Summary: Reading Time: 9 minutesThe Horrors of the Holocaust in Europe<br> Anti-semitism in Europe did not begin with Hitler and the holocaust. <a href="http://www.theendofhistory.net/global-issues/middle-east-history-politics/complete-balanced-guide-israeli-palestinian-conflict-chapter-2-zionism/">We have already seen</a> how it was a dominant strand of culture in Europe for centuries and by the 19th century was even increasing in violence and ferocity. In fact, much of the growth of Zionism was fueled as a response to the widespread and violent pogroms of a declining Russian empire in the 19th century.<br> <br> But Hitler and the Nazis took all of this to a whole new level through their plan known as the Final Solution for the Jews. This was a systematic, strategic plan for permanent and absolute destruction of the Jews that stretched as far as the Nazi armies could muster conquest. The world had seen genocide and ethnic cleansing before but nothing to the degree and organization that was perpetrated by the Nazis in Europe.<br> <br> Hitler’s victims included people groups beyond the Jews. Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Soviet POWs and the mentally and physically disabled were also included among those targeted in the final solution but none figured as large into the equation of Hitler’s atrocities as did the European Jews.<br> Few of the people reading this would be unfamiliar with the atrocities of the holocaust but it is worth noting to consider the scale of the slaughter of European Jews and how that would eventually figure into the founding of the state of Israel.<br> Some scholars have noted that as many as 2/3 of the Jews of Europe, 6 million Jews were killed in the course of the holocaust. Many were shot or died in transit from ghettos which the Nazis at first confined the Jews to.<br> <br> Upon being transported from the ghettos those who survived the transit were taken to the death camps whose names are famous and iconic for their place in history and in the holocaust. These are camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka along with many others. These camps were designed not simply to kill people but to kill people en masse.<br> Life in the ghettos amounted to little more than hell on earth. Stripped of their homes and possessions Jewish families were tossed into these communal prisons and forced to set up a council to represent them before the Nazis. A slow, cruel, and certain progress of humiliation and death thus ensued as Jewish leaders in the ghettos were forced to negotiate for the simplest of issues with their Nazi persecutors. By the end of the process the stakes being negotiated were often the lives of Jewish, men, women and children themselves.<br> The ghettos worked to psychologically destroy the individual condition of each resident who might survive by taking away all dignity and making them turn on their fellow Jews and even family members.<br> <br> In Auschwitz a man named Dr. Joseph Mengela performed medical experiments on Jewish prisoners; men, women, and children alike. These experiments were similar to what a lab rat might endure today. The victims were subjected to pressure chambers, amputation, and other tortures to see how the human body would respond. Children had chemicals injected into their eyes to change the color of their eyes. Most of these human subjects slowly but eventually died under the weight of the torture and were dissected afterward.<br> Families were torn from one another with parents and children often forced to watch one another be killed. In the book Night by Eli Wiesel the story is told of a Jewish son who beat his own father to death when the man could not quit crying. The book is a novel but recounts the realities of circumstances witnessed and experienced by Wiesel in the death camp of Auschwitz.<br> Mothers and daughters were raped by their captors and husbands were often forced to watch or stand by impotently while their wives and daughters were taken awa...
