Inside the Minds of the Holocaust

The Holocaust has synthesized uncountable horrors in the minds of those who experienced it and has challenged the rest of the world to envision what these people must have gone through. Perhaps the key to preventing a catastrophe of like proportions is through understanding and analyzing the one we have already experienced. The purpose of this paper is to examine the Holocaust through a psychological eye to better understand how it was allowed to happen and the consequences we now face. The paper is divided into three sections: psychological factors contributing to the Nazi murderers, the effect the Holocaust have had on its survivors, and what we might do for these individuals.

Before attempting to resolve an issue, any accredited psychologist needs to first gain context. One needs to first understand what set the stage for this atrocity. A high school teacher of mine told me, “The biggest cause of WWII was WWI.” The Treaty of Versailles left Germany in shambles. It was humiliating to the country by having them accept total responsibility for the lives of millions. Not only was their pride demolished, Germany was sentenced to pay for the entire war. Along with their own costs of the war, Germany’s economy was sent into an abyss. Germans struggled from day to day just to find food for their children. The price of a loaf of bread was unimaginable. Many of these Germans had to sit and watch their own children starve. In some cases, the kill or be killed mentality kicked in.

Hitler took advantage of these poor desperate individuals who longed for a united country. The nation was practically destroyed and separated. Hitler used the Jews as a scapegoat to unify Germans and follow him. This was an idea he didn’t come up with on his own, it was just a way to gather followers. He would travel around Germany speaking anywhere he could about the evil cancer of Jews. He once spoke in a beer cellar in Munich about, “Why we are against the Jews (Gilbert, 1985).” This overall theme was later molded into the “final solution,” the idea that the extermination of all Jews would rid the world of its problems.

Anti-Semitism wasn’t a new idea at the time. Anti-Semitic ideas have been at the surface of many people’s thoughts ever since Jesus Christ was killed. Many Christians blamed the Jews for his death and persecuted them for thousands of years. Martin Luther wrote, “…their (Jews) synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see cinder or stone of it (Gilbert, 1985).” These types of ideas have been driven into Christians’ heads and they failed to focus on what Christ would have actually thought was important. Some Christians still today remain fixated on hating the Jews instead of loving your neighbor.

In the 1920’s and ‘30’s the people of Germany were looking for some sort of government that would bring them out of a depression that dwarfed ours.