In addition, his purging of senior leaders set the tone at the grass-roots level; if he had pursued a less radical policy and listened to advice, and encouraged his underlings to do so as well, their actions would surely have been different.
The Cultural Revolution—the year period of government-instigated chaos and violence against imagined enemies—resulted in probably 2 to 3 million deaths, according to historians such as Song Yongyi of California State University Los Angeles, who has compiled extensive databases on these sensitive periods of history.
He estimates 32 million in the Great Leap Forward, 1. It is probably fair to say, then, that Mao was responsible for about 1. At this point, I must digress briefly to deal with two specters that diligent researchers will find on the Internet and even on the shelves of otherwise reputable bookstores.
One is the political scientist Rudolph Rummel , a non-China specialist who made wildly higher estimates than any other historian—that Mao was responsible for 77 million deaths. His work is disregarded as polemical, but has a strange life online, where it is cited regularly by anyone who wants to score a quick victory for Mao.
Equally scorned but extremely influential is the British-based author Jung Chang. After writing a bestselling memoir about her family the most popular in what now seems like an endless succession of imitators , she moved on to write, along with her husband, Jon Halliday, popular history, including a biography of Mao as monster.
Few historians take their work seriously, and several of the most influential figures in the field—including Andrew J. Goodman— published a book to rebut it. But is starting a war of aggression less of a crime than launching economic policies that cause a famine? If one includes the combatant deaths, and the deaths due to war-related famine and disease, the numbers shoot up astronomically. The Soviet Union suffered upward of 8 million combatant deaths and many more due to famine and disease—perhaps about 20 million.
As for Hitler, should his deaths include the hundreds of thousands who died in the aerial bombardments of Germans cities? After all, it was his decision to strip German cities of anti-aircraft batteries to replace lost artillery following the debacle at Stalingrad. And what of the millions of Germans in the East who died after being ethnically cleansed and driven by the Red Army from their homes?
On whose ledger do they belong? And there is the sensitive matter of percentages. So is Mao simply a reflection of the fact that anything that happens in China becomes a superlative? Relativizing can be perilous. Trucks and police vans raced up and down the streets arresting any threat to Nazi rule, including those members of the artistic community who demanded cultural freedom.
Books were burned. Authors and artists were either imprisoned or purposely denied the ability to earn a livelihood. Even telling a joke about Hitler could lead to a death sentence. The evening before he was to give a concert, pianist Robert Kreitin remarked to the woman with whom he was staying, "You won't have to keep Hitler's picture over your mantle much longer. Germany's losing the war.
The day of the concert, he was arrested and executed. While she opposed the regime, her favorite cousin, Ulrich, supported Hitler and joined the Storm Troopers.
Everyone I talked to described her blond-haired, blue-eyed cousin as "a sweet and sensitive person, an artist and a poet. He came from the same background as Cato. It was people like Ulrich, along with the scientists and the judges who administered Nazi "justice," who gave Hitler the manpower and the consent to murder six million Jews and five million non-Jews.
Although Hitler is dead, the theories that he espoused remain alive. With the modern tools being developed by biologists and other scientists, it is important for young people to be made aware that knowledge can be manipulated and turned into tools of destruction.
In every generation, educating the young is an awesome task. Today, with new scientific advances, the rapid spread of knowledge through computer networks, and the ability to alter the material being transmitted, it is more important than ever that students learn to think for themselves.
Part of that learning process should include the devastating effects of prejudice. A true understanding of the history of the Holocaust would make that lesson clear. BibliographyBethge, Eberhard. Forman, James. The Traitor. New York: Hawthorn Books, Friedman, Ina. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Brookline: Lodgepole Press, Hancock, Ian.
Ann Arbor: Karoma, Inc. Hanser, Richard. New York: Putnam, Kanfer, Stefan. The Eighth Sin. In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils.
Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. This was especially true for Jewish men: circumcision is a Jewish ritual, but was uncommon for non-Jews at the time. Jewish men knew they could be physically identified as Jewish. Read Locating the Victims to learn more.
Similar to their fellow Germans, German Jews were patriotic citizens. More than 10, died fighting for Germany in World War I, and countless others were wounded and received medals for their valor and service. The families of many Jews who held German citizenship, regardless of class or profession, had lived in Germany for centuries and were well assimilated by the early 20th century. At first, Nazi Germany targeted the , Jews in Germany at a relatively gradual pace, attempting attempted to make life so difficult that they would be forced to leave their country.
