After we finished watching Schindler's List, various themes stood out. In my opinion the most important theme of the film would have to be the emotion of hate. The Holocaust was defined by hate, pure and simple. The Nazis came up with lots of elaborate philosophical explanations as to why they needed to do what they did. But in the end, it came down to pure, irrational Jew-hatred. In his psychotic manifesto, Hitler wrote that "the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew." Jews were "viruses," a "tuberculosis race" that threatened to poison the rest of the world. If you bought that argument, you'd think you were doing the world a favor by getting rid of Jews once and for all. In the midst of an existential war against the rest of the world, a war that was financially ruining Germany, the Nazis chose to spend enormous resources killing Jews. Europe, with its long history of anti-Semitism, was very fertile ground.
And Schindler's List shows us the brunt of it all.
And Schindler's List shows us the brunt of it all.