TheHolocaust was an example of an organized mass killing method that began as anidea and progressed into many different stages as the war situation changed.
It resulted in approximately six million Jewsbeing killed out of nine million that were in Europe at the time. Hundreds of thousands of other disable,homosexual and many different ethnic groups were also killed. The idea wasstarted when Hitler was wounded during the first world war. When he was brought back from the front linesto be treated for his wounds ne noticed that all of the shops were open and theJewish people were still working as if the war was not in progress. This angered Hitler and it stayed with himmany years. After Hitler was in power theNazis organization first put their strategy into motion. The first step for the Nazis was to separatethe Germans from the Jews along with many other minority groups. The Nazis believedthe Aryan race was superior to all other races and all others were to beannihilated.
Mistakenly, the Jews were considered a race rather than areligion. The Nazis used propaganda to win the backing of German people. Theyalso created an Anti-Semitism movement throughout the country.
Hitler tookadvantage of this and blamed the Jews for Germany’s loss during World War I. Germans were taught to believe that the Jewswere a national threat and the Germans blamed the for all of their problems. Duringthis time Hitler was a powerful figure in Germany. He was a dictator with a bureaucracy ofhenchman at his disposal. Getting rid ofthe Jews was Hitler’s plan.
Although atthis point the details were not worked out this being based on intentionalinterpretations of how the events unfolded concerning the Holocaust. Another view point of how the events unfoldedis the functional interpretation of the Holocaust. This belief minimizes Hitler’s hate for theJews and focuses more on how the ultimate decision came about. It also looks atthe central planning and how the events were brought about because of the roleof central planning, changing environment and turmoil and the competinginfrastructures of the Nazi governmental organizations.
There were failed policies and decisionmaking that played a role. Hitler used three rudimentary tools tocreate and preserve his fascist state. The first was terror including the SS and Gestapo the second waslegislation, propaganda and the public service. Hitler used all of theseconcurrently to achieve his ends and create a feeling of acceptability for histyranny. This method permitted Hitler to validate his activities both to theworld and to Germany’s civil service, who were important to directing first theNazi government and later to direct the Holocaust. Germany’s trained civilservants and the court of law probably would have fought against a regime thatlacked legal and constitutional legitimacy.
The first basic statute passed under theEnabling Act was the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,”promulgated on April 7, 1933, together with a statute that restrictedthe independence of the secondary statesin favor of the central government. One of the immediate effects of the Law forthe Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was that civil servantsthroughout Germany became deeply involved in the highly bureaucratic process ofdetermining who was or was not a Jew. The law contained the first officialdefinition of a Jew, and genealogical and medical records had to be trackeddown and verified for thousands of individuals, that is, for anyone suspectedof being Jewish. These investigations led to the dismissals of thousands ofJews from civil service positions, to prohibitions from the practice of law andmedicine, and to many other prohibitions and restrictions in all areas ofpolitical, social, and cultural affairs (Friedlander, 1997).
Asthe policy progressed, it was up to the numerous constituents of both publicand private administrationsto figure out how to achieve this goal. The difficulty of the matter stemmedfrom centuriesof anti-Semitism, Jews were fully intertwined with every facet of German andEuropean society be it economic, political, social, and cultural. No matter howstrong Hitler’sanimosity of the Jews and the passion of his followers, Jews could not suddenlybe exiled or killed without severely disturbing the social fabric and politicaleconomy of German society (Browning, 1989). Hitler had to first combinehis political power before beginning his movement against the Jews.
The first fatalitiesof the Nazi regime were its communist, liberal, and other internal opponents. Althoughsome Jews were included it was not the focus (Gellately, 2001; Johnson, 1999). While,understandably, history has focused on Hitler and his inner circle, the brutalityof the SS, the Gestapo, and infamous concentration camp doctors and guards,much less attention has been given to the thousands of public administrators suchas those in the Finance Ministry who engaged in confiscations, the armamentinspectors who organized forced labor, municipal authorities who helped createand maintain ghettos and death camps throughout PolandandEastern Europe, corporations that profited from slave labor, and women whoserved in roles from secretaries to concentration camp staff members (Allen,2002; Hayes, 2004; Kaplan, 1998; Lower, 2013). Inany event the extermination of the Jewish population turned into genocide. Death camps were spread throughoutEurope. The strong were forced to digthe graves of the children and the old. Those who were strong were forced to work and provide free labor to fuelthe war machine the Nazis had created. The labor continued until you could notwork any longer, then they were killed.
This systematic plan designed by theNazis demonstrates how the organizational genocide had a role in completing thefinal solution. Summary:Thischapter discusses the many different theories on how the holocaust was carriedby Hitler and the Nazis. It also suggests the way the civil service and privatebusinesses contributed in the destruction of Europe’s Jewish population.
Theauthor explains that the Holocaust is directly important to the theory andpractice of civil programs and administration. He also associates public policy and management to the Holocaust bydemonstrating the significance of routine organizational processes of ordinaryadministrators to the implementation of the Holocaust. It shows that the dailyroutines of the bureaucratic processes are not unique to Nazi Germany or theHolocaust, but are constant with modern organizations and the balanced approachto administration. The significance of the link between the Holocaust and thecivil service in Germany and their responsibility for the event extends notonly to the essential offenders who calculated and committed explicit acts of murderto millions of people, but should also include the thousands of ordinary civil servantswho took part in routine and morally neutral tasks Without the full collaborationof civil servants. It is unimaginablethat the mass murder of Europe’s Jews could have been carried out. Thepart of the civil servants as agents of the Holocaust necessitates that we completelyquestion the competence of the moral fundamentals of modern publicadministration. The civil service enabled every step of the mass exterminationprocess.
As the final solution changed, there was nothing that is normallyconsidered part of modem expertise or knowledge, moral standards, scientific approaches,organizational measures, accountability to elected officials, that could havestopped or fought against the genocide of the Jewish Population. The civilservant was both agreeable and helpless to stand up to this tragedy.
