Abstract
Genocide is a denial of a fundamental right and that is the right of an individual to life. While the onset of mass murder may appear to happen swiftly in genocide, there may have been several preliminary steps leading up to the mass killing. One preliminary step that has historically led to genocide has been the reduction and denial of rights to a select group of individuals in a society. Their rights are being denied incrementally and systematically. The anti-Jewish legislation enacted in Germany in the early twentieth century was a prelude to further denial of basic rights. Allegedly the victims did not deserve to enjoy the same rights as the favored Aryans. When this happens without check, this progressive reduction of rights may threaten or deny some persons of their fundamental right to life. The Nazis were engaged in a war upon Jews to deny them the right to life.
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Notes
- 1.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1970), 287.
- 2.
See Dr. Gregory H. Stanton’s ten stages of genocide at https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages
- 3.
The Holy Bible.
- 4.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 132.
- 5.
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1982), 6.
- 6.
Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 52.
- 7.
See the discussion of the fundamental right to life in the introduction to this work.
- 8.
Martin Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 119.
- 9.
Simone Gigliotti and Berel Lang. The Holocaust: A Reader (Malden, Maryland: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 82.
- 10.
Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 199), 132.
- 11.
Mary Berg, et al. Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary. Edited by Sh. L Shnayderman (New York: L.B. Fischer, 1945), 64.
- 12.
Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, 38.
- 13.
Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, 174.
- 14.
Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001). Critical to the successful classification of Jews was the use of the IBM punch card system. Without this technology the Nazis would have lacked the means of quickly and precisely cataloging Jews. Once cataloged they could easily then be rounded up and sent to ghettos or concentration camps. See the later discussion corporate complicity in Chap. 11.
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Wilson, P.E. (2023). Denial of Rights as a Prelude to Entitlement. In: The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_3
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