The Holocaust, according to me

This is an essay that I randomly wrote in seventh grade in about 45 minutes, with varying degrees of edits, depending on when you read it. Currently I've fixed a typo and a bit of information.


So, I agree it’s important to know what happened in the Holocaust, but at least as important to know how and why it happened, too. Once you know that, you can recognize a modern-day Holocaust before it’s too late to prevent it.

For background: WWI. Germany was building up a big military, France said "Uh-oh" and built up a bigger military, Germany said "Darn it" and allied itself with Austria and built a bigger military, France said "Oh cheese" and allied itself with England, and basically war broke out at some point. Towards the end, Germany was somewhat ahead because Russia collapsed, but then America got annoyed at the Germans’ sinking one cruise liner too many with their U-boats, so we joined the western dudes and whacked the Germans.

The war took a huge amount of resources from all sides. The victorious Allies decided it was Germany’s fault, so the Versailles treaty asked for a huge wad of cash and land and soldiers to repair the damage. Germany was already deep in the red from the war, so the government went bankrupt and started printing money like crazy. Inflation was at 10,000,000%/day, so all the Germans were suffering extreme poverty.

Whose fault? France. The German people wanted revenge.

Then comes Mr. Hitler. He was a soldier in WWI and was recovering from temporary poison gas-induced blindness when Germany lost. He really hated Jews. In fact, he blamed Germany's loss on them. Germany was absolutely flawless, so the only explanation was that the Jews betrayed them, right? NOTHING to do with declaring war on one country too many.

Anyway, that's what Hitler decided. The public, predictably, was pretty happy with this idea, because then it wasn't their fault. Hitler was also a really good public speaker, and he simplified a lot of things to where the people could understand him. (A paraphrased quote: "You must repeat the message to the idiotic masses several billion times so they absorb the idea.") He actually tried to cause a revolution in an incident called the "Beer Hall Putsch", in which he was arrested and thrown into jail. While he was in there, he wrote a book called "My Struggle", which talked about his views. I'm guessing a lot of people read it, adding to Hitler's support. Also, he gave out random propaganda, like a poster in which he's leading a bunch of soldiers, raising a German flag while a ray of sunlight peeks through the clouds; it basically presented him as a messiah or something. Anyway, with this sort of stuff, he got the public to join him and his Nazi party. That's how he got to power...

To understand the other half, I must give this backround: A guy named Francis Galton came up with the idea of eugenics in the 1870s or so. Basically, he said, if we evolved because inferior humans were much less likely to reproduce, what if we duplicate natural factors today? Viz., tell smart and/or strong people to have a lot of children, and do the opposite for weak and/or stupid people. That would slowly improve the human race (if you could be sure whether someone’s genius is due to genes or environment, which you can’t). Hitler took the above idea and applied all the anti-Semitism he could think of.

Hitler said the Jews were an inferior race. We Aryans are superior, and we must keep their genes from contaminating ours. We must create a "master race" that will rule the world. Make sure we don't interbreed with anyone who doesn't fit the definition of "smart strong white xenophobic racist". Not just the Jews, you understand, also Gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents (after all, if you don’t obey numbskulled orders, you must be diseased in some way, riiiight?), and those with disabilities of any kind. But Jews got the worst treatment. Hitler actually made his men gather detailed family trees, and a non-Jew with Jewish parents was considered “just as bad”, because he carried Jewish genes.

Now, how do you prevent several million people from reproducing? Killing them is simple and effective. So Hitler told his men to get every Jew they could find and send them into concentration camps. He made them work their butts off, literally – work till you die of exhaustion. Or he just flat out killed them. He tried to figure out the most efficient way to kill people; line them up, so a bullet went through more than one person? Lock a dozen in a car and wait for them to suffocate? Whatever happened, these people were definitely not going to be able to breed with anyone else.

He “purified” the gene pool the positive way, too: encouraging the "superior" people to reproduce more. When a couple got married, they got a big loan from the government, my guess is the equivalent of $200,000. If they had a child in the first year of marriage, they only had to pay back 3/4 of the loan. If they had another child, they only had to pay back half. 4 children, they could keep the money.

Hitler also thought about where to put all these people. That was one of his reasons for conquering Europe, to get "living space" for them. He was vindictive, too. When France surrendered, Hitler made the king (or president, or whatever) sign the truce in the same railroad car that Kaiser William II surrendered in at the end of WWI.

And, of course, Hitler's campaign had its ironic aspects. Among the Jews getting the heck out of Germany before he found them were Messrs. Einstein, Oppenheimer, and a few others that Hitler could have used for making the atomic bomb. An inferior race, eh?

Anyway, that's my story of the Holocaust. In my opinion, it shows the more important aspects of it. You see, I think the main lesson we should learn is how it happened, so we can prevent it, rather than (pardon the callous term) spooky stories about the atrocities. But that’s just me.