appealed to all nations maintaining diplomatic contact with Hungary to increase the size of their legations so that the deportations could be monitored. In Sweden the WRB recruited Raoul Wallenberg, who went on to demonstrate what could be achieved. A special executive order issued by Roosevelt in April 1944 established a temporary haven for rescue in Fort Ontario, near Oswego, New York. The heretofore immutable immigration laws were thus circumvented. Pressure was put on various neutral countries to accept refugees. But proposals to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, and the camp itself were rejected.