r way through Berlin, Hitler commited suicide and was never to answer or to be punished for the atrocious crimes he commited as Dictator of Germany.THE HOLOCAUSTIn April 1933, just three months after Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, the Nazis issued a degree, ordering the compulsory retirement of "non-Aryans" from the civil service. This included Poles, Russians, and their favorite target, the Jews. This law was the first spark in what was to become the Holocaust, one of the most ghastly things that has happened in history. Before Hitler's campaign against the Jews was halted by the defeat of Germany, something like eleven million people had been slaughtered in the name of Nazi racial purity.The Holocaust had many things leading up to the severe brutality it would turn out to be. In the years following 1933, the Jews were deprived of their civil rights, of their jobs and even their property. Violence and brutality became a part of their everyday lives. Their places of worship were defiled, their windows smashed, their stores ransacked. Old men and young were beaten and stomped to death by Nazi officers. Jewish women were ravaged, in broad daylight, on main roads. All these crimes were carried out by Hitler's own Nazi law enforcers, known as the Gestapo, or the SS.Some Jews fled Germany. But most, with a belief in God, sought to wait out the Nazi terror. It was in vain sadly. In 1939, after Hitler's conquest of Poland, the Nazis got much worse. Jews in their millions were now herded into concentration camps, there to starve and die as slave laborers. Other millions were driven into dismal ghettos, which served as holding pens until the Nazis got around to disposing of them.The mass killings began in 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Nazi murder squads followed behind the armies enthusiastically killing Jews and other conquered peoples. First tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people were led off to remo...
