Why did germany escalated

Jews could not attend public schools; go to theaters, cinema, or vacation resorts; or reside or even walk in certain sections of German cities. The Nazis either seized Jewish businesses and properties outright or forced Jews to sell them at bargain prices. This attack against German and Austrian Jews included the physical destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned stores, the arrest of Jewish men, the vandalization of homes, and the murder of individuals.

A Nazi propaganda poster against the disabled. Supporters of sterilization also argued that the handicapped burdened the community with the costs of their care. About children of mixed African-German backgrounds were also sterilized. Their literature was confiscated, and they lost their jobs, unemployment benefits, pensions, and all social welfare benefits. Many Witnesses were sent to prisons and concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and their children were sent to juvenile detention homes and orphanages.

Arrival of Jewish refugee children, port of London, February Between and , thousand of people, mostly political prisoners, were imprisoned in concentrations camps, while several thousand German Roma were confined in special municipal camps. The first systematic round-up of German and Austrian Jews occurred after Kristallnacht, when approximately 30, Jewish men were deported to Dachau and other concentration camps, and several hundred Jewish women were sent to local jails.

The wave of arrests in also included several thousand German and Austrian Roma. Serbian nationalism and expansionism were profoundly disruptive forces and Serbian backing for the Black Hand terrorists was extraordinarily irresponsible.

Austria-Hungary bore only slightly less responsibility for its panic over-reaction to the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne. France encouraged Russia's aggressiveness towards Austria-Hungary and Germany encouraged Austrian intransigence. Britain failed to mediate as it had done in the previous Balkan crisis out of fear of Germany's European and global ambitions - a fear that was not entirely rational since Britain had clearly won the naval arms race by The generally positive attitude of European statesmen towards war, based on notions of honour, expectations of a swift victory, and ideas of social Darwinism, was perhaps the most important conditioning factor.

It is very important to look at the outbreak of the war in the round and to avoid reading back later developments - the German September Programme for example an early statement of their war aims - into the events of July-August Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia. Relatively common before , assassinations of royal figures did not normally result in war.

But Austria-Hungary's military hawks - principal culprits for the conflict - saw the Sarajevo assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Bosnian Serb as an excuse to conquer and destroy Serbia, an unstable neighbour which sought to expand beyond its borders into Austro-Hungarian territories.

Serbia, exhausted by the two Balkan wars of in which it had played a major role, did not want war in Broader European war ensued because German political and military figures egged on Austria-Hungary, Germany's ally, to attack Serbia. This alarmed Russia, Serbia's supporter, which put its armies on a war footing before all options for peace had been fully exhausted. This frightened Germany into pre-emptively declaring war on Russia and on Russia's ally France and launching a brutal invasion, partly via Belgium, thereby bringing in Britain, a defender of Belgian neutrality and supporter of France.

Austria-Hungary and Germany. WW1 did not break out by accident or because diplomacy failed. It broke out as the result of a conspiracy between the governments of imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary to bring about war, albeit in the hope that Britain would stay out.

After 25 years of domination by Kaiser Wilhelm II with his angry, autocratic and militaristic personality, his belief in the clairvoyance of all crowned heads, his disdain for diplomats and his conviction that his Germanic God had predestined him to lead his country to greatness, the 20 or so men he had appointed to decide the policy of the Reich opted for war in in what they deemed to be favourable circumstances.

Germany's military and naval leaders, the predominant influence at court, shared a devil-may-care militarism that held war to be inevitable, time to be running out, and - like their Austrian counterparts - believed it would be better to go down fighting than to go on tolerating what they regarded as the humiliating status quo.

In the spring of , this small group of men in Berlin decided to make "the leap into the dark" which they knew their support for an Austrian attack on Serbia would almost certainly entail. The fine-tuning of the crisis was left to the civilian chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, whose primary aim was to subvert diplomatic intervention in order to begin the war under the most favourable conditions possible.

In particular, he wanted to convince his own people that Germany was under attack and to keep Britain out of the conflict. Long before the outbreak of hostilities Prussian-German conservative elites were convinced that a European war would help to fulfil Germany's ambitions for colonies and for military as well as political prestige in the world.

The actual decision to go to war over a relatively minor international crisis like the Sarajevo murder, however, resulted from a fatal mixture of political misjudgement, fear of loss of prestige and stubborn commitments on all sides of a very complicated system of military and political alliances of European states. In contrast to the historian Fritz Fischer who saw German war aims - in particular the infamous September Programme of with its far-reaching economic and territorial demands - at the core of the German government's decision to go to war, most historians nowadays dismiss this interpretation as being far too narrow.

They tend to place German war aims, or incidentally all other belligerent nations' war aims, in the context of military events and political developments during the war. Whole libraries have been filled with the riddle of Was the war an accident or design, inevitable or planned, caused by sleepwalkers or arsonists? To my mind the war was no accident and it could have been avoided in July In Vienna the government and military leaders wanted a war against Serbia. The immediate reaction to the murder of Franz Ferdinand on 28 June was to seek redress from Serbia, which was thought to have been behind the assassination plot and which had been threatening Austria-Hungary's standing in the Balkans for some time.

Crucially, a diplomatic victory was considered worthless and "odious". At the beginning of July, Austria's decision-makers chose war. But in order to implement their war against Serbia they needed support from their main ally Germany. Breitman, Richard. New York: Knopf, Browning, Christopher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Cesarani, David, editor. The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation.

London: Routledge, Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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