Who was responsible for the holocaust?

[Middle-aged Europe]

And in the end, who gave Hitler his power in the first place.

Answer: Paul von Hindenburg.

He appointed Hitler Chancellor. Beginning in 1930, Germany was ruled by presidential decrees under Article 48 (the so-called "emergency clause") of the Weimar constution. Since that time the German Chancellor and his cabinet were neither elected by nor resonsible to the Reichstag or the respective majorities there.

Of course, Hitler would have never been appointed Chancellor in the first place without NSDAP election results in the range of 30% to 40%, which made it practically impossible to put an effective government together without him... or at least that's the conclusion Hindenburg and his advisors came to in 1933 (the perceived rise of the communist KPD played also a role, of course). They also thought that they'd be able to keep Hitler in check somehow, which was the second mistake they made.

About a year after that, Hindenburg died of old age. At that point, Hitler had become so powerful, that it was pretty easy for him to simply merge the offices of president and chancellor into the newly created position of Führer.

So much to the question who gave Hitler his power: President Hindenburg, some of his key allies/advisors, and the 30% to 40% of the electorate who voted for the NSDAP in the final Reichstag elections. Also somewhat responsible are the not-as-bad-as-Hitler-but-still-Mussolini/Franco-level-bad DNVP and the catholic Zentrum party, who voted in favour of Hitler's Enabling Act in the Reichstag, which made everything what followed possible.

Of course, after Hitler had consolidated his power, he became quite popular among the German population, which could at least partially be contributed to the fact that the unemployment rate steadily declined during the 1930ies (the enormous unemployment rate after 1929 being the reason why the NSDAP started to fare that well in elections in the first place) as well as the fact that Germany didn't "bow down" to the "demands" of the League of Nations, France, Great Britain, or any other nation anymore.... among other things.


However, the question of this thread is, whose responsibility the Holocaust was.

Answer to that: Option 1 (sort of) and Option 2. Whether a "majority" of Option 1 could be held responsible for the Holocaust is a matter of definition of the terms "responsible" and "majority". Voted option 2, since there's no doubt, that they were reponsible under any definition.

[Middle-aged Europe]

And in the end, who gave Hitler his power in the first place.

Answer: Paul von Hindenburg.

If we're gonna take that tac, let's pin it on Otto von Bismarck.  It was because of that old Prussian fart and his spectacular unification scheme that the Germans learned to put all their trust in one man.  He did achieve peace in what would become the German Empire for nearly three decades.  Or why not just blame the "Allies" (i.e., Limeys, Yanks, and Frogs) who gave the krauts such a raw deal on that boxcar after WWI, and made it so easy for nationalistic types to rally high school students in their undying love for der Führer and his master race.  Or why not blame Neville Chamberlain.  After all, Churchillians blame him for the invasion of poland and the war, and if it weren't for the subjugation of Silesia, all those gas chambers wouldn't have been built in Silesia in the first place.

Who killed the kikes?  Wo killed the kennedys?  Who put the bop in bop-she-bop?  Here's a clue:  you and me, baby.  there's no evil that we didn't create. 

"I rode a tank
Held a generals rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank.

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name.
Ah, whats puzzling you
Is the nature of my game.

I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made
I shouted out,
Who killed the kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me"

  --Rolling stones

Not only did Hindenburg appoint Hitler Chancellor, he also signed the Enabling Act and was directly reponsible for the so-called Preußenschlag of 1932, when he unconstitutionally dismissed the government of Prussia and put that state under his direct control... which effectively neutralized one of the strongest bastions (the Prussian cabinet under Otto Braun) against a potential Nazi takeover of Germany.

As for the reason why Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor, I already explained that the election results of the NSDAP in the early 1930ies were a key factor in making this decision. Ironically, in the last Reichstag election before Hitler's appointment to the Chancellorship, the NSDAP had actually lost votes and seats (Nov. 1932: 33.1%), which makes this decision even more questionable.

The point is that Hitler wasn't appointed Chancellor by Bismarck or the French government any other person/nation/institution. It was Hindenburg. And considering the fact that the NSDAP had lost votes in the last election and that an economic recovery was only a matter of time, it should have been possible to sit this one out.


