This is a super important topic. Interested to hear what your book says. A common misconception about the Holocaust that I’ve seen is the idea that it came out of the blue and started because Hitler just woke up one day and was like “let’s kill all the Jews” and for some reason the German people just randomly went “ok sounds good.”
That’s not what happened. Antisemitism was already deeply embedded in German society - and indeed in European society as a whole. The Nazis were inspired by the writings of antisemites in many other countries - notably France and Russia - and disseminated these bigoted works along with their own domestically produced propaganda.
And it didn’t happen suddenly either. There was a period of a few decades during which the antisemitism in Germany - already latently present for centuries - became more pronounced and accepted in mainstream society. People began sharing many of the same bigoted propaganda and “jokes” about Jews that I see going around online today. And inciting violence against them just as I see today. And those words turned into actions - first isolated attacks that were celebrated by Jew haters - that slowly increased in frequency. I’m seeing that too in many countries. As this happened in Germany most people turned a blind eye and refused to admit there was a problem - or worse still supported the violence.
Antisemitic behavior was normalized in society. It became something that you could get away with without losing friends or social standing. And so it spread and grew more virulent. It became an acceptable political position. Politicians who openly espoused Jew hatred got into positions of power - first a few of them and then more and more. The Nazi Party was founded in 1920. Hitler became leader of Germany in 1933. By 1941 Jews were being gassed en masse in death camps as the world stood by.
Don’t imagine that the Nazis were alien monsters. They were regular people just like you and me. And remember the bulk of Germans didn’t actually work in concentration camps, but they knew what was going on and allowed it to happen and often actively supported it. (As did many people in other countries who were only too glad to hand over their Jews to the Nazis).
When we don’t speak out against Jew hatred, when we normalize it, when we allow it unchallenged into discourse online or in real life, when we share racist jokes or conspiracy theories or biased headlines, we are following the same evil path that the Nazis and many other Jew haters before them followed.
The Holocaust was a cancer that grew slowly over a period of decades (based on hatreds centuries old). What happened before does not have to happen again - and will not and cannot be allowed to happen again. But the parallels are real. Don’t think what’s happening now is less serious. This is how it started. Not with the madness of a dictator but with the hate filled murmurings of regular people who allowed their prejudices to go unexamined and unchecked and with the complicit silence of others.
The racist hatred of Jews was old. The Nazis just harnessed and updated it. For example, because persecuting Jews for failing to convert to Christianity was going out of fashion the Nazis focused more on portraying Jews as an inferior race rather than followers of an inferior religion. Other than a slight cosmetic change though a lot of the propaganda and “justifications” for violence remained the same - i.e. false propaganda blaming Jews for economic problems and depicting then as manipulators and predators who preyed on children and portraying them as the “oppressors” who the world had to be “liberated” from by any means etc.
Jews who are pointing this out today are not being paranoid - and if you think otherwise, you have in fact fallen for a classic piece of antisemitic propaganda spread by the Nazis, but not invented by then, portraying Jews as unreliable sources about their own oppression, when in reality, the Jewish community tends to have one of the best understandings of antisemitism since their lives have literally depended on it for millennia. Jews have faced extreme violence and oppression and even genocide many times in their long history (even as far back as the conquest and destruction of historic Israel and Judea by the Babylonians over 2,500 years ago) and those that didn’t recognize the signs often were murdered. So naturally Jews have learned to pay attention to and recognize these deadly trends.
Listen to them. And listen to the historians telling you the same thing. And examine your own behavior and biases. Speak out against hatred and racism and make sure you are not being part of the problem by spreading words or taking part in actions that inflame tensions and spread hatred and violence. Say no to hate. Be on the right side of history.
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