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... in protective custody, and taken to concentration camps. Although Kristallnacht is frequently considered the beginning of the Holocaust, it is wrong. However, even when Kristallnacht is not part of the destruction process, it is a very important turning point in the violence against Jews.
Within months of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, the Dachau concentration camp was created. According to the Nazis, one of the purposes of Dachau was re-education. Anybody who was in prison there was in a rescue operation to bring him back to the community. Dachau was administered in a harsh and deadly fashion. Victims were any dissidents: clergymen, communist, some Jews, Jehovahs Witness, etc. Re-education was a bureaucratic euphemism like special treatment or special handling was for shooting and gassing.
Nazis never said killing: they were trying to maintain this fiction even in their own minds. The first commandant of the Dachau Concentration Camp was Theodor Eicke. Under his command, the camp would become the model camp for all future SS concentration camps. The Dachau camp served as a training school for officers who would later become commanders of the new concentration camps. Rudolph Hotels and Adolph Eichmann trained under Eicke at Dachau. Eicke was arrogant, paranoid, impulsive, and a methodological killer, iron discipline, power, and obedience were his nature (Class notes, July 17).
One more time, these characteristics, especially methodological and discipline fit perfectly with the conception of the Holocaust as a bureaucratic massive process. Prisoners were dangerous sub-humans that had to be treated with maximum rigidity, zero tolerance. Any trace of weakness was unworthy of an SS man. Key to the camp was not only discipline but a system of regulations: what happened if you step over the line, what happened if you get closer to a guard, what happened if a guard mistreated a prisoner, etc. It was a system of regulations for the administration and maintenance of discipline and order. Reason for punishment had to be crystal clear; guards were subject to penalties also (Class notes, July 17).
Everything was prescribed through regulation manuals, through the Dachau Training books. With this multiform bureaucracy, Dachau became the model for concentration camps. According to Dr. Bolkosky, here is when the union of a potentially violent ideology and the reality of its implementation occurred. Ideology met real world. Racist fanaticism met bureaucratic efficiency (class notes, July 17).
This strict order and the detailed written set of regulations reveal up to what point the bureaucracy was involved in the extermination, which was the fourth phase in the destruction process. No details were left out with respect to when, who and how to punish either prisoners or guards. No doubt that, in order to kill six million Jews, an ideology of racial cleansing is not enough. It needs a structure behind supporting it; this structure was the wide range, complex, almost scientific bureaucracy. Hilberg in The Destruction of European Jews (p. 100) claims that the Holocaust was a destruction process. Then he continues to define a destruction process as a series of administrative measures that must be aimed at a definite group (p. 27).
Therefore, his central thesis is that the destruction of the European Jews was "an administrative process carried out by bureaucrats in offices, by desktop murderers. The bureaucracy of the machinery of destruction was divided into four independent components or hierarchies -civil service, army, industrial complex, and Nazi party-. Again, this shows how complex and wide-ranging the organization was. Hilberg continues, In the inexorable development of the process, every segment of organized German society was drawn into the destructive work (p. 100). Reinforcing the idea of systematic destruction, he points out the killing operation was standardized.
In every city the same procedure was followed with minor variations (p. 126). A head of the Judenrat in Budapest, Rudolph Kastner, watched how Jews disappeared in Germany, then in Poland, then in Yugoslavia, etc. The same essential events seemed to be occurring in a sequence. Kastner recognized a process (class notes, July 26); something was going on in each country that was almost identical to what was going on in every other country.
He thought that there had to be some inherent logic in what was happening regardless of future plans (he didnt know that they were to kill everybody) but it was clear to him that Nazis were removing Jews from the European society. In addition, Richard Rubenstein writes: "The process was a highly complex series of acts which started simply with the bureaucratic definition of who was a Jew. Once defined as a Jew by the German state bureaucracy, a person was progressively deprived of all personal property and citizen rights. The final step in the process came when the Jew was eliminated altogether. The destruction process required the cooperation of every sector of German society.
The bureaucrats drew up the definitions and decrees; the churches gave evidence of Aryan descent; the postal authorities carried the messages of definition, expropriation, de naturalization, and deportation. Business corporations dismissed their Jewish employees and took over Aryanized properties; the railroads carried the victims to their place of execution. The operation required and received the participation of every major social, political and religious institution of the German Reich (The Cunning of History, Rubenstein, p 4). In agreement with Hilberg, Rubenstein supports the idea of the Holocaust characterized by a highly complex, logical sequence of acts and bureaucracy.
Although Adolf Hitler is often perceived as the chief perpetrator, there were others. This notion is clearly demonstrated by the previous quote from Rubenstein. Perpetrators were Nazi party leaders, but also doctors, engineers, lawyers, police, railroad employees, scientists, military officials, salesmen, and civil servants. The Holocaust needed bureaucracy, it needed professional administrators, it needed logistic experts, it needed planning, and it needed specialists. Holocaust is a mass murder in the 20 th century. Nothing good came out of the Holocaust.
Nothing simple came out of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators, and practically all segments of German society participated in the destruction process. Bibliography:
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Research essay sample on Holocaust The Destruction Process
