Could the leaders of Europe have prevented the Holocaust Essay

Could the leaders of Europe have prevented the Holocaust - Essay Example berg Law of 1935, the violent riots against Jewish businesses on ‘Kristallnacht’ in 1938, the confinement of Jews to Ghettoes in 1940, their killing in concentration and labor camps in 1941 and culminated in their whole scale massacre in the extermination camps from 1942. They were transported by railroads and eliminated in gas chambers in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Maulthausen.1 Approximately six million Jews lost their lives in the Holocaust, which was described by Winston Churchill as â€Å"the greatest and most terrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.†2 Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism was the prime instigator of the Holocaust, but it was also perpetrated by the Western Allies policy of appeasement, which was motivated by self-interest. Anti-Semitism has long been a part of human history and can be considered a cultural phenomenon, prevalent in Europe and America as in the rest of the world. It can be attributed to many factors: jealousy of the economic prosperity of the Jews, resentment of their claims of being the ‘chosen people,’ their vilification as the killers of Christ and 2racism. They have been used as convenient scapegoats for disasters such as The Black Death, subjected to massacres during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and to pogroms in Russia and Poland. Hitler advocated world dominion by the pure Aryan races through the elimination of ‘inferior races,’ such as the Slavs, Gypsies and particularly the Jews. He set about this genocide with military precision, aided by the reluctance of Western Europe and America to take decisive measures to stop this horrendous crime against humanity. Britain and France unabashedly followed a policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany due to several factors, which were related to their perceived self-interest. World War 1 (1914 – 1918), with its’ 7 million European casualties, had a deep impact on public opinion, particularly in