ABSTRACT
The Holocaust was a cataclysmic event that changed the shape of human history forever. It was an unprecedented, systematic attempt to achieve “racial purity” through the extermination of innocent people. Although there is historical evidence of other tragedies involving genocide, only the Holocaust involved a master plan for the deliberate extinction of a group of people who were regarded as unfit to inhabit the earth with other mortals. Bergmann and Jucow state:
The concept adopted by the Nazis in devising the Final Solution was the fulfilment of an ideology of hate—an apocalyptic end in itself. Sophisticated technology was applied to the organized and relentless slaughter of a people—a slaughter on a scale surpassing any anti-Semitic crimes of the past. [Bergmann & Jucovy, 1982, p. 4]
