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>>13699161
'Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”), Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban (“Destruction”), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by NaziGermany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.” Yiddish-speaking Jews and survivors in the years immediately following their liberation called the murder of the Jews the Ḥurban, the word used to describe the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 bce and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 ce. Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”) is the term preferred by Israelis and the French, most especially after Claude Lanzmann’s masterful 1985 motion picture documentary of that title.'
>>13699171
'Holocaust Investigation
During World War II (1939–1945), an estimated total of 60 million people, including military personnel, paramilitary personnel, and civilians, had perished, whether in battle, by air raids or shelling of urban areas, village sieges, or in concentration camps. The term Holocaust refers to those ethnic populations who were persecuted and exterminated by the German Nazis in forced labor camps, death marches, inside ghettos, and rural areas. The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, conducted the investigation and trials of such crimes in the aftermath of World War II. In spite of strict secrecy kept by the Nazi authorities on their genocidal activities, thanks to several anti-Nazi paramilitary groups organized by civilians in the German-occupied territories, collectively known as the Resistance, testimonies of such atrocities were gradually gathered by the Allied Forces. Citizens from France, Italy, Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark, and other countries formed a network of underground activity, supplying the Allies with intelligence, and smuggling targeted ethnic persons, such as Jews, Gypsies (Roma people), prisoners of war, and political dissidents from Germany and the occupied territories to the United Kingdom, southern France, and the Americas. In the face of the alarming amount of atrocities reported, the governments of the Allied Forces decided in early 1942 to thoroughly investigate and punish those responsible for such crimes. On December 17, 1942, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed a joint declaration acknowledging the mass murder of European Jews.'
>>13699187
'The Soviet Union issued the Moscow Declaration, on October 30, 1943, "Concerning responsibility of Hitlerites for committed atrocities" and the United Kingdom established, on August 8, 1945, the London Agreement, "Concerning prosecution and punishment of major war criminals of European Axis" (Axis meaning the Alliance of Nazi-Germany with Mussolini, then Dictator of Italy, and the Japanese Empire). Those two documents were combined into a body of laws to regulate the International Military Tribunal (IMT), created by the Allies (the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union) in August of 1945. The IMT received jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute individual responsibilities concerning the following offenses: 1) crimes against peace, or "planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing"; 2) war crimes, or "violations of the laws or customs of war . . . shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity"; and 3) crimes against humanity, or "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war . . . or persecution on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated."'
>>13699206
"From October 18, 1945, until October 1, 1946, twenty-two Nazi officers were prosecuted on one or more of such charges. Under IMT law, American military tribunals had also tried another 12 high-ranking German Officials at Nuremberg. However, the vast majority of post-war trials concerned lower-rank officials, such as concentration camps commandants, guards, leaders of mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen), police officers, and Nazi physicians who carried out gruesome medical experiments on both political dissidents and other prisoners (Jewish and Gypsy women, men, and children) in the concentration camps. These criminals were prosecuted in different courts and locations of the Allied-occupied territories, such as Soviet-occupied zones of Germany and Austria, British and American courts, and Italy. Additionally, other countries also tried those who committed crimes in their respective territories during Nazi occupation and those who collaborated with Nazi authorities. Poland, for instance, sentenced to death Rudolf Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz extermination camp, in 1947. In post-war decades, Israeli intelligence continued to investigate and hunt Nazi criminals who had fled to other countries under fake identities, such as Adolf Eichmann, who was finally tried in Jerusalem in 1961.'
>>13699217
'In spite of testimonial evidence and intelligence on Nazi crimes against humanity gathered by the Allies and the Red Cross during the war, nothing prepared the world for the horrors that were disclosed when troops finally reached the concentration camps. In addition to the on-site photographs, movies, physical evidence , and reports by officers of the liberation forces, as well as the individual testimonies of those who survived the Holocaust or the Nazi medical experiments, a great amount of Nazi documentation and material evidence was found in prisons, in the secret police archives, and local police administrative files, which the Nazis did not succeeded in destroying before the Allied invasion.'
