The events recounted in Anne Frank’s diary take place during World War II, in which almost all the countries of Europe, as well as the U.S.A. and Japan, were involved to a greater or lesser extent between 1939 and 1945. The reasons for the war are many and varied, and even the historians are not fully in agreement as to the precise causes, some blaming the harsh conditions and economic penalties imposed on Germany after its defeat in World War I, others claiming that it was the weakness of the European countries after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany that was the indirect cause. All are agreed, however, that had it not been for Hitler and his policies, the war would not have taken place.
In addition to the various military engagements, however, the Nazis were engaged in a systematic attempt to kill off certain sections of the population–primarily Jews and Gypsies–both within Germany and in the countries which they occupied, claiming that they were “racially inferior.” The murder of mentally retarded and psychologically disturbed people, as well as homosexuals, was also official Nazi policy. In some cases, these people were made to work as slaves before they were killed so that the Germans could benefit as much as possible from their labor. To implement this scheme, the Germans established huge “concentration camps,” or death camps, throughout Europe. Jews and other people were sent there in cattle trains, and upon arrival, their heads were shaved and their arms were tattooed with numbers; in addition, they were stripped of their clothes and whatever possessions they still had. They were made to work and were subjected to the strictest discipline and the most inhumane conditions before they were gassed in special chambers and their bodies burned. In those parts of Europe which were occupied by the Nazis, but where these methods of killing large numbers of people had not yet been established, the Nazis assembled large numbers of Jews and machine-gunned them all as they stood on the edge of huge pits which they had dug themselves, or beside natural, deep ravines, as was the case at Babi Yar, in Russia. In other places, the Nazis herded all the local Jews into the synagogue and then set it on fire.
Throughout World War II, the Nazis devoted considerable thought, equipment, and manpower to the wholesale slaughter of Europe’s Jewish population, and by the time the war had ended, they had succeeded in killing six million of them, two-thirds of the total number of Jews in the world.
How could it come about that one nation regarded itself as racially superior to another, to the extent that it felt that it was its right and its duty to kill all the members of that other nation? How could huge “factories of death,” manned by thousands of people, systematically kill off millions of people in the midst of inhabited areas without anyone protesting or even knowing what was happening? How could Hitler, a homicidal maniac, become the ruler of a country whose civilization had produced some of the world’s greatest thinkers, writers, composers, and statesmen? In order to obtain answers to these questions, we have to go back to the nineteenth century.
Germany was not always one united country. During the Middle Ages, Germany consisted of a series of small kingdoms and principalities, often rivals, and often even at war with one another. The language which they all shared was German, but the people differed on matters of religion, so much so that these differences occasionally erupted into wars between the Catholics and the Protestants. In the mid-nineteenth century, Bismarck (the Chancellor of Prussia, the largest German state) made it his objective to unify the various German states. This he achieved by judicious policies, arranging marriages between various royal families and obtaining treaties which were mutually beneficial to the parties concerned. By the end of the nineteenth century, Germany was united under one monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm I; it possessed colonies in Africa and was ruled by an Emperor (the German term Kaiser is derived from the Latin word Caesar).
World War I, in which Germany fought against France and England, from 1914 to 1918, was largely a result of the structural weakness of many European states and the growing military and economic strength of Germany. After four years of bitter fighting, Germany was defeated, the Kaiser fled to Holland, and a peace treaty, the Treaty of Versailles, was drawn up. This stripped Germany of its foreign colonies, imposed heavy economic penalties on the country in the form of fines and disarmament, and it changed many of the borders of the countries of Europe. This policy gave rise to severe economic problems in Germany. Hunger and poverty were wide-spread, and galloping inflation caused prices to rise at a dizzying rate. The middle class, which had been the chief support of the German Republic, which was established after World War I, became embittered, and many Germans longed for the old autocratic kind of government that had formerly dominated the country.
It was during the years after World War I that Adolf Hitler, a house painter who had experienced the bitterness of defeat as a soldier in the German Army, developed his ideas of the Master Aryan Race, the need to rid Germany of “inferior” peoples, such as Jews and Gypsies, and the need to expand Germany’s borders and build a Germany that was militarily strong. He gathered around him a group of people who supported his ideas and used the tactics of bullying and terrorism to obtain publicity and intimidate his opponents. His National Socialist—or Nazi—party advocated the establishment of a totalitarian state, the redistribution of the nation’s wealth and the pro-vision of jobs for everybody.