But as I indicated, not only the people who voted for the NSDAP were responsible for Hitler's rise, but also the voters of the KPD (which is also kind of ironic since no other party was so militant in its opposition to the Nazis) as well as Alfred Hugenberg's DNVP. However, I will absolve the voters of the Zentrum party here, because it's unlikely that they could have anticipated the Zentrum's future vote in favour of the Enabling Act (not that it would have withhold all supporters of the Zentrum from voting for their party, had they known it).

Combining the votes for these three parties (NSDAP, DNVP, KPD) in the last free Reichstag election, one could say that 58.5% of the electorate was actively opposed to a democratic system of government at that point. However, the voters of the KPD certainly wanted to see Hitler dead and not in power. And the supporters of the DNVP preferred the restoration of a constitutional monarchy under a strong Emperor (of course, when forced to choose between a democratic republic and an authoritarian/fascist government they chose the latter).

[Middle-aged Europe]

NSDAP stands for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (which btw was a misleading name, since most "workers" tended to support the SPD until the end of the Weimar Republic, the NSDAP was more a party for small business owners etc.)

While the Treaty of Versailles certainly played a role, I also think that its effect is often overestimated. Before 1929/30, the election results of the NSDAP had always been pretty mediocre (relatively speaking). But then came the Great Depression, which caused not only a dramatic increase of the unemployment rate, but also of the NSDAP's share of votes in elections. Aside from the United States, Germany was one of the nations which was hit severest by the Great Depression. That, combined with the fact that the Weimar Republic couldn't hardly called be called an "established" or "stable" democracy led to the rise of the NSDAP (a good analogy for the Weimar Republic would probably be post-1991 Russia... this analogy would also turn Paul von Hindenburg into the German version of Vladmir Putin, which isn't actually too far-fetched. Both had served under the previous regime in military/intelligence positions and weren't very fond of democracy in particular).

A little sidenote: As I said in the beginning, the NSDAP was primarily supported by business owners and not workers. Workers voted SPD, while unemployed people often opted for the KPD. It is one of the many ironies of the history, that Hitler wasn't elected not so much by the unemployed, but because of the unemployment.

[Middle-aged Europe]

To be fair, I heard of that Madagascar thing before. But as far as I know the Nazis simply figured out that it would have been much too expensive and hardly practicable to ship all European Jews to Madagascar... so instead they decided too kill them all, because that way it was more "cost-effective".

Ah, and btw, Germany declared war on the United States and not the other way around. Don't ask me why, but somehow Hitler felt it necessary to declare war on the U.S. after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbour, despite the fact that Germany wasn't obliged to do so under the Tripartite Pact of 1940 (the Tripartite Pact would have bound Germany to help its allies in cases when they're attacked, but not in cases when those allies decided to attack other nations on their own).

I guess it was another sign for Hitler's delusions of grandeur. Somehow he thought that he would be able to defeat all major powers in the world simultaneously.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Well, Wikipedia has an entry about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

At the end of the article you can also find three links to reliable sites about the topic... I think.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Even those articles do not blame it on Roosevelt though, it was the problem of logistics that ruined that plan.

Yeah, as I said, the plan was doomed when the Nazis figured out that this was very hardly realizable. Even for radical anti-Semites this whole Madagascar thing was a pretty absurd plan in the first place.

Also, it was never accepted much by Hitler, it was more Himmler's master plan than his.  Hitler thought of it as another ghetto and we all know what happened to ghettos in Nazi territory, they were emptied and exterminated.

Well, this could have happened too.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Sorry to bust your "Adolf Hitler was bent on world conquest" bubble but, in reality, from his writings on what he would do in the post-War and his views on the rest of the world he would have basically disengaged from the rest of the world while solidifying the Reich's control over the only continent that, in Hitler's mind, meant anything, Europe. He wanted to bring all of Europe under his dominion and, especially, use Britain, under a puppet monarch, to do whatever bidding he wanted in world affairs outside of Europe. Also once you get outside of Europe alot of problem occur, such as bumping into the great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere or American global interests, which Germany really couldn't piss off. Hitler most likely thought that after the War, if he won it, there would be a cold war between the United States and Germany, since the United States was one of the few "civilized" nations that Hitler couldn't control in his "Europe is everything" strategy.