'From the Nazi documentation, such as decrees issued by Hitler to the Gestapo (German secret police organization), ministry memos, and doctrinaire Nazi material, it became clear to Holocaust investigators and prosecutors that concentration camps had served initially as a tool of 1) political terror against Germans, Austrians, Poles, and other political dissidents; 2) as a means of exploiting slave labor; and 3), as places for mass extermination of Jews, Roma people (Gypsies), and others (Serbs, Russians, and Albanians). Soon after Adolf Hitler was nominated as Chancellor of the Third Reich, the Nazi party issued a presidential emergency decree, in February 28, 1933, establishing a so-called "protective custody" that gave the Gestapo unlimited power to arrest people without judicial proceedings.'
>>13699236
'The Nazi rationale behind ethnic persecution and extermination was twofold. First, according, to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, in a speech to the SS Major Generals at Posen in 1943, the mass extermination of Jews was necessary, although it was a very difficult task, because Jews, due to their religion, were against the Nazi war efforts, acting "in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators and trouble-mongers"; and second, because of the Nazi racial theory about the existence of a pure, "superior" race, the Aryans (Europeans descended from the Saxons), which should be protected from miscegenation with non-Aryan "inferior" races, which were gradually polluting and degrading the Aryan race. Therefore, Jews in particular, and all persons having at least one Jewish grandparent, should be eliminated.'
'The Roma people, like the Jews, were for centuries victims of discrimination by Europeans in general, due to their traditional customs and nomadic behavior. Nazi killing mobile units were sent to assassinate tens of thousands of Roma in the occupied eastern territories, such as Poland, Hungary, Serbia, and Albania, as well as in the western territories of countries such as France and Italy. Like the Jews, the Roma were also imprisoned in concentration camps, forced to work in factories and mines, tortured, shot, hung, or gassed in the death chambers. An estimated 1 million Roma are thought to have died under Nazi oppression, approximately half of the existing prewar population.'
'Nazi documents on the number and location of concentration camps all over Europe, such as one signed by the SS General Pohl, compared quantities of prisoners between 1939 and 1942, as follows: "At the beginning of war (Dachau, 1939 = 4,000 prisoners, today, 8,000; Sachsenhausen, 1939 = 6,500, today, 10,000; Buchenwald, 1939 = 5,300, today, 9,000; Mauthausen, 1939 = 1,500, today, 5,500; Flossenburg, 1939 = 1,600, today, 4,700; Ravensbureck, 1939 = 2,500, today 7,500." The report continues, showing a list of new camps built between 1940 and 1942: Auschwitz (Poland), Neuengamme (Germany), Gusen (Austria), Natzweiler (France), Gross-Rosen (Germany), Lublin (Poland), Niederhagen (Germany), Stutthof (near Danzig), Arbeitsdorf (Germany). The War Crimes Branch of the Third U.S. Army (Judge Advocate Section), reported that "Concentration Camp Flossenburg was founded in 1938 as a camp for political prisoners . . . and it was not until April 1940 that the first transport of prisoners was received. . . . Flossenburg was the mother camp and under its direct control and jurisdiction were 47 satellite camps or outer-commandos for male prisoners and 27 camps for female workers . . ." The SS police (Gestapo) established a program of "extermination through work" in these camps, alternating with torture, starvation, and mass execution in gas chambers and incineration in furnaces. A secret motion picture made by the Gestapo of these mass executions was presented as evidence in the IMT court. According to surviving witnesses, when bored, the camp guards also amused themselves by randomly shooting or hanging prisoners.'
>>13699249
'Physical forensic evidence presented at IMT included an exhibit of three tattooed parchments, identified as human skin by Lieutenant George C. Demas, U.S.N.R., of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. The evidence was presented in support of testimonial by a former prisoner at the Buchenwald camp, as follows: "In 1939, all prisoners with tattooing on them were ordered to report to the dispensary . . . but after the tattooed prisoners had been examined, the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were kept in the dispensary, and then killed by injections administered by Karl Beigs, a criminal prisoner. The bodies were then turned over to the pathology department, where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated. The finished products were turned over to SS Standartenfuehrer Koch's wife, who had them fashioned into lamp-shades and other ornamental household articles. . . ."'
