In the years of the Second World War, American leaders were aware of the plan of the Germans to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, yet they did not act to save them. The attitude in society and the state of the economy in the years leading up to the war made for conditions that did not make saving them likely.Most Germans despised the Weimar Republic, which held control of Germany at the time they signed the Versailles Treaty. This treaty crippled Germany after they lost The First Great War. The proud Germans saw this republic as weak. Adolph Hitler, an Austrian born man of German lineage, claimed that the only true Germans were Aryans and that the Jewish influence in the Weimar Republic was the reason for their weakness. He published a famous propaganda novel entitled Mein Kampf, which helped to catapult him and his political party, the National Socialist German Workers Party, into power. (Barber)Hitler’s political position was simple: Germans were always right and the Jews were to blame for everything. After the outbreak of war by all the major powers of the world, Germany immediately turned a major part of their concern towards the extermination of the entire Jewish race. It began with the Einsatzgrupen, a special mobile unit of who moved behind frontline troops in the attacks on Russia and Poland, whose sole purpose was to round up the local Jewish families and kill them. They dug massive graves intended for entire Jewish communities. Their victims were lined up, stripped naked and shot. One reporter observed that not every shot was fatal and the poor civilians were made to suffer in the pits till they were sufficiently buried alive by their own brethren. The first sweep of this unit between January and December of 1941 yielded about 500,000 Jewish deaths. The second rampage, which ranged from the fall of 1941 through 1942, took 900,000 Jewish lives. (Wyman)Even with such massive extermination the German leaders ...
