Those who lived during those ugly years of World War II, and who are still alive in Germany, have a multitude of stories to tell. Stories about being swept away by the Nazi Party's propaganda, by the glorious portraits of handsome young Nazis, surrounded by the passionate red flags emblazoned with black swastikas, as they marched off into the sunset. Swept away by the conviction in Hitler's voice as he talked about building a better Germany, a better world, through the systematic genocide of inferior races. A good friend of mine from Germany who visited the USA for a year, once described to me what her grandmother had described to her about growing up in a Nazi Germany: "His ideas sounded crazy, but when he was scheduled to make a speech, it was like a social event. Everyone was there. Bands were playing, the Hitler Youth sang songs, people had fun. I went to one of these events, and when everyone cheered when he spoke, I had to cheer as well. I was swept away. It only made sense that it was the right thing to do, or why would everyone else go along with it?"

So, how exactly DID Hitler manage to take such an insane idea (the extermination of Jews and any other "inferior" race) and manage to convince entire countries that it was a good idea?

First of all, back in the early 20th century, the study of eugenics was still relatively new, and it seemed to make sense at the time. In the 1930's, a girl named Carrie Buck was sterilized, (made infertile) because it was "proven" that she, her mother, and her baby daughter were "imbeciles," and that to have three generations of "imbeciles" could only be the result of bad genes. The obvious solution to prevent more stupid people from breathing all of our air was to just nip it in the bud and cut off the chain of bad blood.

There was also a lot of plain old racism going on because not everyone had realized yet that race has no affect on your intelligence, awareness, or any other mental capacity for that matter. Take, for example, the murder of a Chicago teen named Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered in Mississippi just for being black. This event didn't happen until 1955, well after World War II had ended and Hitler committed suicide, but as the event that many say jump started the civil rights movement, it just goes to show that our world even then hadn't come to terms with accepting each other.

Second, the Jews were dehumanized. A good example of another race being dehumanized would be the Tutsis in Rwanda in the early 1990s. Entire radio stations were taken over by Hutus who were being on destroying the Tutsi race, entire newspapers, flyers were thrown around and posters were made, all referring to the Tutsis as cockroaches. It is easy for most people to kill a cockroach, but it's not so easy to kill your neighbor. It seems incredible that something so small as a leader telling you that your neighbor is inferior could lead a whole country to chaos. In a survey I conducted, 19/20 people said that if Bush launched a campaign trying to convince us that Arabians needed to be wiped out they wouldn't fall for it.

The Jews were portrayed as the cause of Germany's economic problems, as a penny-pinching race of Scrooges whose only concern was to get rich and not care about anyone else's problems. Hitler urged that the only way to solve this problem was to get rid of them all together!At first, Nazis only encouraged Germans to boycott Jewish businesses. But eventually, Jewish doctors were only allowed to treat Jewish patients, Jewish teachers were forced out of their profession, and Jewish shops were sold to Aryans for a fraction of their worth.

This kind of division began to form a wedge in the minds of some Germans, a wedge between themselves and the Jews. This helped later in recruiting Nazis to burn the homes and loot the businesses of their former friends and neighbors. One Japanese scientist who conducted inhumane experiments on Chinese subjects during WWII was asked how he could commit such cruel acts on other human beings. He replied simply "they were like logs to me". I think that the same sentiments must have been taken to heart by Nazis who imprisoned and tortured countless victims in concentration camps.