'The IMT and other investigation committees could never make an accurate estimate of the real numbers of the Holocaust victims. Although Nazis in general kept detailed records, and some concentration camp death lists have been retrieved, it is likely that they only represent the tip of the iceberg. However, due to the huge scale of concentration camps operations and facilities, it was evident they were designed as death factories for mass extermination. Mass graves were also found by the Allied troops in several locations, with hundreds of corpses inside many of them. From some interim reports to Himmler, issued by German officers, it is known that, only from Hungary, "Up to June 27, 1944, 475,000 Jews were deported" to concentration camps in Germany. One report also informs Himmler that between January 11 and 31, 1943, a total of 45,000 Jews were deported from Poland, Berlin, and occupied Dutch territories to Auschwitz: ". . . the figure of 45,000 includes the invalids (old Jews and children). By the use of a practical standard, the screening of the arriving Jews in Auschwitz should yield at least 10,000 to 15,000 people fit for work. . . ." Those "unfit for work" were killed in the gas chambers. Auschwitz and the other camps were constantly receiving prisoners and discarding the unfit for work, and renewing their work forces as the fit quickly became unfit through disease, murder, or starvation.'
'Long after the confusion of war, work is underway to preserve sites where forensic evidence of the Holocaust might still be found. Most extermination sites were cleaned or deliberately bombed and machinery dismantled by the retreating Germans to attempt to hide the full extent of and motive behind concentration camp atrocities, but some relatively undisturbed sites still remain. In the Birkenau camp in Poland, parts of walls from the gas chamber and crematorium still stand. Preservation groups are consulting forensic scientists for methods to protect traces of chemicals or human remains that are still in the area.'
'The story surrounding the documents supposed that they had been on a plane carrying the Führer's personal archives out of Berlin when it was shot down in April 1945 near the village of Börnersdorf, in what would later become East Germany. The documents, which escaped destruction because they were housed in a metal box, were recovered by local farmers, who hid them until they were smuggled out of the country and came into the hands of a document collector and World War II enthusiast named Konrad Kujau.
The diaries sent shock waves throughout the world and touched off a historical controversy, for they portrayed a Hitler who was very different from the man who haunted the history books. In particular, they suggested that Hitler had no involvement in the 1938 riot against the Jews called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), that he knew nothing of the "final solution," or plans to exterminate Europe's Jewish population, and that his goal was simply to resettle western Europe's Jews in eastern Europe. If the diaries were authentic, they were the most significant historical find in decades, and the history of the Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s would have to be entirely rewritten.'
..
'The chloride that was identified in the Hitler Diaries ink proved that the documents could have been written only in the previous year. Further, the paper, which had been "aged" by beating on it with a hammer and staining it with tea leaves, was examined under ultraviolet light. This examination showed that the paper contained an additive that had not been used in the papermaking process until 1954. The threads used to affix the seals to the documents, too, were suspect because they contained materials that were not available until after World War II. The physical evidence was conclusive: The documents were an elaborate forgery.
How could such a hoax be perpetrated on millions of people? At the center of the hoax was a sometime artist named Konrad Kujau (1938–2000), who was born into a middle-class family in Löbau, Germany. His father was an enthusiastic Hitler supporter, and the younger Kujau, who showed early promise as an artist, expressed his admiration for his father's hero by drawing sketches of the Führer. Kujau's early years are shrouded in some mystery; he worked in a number of short-lived jobs, and he later claimed to have studied at the Dresden Academy of Art. He surfaced near Stuttgart, West Germany, in 1957, where he had numerous brushes with the law and spent time in jail.'
'Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”), Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban (“Destruction”), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by NaziGermany and its collaborators during World War II. '
'Guards from the so-called "Hygienic Institute" would then drop powerful Zyklon-B gas pellets into the sealed chambers, and wait for people to die. It took about 20 minutes. The thick walls could not hide the screams of those suffocating inside.
Then Sonderkommandos - other prisoners, usually Jews forced to work for the guards or be killed - would remove artificial limbs, glasses, hair and teeth before dragging the corpses to the incinerators. Ashes of the bodies were buried or used as fertiliser.
