Why Did Genocide Happen

Often, humans are blind to the idea that we are all one species, whether it be one person, or a crowd of people. Throughout the existence of mankind, many nations and civilizations have made history by slaughtering their own people, whether it be for superstitions, personal gain, or both. The Holocaust, one of the most violent genocidal events in the past century, has sparked many awareness programs to prevent another event of similar nature from happening again. Genocide is the act of deliberately killing a large group of people, especially those of a similar ethnic group or nation. These awareness efforts in recent years have lead historians to ask: Why does genocide occur? Often, genocide is the product of political and ethnic tensions
Before Nazi Germany’s peak of influence in Europe, Grupenfuhrer Heydrich, an SS soldier, addressed the police force of Germany to perform the first act against German Jews in the World War II era, Kristallnacht. In his order issued to all Police officers, Heydrich wrote, “a) Only such measures may be taken which do not jeopardize German life or property (for instance, burning of synagogues only if there is no danger of fires for the neighbourhoods). b) Business establishments and homes of Jews may be destroyed but not looted. The police have been instructed to supervise the execution of these directives to arrest looters. c) In Business streets special care is to be taken that non-Jewish establishments will be safeguarded at all cost against damage. As soon as the events of this night permit the use of the designated officers, as many Hews, particularly wealthy ones, as the local jails will hold, are to be arrested in all districts, Initially only healthy male Jews, not too old, are to be arrested, After the arrests have been carried out the appropriate concentration camp is to be contacted immediately with a view to a quick transfer of the Jews to the camps,”
Following the conclusion of World War II in Nazi Germany, the world witnessed the Nuremburg War Criminal Trials, a set of trials against the onlookers of the Holocaust, or Germany’s mass extermination of European Jews. In most of the cases in the trials, the accused often used obedience to plead their cases, claiming that their actions had all come from higher in the Nazi’s hierarchy of government. Researcher Stanley Milgram “devised [an] experiment to answer the question ‘Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them accomplices?’ … The study revealed that two-thirds of the time, the participant was willing to deliver potentially life-threatening shocks to the ‘learner’ simply because they were receiving orders from an authority figure” (Document A and Documentary). Historians baffled the thought that Americans were not capable of killing their own peers, simply because the population was thought of as “superior” and it was claimed to be “impossible for an American to kill a fellow American.” However, Milgram’s experiments confirmed the truth that humans are willing to commit unethical or inhumane acts against other humans if given orders from an authority figure, confirming his suspicions during the Nuremberg Trials, and more specifically, Adolf Eichmann’s claim that he was only following