Holocaust Analysis

World War I had been a terrible ordeal for the German people who were forced to endure food shortages and mass inflation that crippled an empire and permanently scarred a people. When the Nazis began to move towards beginning another war of German conquest, they saw it as critical that these mistakes of the past be avoided at all cost. The simplest and most straightforward way to ensure the continued popular support of the German people was through keeping their lives stable and prosperous. Protect the German populace at the expense of any other nation or race. During the war, the Nazis’ achieved this through siphoning the capital and assets of the occupied countries right to the German Reich. The Holocaust also allowed for the seizure of the …show more content…
Aly attempts to give so much agency to the German people that he falls into a trap of heavily discounting the influence propaganda or legitimate enthusiasm had on maintaining the Nazis power. There were many people who were legitimate party members not because they had to be but because they wanted to be. This manifested itself for example in a generation of youth who were raised on a steady diet of German nationalism and military training. Then there was Goebbels propaganda machine that throughout the militarization of Germany spouted a message of the individual’s subservience to the nation. In both cases, people were also taught the importance of German racial purity and indoctrinated with a social Darwinist conception of race relations. The German population therefore had the agency to be anti-Semitic and militaristic not because it was in their own interest but because it was the social and political system which they believed …show more content…
Regardless of the attempts made by the state to appease the general population, they were still carrying a heavy burden. That is not to say that they were carrying it unwillingly but rather to point out that to claim, as Aly does, that Germany bore only 30% of the cost runs counter to the accepted narrative. To go even further and claim that the working classes only accounted for a third of that portion would mean that the German population made practically no consequential sacrifices during the war. This does serve to explain the individualistic view that Aly takes but it discounts the reality that saw the German people pay a huge cost if not monetarily then certainly through labour. The conception of total war is a good example of a counter to Aly, as the Nazis harnessing of the economic machine of the state to help the war effort required sacrifices that clearly go beyond the basic numbers. If it were to be accepted that there was an institutional program that intended to protect the people then there would be an equivalent lack of impact on the social lives of the average Germans, which was simply not the