The Holocaust and the Cold War Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4250 words

The Holocaust and the Cold state of war - Essay ExampleEarly German landalism originated turn up of the political effort to unify the German states into a cohesive nation state and the ideology which support this political program. The ideology was a quite mystical doctrine, deriving from herder, Fichte, Hegel, according to which, the German nation is a super-organism with a will and spirit of its own, and the German citizen is someone not at all free as to will and rights, only merely a cell or component part of the state organism and subject to its super-ordinate will. Hegel, Herder and Fichtes thesis that a nation is defined by its culture and principally its language, provided the theoretical and ideological unveiling for the typical German nationalist view, that all German-speaking people and the land upon which they reside form a metaphysical whole, an organic nation, destined to become a unified and sovereign German state (Blaut, p.58).The authorized German doctrine acq uired a strong flavor of expansive nationalism with the addition of Ratzels theory of Lebensraum, living space, during the von Bismarck era. According to this theory, the German national organism, like all other organisms, has the inherent need, and therefore, the inherent moral right, to bob up and thus to expand (Blaut, p.35). This theory of Lebensraum found its practical expression and fulfillment beyond the Bismarckian era into that of Nazi Germany.On January 30, 1933 an Austrian born German, by faith a Catholic, was declared prime minister of Germany by President Hindenburg, with the support of the Conservatives and the Army, in an entirely constitutional manner. That fateful day, when Adolf Hitler was sworn in at 5 p.m., the German people imposed upon themselves and upon the world a Nazi tyranny, the kind of which had never out front been experienced anywhere on earth. As he stood on the balcony of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, the huge crowd down the stairs felicitate d him as their Fuhrer, their Leader and their Messiah, who would make the German nation and its people greater than any other nation or any other race in the world. Only fifteen years back, he was most a non-entity. He had enlisted in the army and had to be hospitalized after being almost blinded by gas in Wervik, near Flanders in Belgium. It was there on November 10, 1918, a dreary and dark free fall Sunday that Hitler sank into the depth of his ordeals in hearing about what he termed as the greatest villainy of the century. (Shirer, p.52) The topical anaesthetic pastor, a reverend old gentleman who came to the hospital to make an important announcement, informed them that the Great War had ended. Germany had lost the First World War, the Kaiser and all the German princes had abdicated and Germany had become a Republic. (Vrerkhem p.3&4) Germany would have to copy the terms laid down in the Armistice and would also have to bear the heavy burdens of the war. This past event shap ed Hitlers own future and the future of Germany. He tried to glean some learning about the events that led to the Armistice and what he learnt only hardened him against the Marxists and the Jews. He could not forgive the Marxists for what he considered as their betrayal of Emperor William II who had for the first time extended his hand of friendship towards them. (This only is in contradiction with his later action. It is believed that at least till May 1919 he associated himself with socialist