Up until the nationwide anti-Jewish violence of , known as Kristallnacht , many Jews in Germany expected to be able to hold out against Nazi-sponsored persecution, as they hoped for positive change in German politics.
Before World War II, few could imagine or predict killing squads and killing centers. Those who tried to leave had difficulty finding countries willing to take them in, especially since the Nazi regime did not allow them to take their assets out of the country. A substantial percentage tried to go to the United States but American immigration law limited the number of immigrants who could enter the country.
The ongoing Great Depression meant that Jews attempting to go to the United States or elsewhere had to prove they could financially support themselves—something that was very difficult since they were being robbed by the Germans before they could leave. Even when a new country could be found, a great deal of time, paperwork, support, and sometimes money was needed to get there.
In many cases, these obstacles could not be overcome. By , however, about , German Jews had already left. Once Germany invaded and occupied Poland, millions of Jews were suddenly living under Nazi occupation. The war made travel very difficult, and other countries—including the United States—were still unwilling to change their immigration laws, now fearing that the new immigrants could be Nazi spies. In October , Germany made it illegal for Jews to emigrate from any territory under its control; by then, Nazi policy had changed from forced emigration to mass murder.
Visit the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition and the Challenges to Escape lesson plan for more information. The idea that Jews did not fight back against the Germans and their allies is false. Against impossible odds, they resisted in ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers.
There were many factors that made resistance difficult, however, including a lack of weapons and resources, deception, fear, and the overwhelming power of the Germans and their collaborators. Read a Holocaust Encyclopedia article about Jewish resistance for more information. In Europe, the Holocaust was not a secret. Even though the Nazi government controlled the German press and did not publicize mass shooting operations or the existence of killing centers, many Europeans knew that Jews were being rounded up and shot, or deported and murdered.
Many individuals—in Germany and collaborators in the countries that Germany occupied or that were aligned with Germany during World War II—actively participated in the stigmatization, isolation, impoverishment, and violence culminating in the mass murder of six million European Jews. People helped in their roles as clerks and confiscators of property; as railway and other transportation employees; as managers or participants in round-ups and deportations; as informants; sometimes as perpetrators of violence against Jews on their own initiative; and sometimes as hand-on killers in killing operations, notably in the mass shootings of Jews and others in occupied Soviet territories in which thousands of eastern Europeans participated as auxiliaries and many more witnessed.
Many more people—the onlookers who witnessed persecution or violence against Jews in Nazi Germany and elsewhere—failed to speak out as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers were isolated and impoverished—socially and legally, then physically.
Only a small minority publicly expressed their disapproval. Other individuals actively assisted the victims by purchasing food or other supplies for households to whom shops were closed; providing false identity papers or warnings about upcoming roundups; storing belongings for those in hiding that could be sold off little by little for food; and sheltering those who evaded capture, a form of help that, if discovered, especially in Nazi Germany and occupied eastern Europe, was punished by arrest and often execution.
Although Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, they were not the only group persecuted. American newspapers reported frequently on Hitler and Nazi Germany throughout the s.
Americans read headlines about book burning, about Jews being attacked on the street, and about the Nuremberg Race laws in , when German Jews were stripped of their German citizenship. The Kristallnacht attacks in November were front-page news in the United States for weeks. Americans staged protests and rallies in support of German Jews, and sent petitions to the US government calling for action.
But these protests never became a sustained movement, and most Americans were still not in favor of allowing more immigrants into the United States, particularly if the immigrants were Jewish. It was very difficult to immigrate to the United States.
In , the US Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act in order to set limits on the maximum number of immigrant visas that could be issued per year to people born in each country. Unlike today, the United States had no refugee policy, and Jews could not come as asylum seekers or migrants. Approximately ,, European Jews immigrated to the United States between , most of them between The US Government learned about the systematic killing of Jews almost as soon as it began in the Soviet Union in Yet saving Jews and others targeted for murder by the Nazi regime and its collaborators never became a priority.
As more information about Nazi mass murder reached the United States, public protests and protests within the Roosevelt administration led President Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in January The establishment of the War Refugee Board marked the first time the US government adopted a policy of trying to rescue victims of Nazi persecution.
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