Belongings of those gassed and those sent to work were taken for sorting in a part of the camp known as "Canada" - so named because the country was seen as a land of plenty. '
>>13699307
'Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”), Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban (“Destruction”), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by NaziGermany and its collaborators during World War II. '
'Chełmno, with gas vans only, had its roots in the Aktion T4 euthanasia program.[295] In December 1939 and January 1940, gas vans equipped with gas cylinders and a sealed compartment had been used to kill disabled people in occupied Poland.[296] As the mass shootings continued in Russia, Himmler and his subordinates in the field feared that the murders were causing psychological problems for the SS,[297] and began searching for more efficient methods. In December 1941, similar vans, using exhaust fumes rather than bottled gas, were introduced into the camp at Chełmno,[283] Victims were asphyxiated while being driven to prepared burial pits in the nearby forests.[298] The vans were also used in the occupied Soviet Union, for example in smaller clearing actions in the Minsk ghetto,[299] and in Yugoslavia.[300] Apparently, as with the mass shootings, the vans caused emotional problems for the operators, and the small number of victims the vans could handle made them ineffective.[301]'
'Auschwitz, Polish Oświęcim, also called Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp and extermination camp. Located near the industrial town of Oświęcim in southern Poland (in a portion of the country that was annexed by Germany at the beginning of World War II), Auschwitz was actually three camps in one: a prison camp, an extermination camp, and a slave-labour camp. As the most lethal of the Nazi extermination camps, Auschwitz has become the emblematic site of the “final solution,” a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz; 90 percent of them were Jews. Also among the dead were some 19,000 Roma who were held at the camp until the Nazis gassed them on July 31, 1944—the only other victim group gassed in family units alongside the Jews. The Poles constituted the second largest victim group at Auschwitz, where some 83,000 were killed or died.'
'Once in power, Hitler established an absolute dictatorship. He secured the president’s assent for new elections. The Reichstag fire, on the night of February 27, 1933 (apparently the work of a Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe), provided an excuse for a decree overriding all guarantees of freedom and for an intensified campaign of violence. In these conditions, when the elections were held (March 5), the Nazis polled 43.9 percent of the votes. On March 21 the Reichstag assembled in the Potsdam Garrison Church to demonstrate the unity of National Socialism with the old conservative Germany, represented by Hindenburg. Two days later the Enabling Bill, giving full powers to Hitler, was passed in the Reichstag by the combined votes of Nazi, Nationalist, and Centre party deputies (March 23, 1933). Less than three months later all non-Nazi parties, organizations, and labor unions ceased to exist. The disappearance of the Catholic Centre Party was followed by a German Concordat with the Vatican in July.'
'Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka became known as the Operation Reinhard camps, named after the German plan to murder the Jews in the General Government area of occupied Poland.[315] Between March 1942 and November 1943, around 1,526,500 Jews were gassed in these three camps in gas chambers using carbon monoxide from the exhaust fumes of stationary diesel engines.[5] Gold fillings were pulled from the corpses before burial, but unlike in Auschwitz the women's hair was cut before death. At Treblinka, to calm the victims, the arrival platform was made to look like a train station, complete with fake clock.[316] Most of the victims at these three camps were buried in pits at first. From mid-1942, as part of Sonderaktion 1005, prisoners at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka were forced to exhume and burn bodies that had been buried, in part to hide the evidence, and in part because of the terrible smell pervading the camps and a fear that the drinking water would become polluted.[317] The corpses—700,000 in Treblinka—were burned on wood in open fire pits and the remaining bones crushed into powder.[318]'
'Auschwitz was probably chosen to play a central role in the “final solution” because it was located at a railway junction with 44 parallel tracks—rail lines that were used to transport Jews from throughout Europe to their death. Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps, ordered the establishment of the first camp, the prison camp, on April 27, 1940, and the first transport of Polish political prisoners arrived on June 14. This small camp, Auschwitz I, was reserved throughout its history for political prisoners, mainly Poles and Germans.'
