Adolf Hitler: The Reason Behind the Holocaust

Contents

Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in 1889. Little Adolf was no regular child, however. He was small and sensitive and grew to dislike his father.

Why did Adolf Hitler feel he needed to kill off an entire race of people? He believed the German race was the pure race. He needed to make sure it stayed that way. The only way in his mind to make sure that happened was to get rid of everything that was a threat to that purity. This included any non-German person who got in his way. Any cross-breeding of different races was not allowed. Hitler felt that the Jews represented what he once was when he was younger, and he despised them. In his memoir, Hitler referred to the Jews as The Black Plague and maggots (Hitler, 1923). He felt their presence was repulsive. He also felt it was the Jews and Communists fault that Germany lost the first world war. In 1933, Adolf Hitler had ordered the first concentration camp be built, German Jews were stripped of any rights and discrimination against Jews was encouraged. Sometime in 1934, a poll was taken of the German people that gave Adolf Hitler a ninety percent approval rating. Then in September of 1939, World War II began. (Witherbee, 2009)

Did Adolf Hitler have an illness to be able to show no empathy for his victims? This is a question that haunts many people. How can a person order the death of other human beings and not feel any remorse at all for that order? Many of the commanders of the camps giving the orders for Hitler had many psychological breakdowns and many of the men ordered to do the actual act of killing took to alcohol to relieve their stress. At the concentration camps, they began to do mass exterminations using gas chambers, killing thousands at a time. This was done to benefit the ones doing the killing, not the ones being killed. This was because it would be less traumatic to the men doing the murders themselves. (Zukler, 1994) The concentration camp extermination was supposed to be kept secret, but the number of humans being killed became too many to be able to keep quiet. Adolf Hitler did not have a formal diagnosis of an illness, but one can only wonder what exactly must have been wrong in his mind to do such atrocities. Mental illness is a big topic these days and we need to keep it in check. People need help who are unable to get to the help. There are so many people that are trying to start their own revolution by going on shooting sprees and killing many innocent people for no real reason other than they did not get their way. Maybe if Adolf Hitler had psychological help in his day, the German world would have a different history.

Brink, T. L. (1975). The Case of Hitler: An Adlerian Perspective on Psychohistory. Journal of Individual Psychology (00221805), 31(1), 23. Retrieved from https://ezproxy.wvstateu.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9093473&site=ehost-live

Cusack, M. (1990, May4). Hitler’s rise to power. Scholastic Update, 122(17), 10+. Retrieved from https://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy.wvstateu.edu/apps/doc/A890361/AONE?u=inst15197&sid=AONE&xid=21cb9152

Witherbee, A. (2009). Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler, 1. Retrieved from https://ezproxy.wvstateu.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=15259513&site=ehost-live

Zukier, H. (1994). The twisted road to genocide: on the psychological development of evil during the Holocaust. Social Research, 61(2), 423+. Retrieved from https://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy.wvstateu.edu/apps/doc/A15764931/AONE?u=inst15197&sid=AONE&xid=41822537