This is also basically a summary for Robert Harris' novel "Fatherland".

[Middle-aged Europe]

It's no mystery.  Stop placating your own emotions by saying "well, Hitler was a madman... plain and simple".  80,000,000 people can't be completely insane.

First, the number was closer to 65,000,000 back then...

Then the Holocaust wasn't something that was officially announced by the German government or the authorities. If at all, it was explained as a "relocation" of the Jewish population. Of course, a mass relocation isn't a very humane thing either (though not as bad as a genocide), so the question remains why only few Germans resisted to this alleged relocation.

The government also did everything possible to cover up the Holocaust. For example, members of the SS were obliged to keep it a secret under the threat of the death penalty. However, thousands of people were directly involved in organizing the whole thing and with a "conspiracy" of this magnitude it's unlikely that everyone involved is keeping his mouth shut and that nothing is leaked to the public.

So, many Germans could have (and actually have) guessed what's really going on... either through those kinds of "rumours" or by living relatively close to a concentration camp or ghetto etc. Of course, the fact that the Holocaust wasn't officially announced or acknowledged by the German authorities made it easy for many people to ignore what was happening.

As for the reason why they choose to ignore it... well, that's not such a complex puzzle. "Why interfere when it would only mean trouble for me and my family? If I raise my voice, what good what it do, except that I might getting send to a concentration camp as well? So, better the Jews than me. Besides, maybe those rumours aren't true anyway." That's how any form of tyranny or mass murder is possible in the end: a mix of cowardice, selfishness and ignorance. Others might have actually swallowed the propganda that Jews were evil etc.

The interesting question is, how many Germans actually were aware of the Holocaust at that time. Helmut James Graf von Moltke, a leading member of the resistance movement (the so-called "Kreisau Circle") estimated in 1943 that "nine tenth" of the German population were unaware of the genocide, which would mean that at least 10% knew what was going on.

Other sources (estimates and secret reports from various German government authorities of that time, surveys conducted by the Allies after 1945, polls conducted in West Germany in the 50ies and 60ies etc.) came to the conclusion that between 25% and 40% of the German population had knowledge of the Holocaust. Of course, there could be a high margin of error (meaning it's also possible that more than 50% knew of the Holocaust).

After the war, several leading politicians of West Germany, including President Theodor Heuss (1949-1959), President Richard von Weizsäcker (1984-1994) and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (1974-1982) claimed that they had no knowledge of the Holocaust and heard the first time of it after the end of the war.

All in all, we can say that millions of Germans knew what was going on, while there were also millions of Germans who were unaware of the Holocaust. Whether you were aware of it or not depended on who you knew (for example soldiers returning from the front who witnessed some of the crimes comitted were) and how close to the locations (concentration camps etc.) of those crimes you lived/worked. The overwhelming majority of those who knew chose to do nothing, primarily out of cowardice and selfishness (fear to get in trouble with the Nazis themselves), sometimes also simply out of loyalty to the regime, because they were Nazis themselves or at least loyal to them for some reason.

[Middle-aged Europe]

But there were a lot of very specific things that went on that led to the Holocaust, and sociologists and psychologists have done experiments and studies that prove groupthink.  I forget who performed the experiments or what they're called.. but a man was told to administer some questions to a guy that he could not see, and if he got the question wrong, he was to jolt the guy with electricity in ever stronger doses.  What he didn't know, is that the guy answering the questions would intentionally get them wrong and then react to the jolt even though he was not being zapped.

The man administering the questions, jolted the man to fatal levels and even did so after the man stopped responding completely at the insistence of the scientist.

I think that was the so-called "Milgram experiment", conducted by Yale University in the early 60ies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

What it basically proved was that human beings are capable of committing (or tolerating) acts which they would normally consider immoral/unjust, provided those acts are carried out on orders given by an authority they consider as legitimate.

This human characteristic makes any dictatorship, genocide or crime against humanity possible.

Of course, certain cultural traditions existing in a society can make it easier for the powers that be to exploit this characteristic. In the case of Nazi Germany, such traditions were abundant.