'In October 1941, work began on Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, located outside the nearby village of Brzezinka. There the SS later developed a huge concentration camp and extermination complex that included some 300 prison barracks; four large so-called Badeanstalten (German: “bathhouses”), in which prisoners were gassed to death; Leichenkeller (“corpse cellars”), in which their bodies were stored; and Einäscherungsöfen (“cremating ovens”). Another camp (Buna-Monowitz), near the village of Dwory, later called Auschwitz III, became in May 1942 a slave-labour camp supplying workers for the nearby chemical and synthetic-rubber works of IG Farben. In addition, Auschwitz became the nexus of a complex of 45 smaller subcamps in the region, most of which housed slave labourers. During most of the period from 1940 to 1945, the commandant of the central Auschwitz camps was SS-Hauptsturmführer (Capt.) and ultimately SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieut. Col.) Rudolf Franz Hoess (Höss).'
'In the 1960s, Kujau decided to put his artistic skill to work as a forger, and he earned pocket change forging and selling the autographs of famous people. (In a bizarre footnote, it turned out that at least one of the documents the handwriting experts relied on was itself a Kujau forgery.) By the 1970s, Kujau was buying and selling Nazi memorabilia. He soon realized that he could enhance the value of the items in his collection by forging the signatures of prominent Nazi officials, as well as bogus documentation for them. Collectors snapped up the helmets, uniforms, flags, medals, and letters he sold in this way. Especially popular with collectors were paintings Kujau sold as Hitler's, but that were his own forgeries.'
'In the late 1970s, Kujau's criminal career took a more elaborate direction when he produced a handwritten manuscript purporting to be the third volume of Hitler's two-volume Mein Kampf (even though Hitler was known to have written the first two volumes with a typewriter). He went on to forge additional documents, including poems he sold to collectors by claiming they were from the pen of Hitler himself. Finally, he began producing the Hitler Diaries, which became a source of fascination among his gullible, but wealthy, clients.'
'The Stern saga began in 1979, when a journalist who worked for the magazine, Gerd Heidemann, himself a Hitler enthusiast, went to the home of one Fritz Stiefel to see his collection of Nazi memorabilia, including not just paintings and letters, but also a volume of Hitler's diary, supposedly one of six volumes extant. Heidemann smelled a major news story, but he knew that his editors would have interest only if he did further background work. He traveled to Börnersdorf, where he learned about the mysterious airplane crash and the metal box containing papers that was retrieved from the wreckage. There Heidemann learned that there were not six but twenty-seven volumes of the diary, all in the hands of one Konrad Fischer, an alias Kujau commonly used. Based on his findings, Heidemann pitched the story to his editors, who agreed to pay two million German marks for the twenty-seven volumes. Kujau feared that selling the notebooks would lead to his exposure, but the money was just too much to refuse, so he began work on the diaries in earnest. Over a two-year period, Kujau wrote the diaries out in longhand Gothic script, sealing each notebook with special seals and black ribbon. For content, he relied on newspaper stories, medical documents, and reference books, including a book of Hitler's speeches.'
'After the documents were exposed as forgeries, Kujau fled, but he was arrested at the German border and tried in Hamburg in August of 1984. Kujau confessed to the forgeries, and during the trial he made no attempt to hide his guilt. Heidemann was tried as an accomplice, although he protested that he had also been duped. The pair was found guilty and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. The judge criticized Stern, stating the magazine "acted with such naïveté and negligence that it was virtually an accomplice in the fraud." After serving about three years of his sentence, Kujau was released. In the years that followed he created and sold art reproductions, ran unsuccessfully for public office, and was arrested in 1999 for forging his own driver's license. Kujau died in 2000. It has never been determined what happened to the total of five million marks Stern allegedly paid out for the Hitler Diaries.'
'As the leader of Germany’s Third Reich in the 1930s and 1940s, Adolf Hitler developed a totalitarian fascist state dedicated to imperialist expansion of a pure German race. Hitler and his anti-Semitic, supra-nationalistic National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi Party) was ultimately responsible for millions of deaths during the Holocaust and a massive refugee crisis in Central and Eastern Europe during World War II (1939–1945).
Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria, and spent his younger years in Linz, Austria, and in Vienna. Hitler was not a good student; he left the Gymnasium without graduating and failed to be accepted as an art student at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. This failed career move left Hitler a lonely and distraught young man. While in Vienna in the years leading up to World War I (1914–1918), Hitler developed anti-Semitic tendencies, most likely fed by his envy of affluent Jewish citizens during his years of extreme poverty and destitution as well as the influence of Vienna’s Lord Mayor who publicly supported anti-Semitic policies. In 1913 Hitler moved to Munich where he lived until the war broke out and he volunteered to serve in the German Army. During the war, Hitler was injured twice, once in 1916 and again in 1918, the second time as a victim of a gas attack. For his bravery and valor, he earned the Iron Cross twice and was promoted to the rank of corporal. Hitler returned to Munich after the war, dispirited, disillusioned, and angry over the Versailles settlement. Like many young returning soldiers, Hitler believed that Germany’s new liberal government should not have signed the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty forced Germany to accept full responsibility for starting the war, stripped Germany of its colonies, required that it pay heavy reparations to the Allied powers, demilitarized a large portion of its western territory, and reduced its military numbers substantially. Hitler believed that these terms unjustly punished Germany and joined the right-wing, nationalist German Workers’ Party in 1919, the forerunner of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, to work toward a reversal of the treaty.'
'By 1920 Hitler was the leader of propaganda of the growing German Workers’ Party, and in 1921 he became the führer (leader) of the organization, now called the Nazi Party. The Nazis at this time were still a very small splinter party, but gained notoriety with their failed Munich Hall putsch in 1923, after which Hitler served nine months in prison. During his incarceration, Hitler wrote his famous memoir and political treatise Mein Kampf (My Struggle) where he condemned democratic systems and blamed Europe’s Jewish population for what he considered to be Germany’s crisis of morality and modernity. The issue of race and its intimate connection to political institutions that stood as symbols of a vanishing collective identity became the focal point of Hitler’s theory of fascism. In the tradition of other “philosophers of race” such as Comte de Gobineau and H. S. Chamberlain, Hitler believed in the natural inequality of human races. The white race, he argued, was superior to all others, with the Teutonic race as the most civilized and advanced. Because Hitler believed that the demise of the human race begins with an intermingling of races that causes social instability through a crisis of identity, he called for social, political, economic, and cultural policy to protect the purity of German blood first and foremost.'
'This belief in ethnic community as the foundation of the nation led Hitler to be suspicious of the Jews’ lack of a homeland. He referred to them as “parasites on other peoples” and fervently believed that their infiltration into European society needed to be halted immediately. Hitler was equally suspicious of liberal doctrines of “equality” and “liberty” because, he argued, they only allowed Jews to exploit Europe’s gullibility about their true intentions to take over European society. Hitler pointed to the Jewish origins of many Soviet revolutionary leaders, their support of trade unionist activities, as well as their overarching presence in business, finance, banking, and stock market sectors as evidence of Jewish infiltration. Therefore, for Hitler and the Nazis, Jews represented the gravest threat to the Aryan race because of their prominent roles in the development of liberal capitalism and socialism, two modern ideologies that threatened Germans’ collective identity. In this way, Hitler’s brand of fascism was both anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic, for the two were inextricably intertwined in his mind. Hitler’s race doctrine was thus used as an instrument of defense against the inescapable degeneration of Aryan civilization. Only through active destruction of racial inferiors, defined by Hitler to be primarily Jews but also included Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, political dissidents, and disabled people of all ethnicities, could Germany be saved. This dedication to action, outlined in Mein Kampf, provided the philosophical foundation for the Holocaust and was responsible for the deaths of approximately 6 million Jews and 3 million other “degenerates” during the Nazi era.'
shills whine
'Hitler had no desire to spark a radical revolution. Conservative “ideas” were still necessary if he was to succeed to the presidency and retain the support of the army; moreover, he did not intend to expropriate the leaders of industry, provided they served the interests of the Nazi state. Ernst Röhm, however, was a protagonist of the “continuing revolution”; he was also, as head of the SA, distrusted by the army. Hitler tried first to secure Röhm’s support for his policies by persuasion. Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler were eager to remove Röhm, but Hitler hesitated until the last moment. Finally, on June 29, 1934, he reached his decision. On the “Night of the Long Knives,” Röhm and his lieutenant Edmund Heines were executed without trial, along with Gregor Strasser, Kurt von Schleicher, and others.'