A major development in the Nazi campaign against Jews was the passing of the Nuremburg Laws in September 1935. The first law, ‘The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’, prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between "Jews" (the name was now officially used in place of "non-Aryans") and "Germans". Furthermore, Jews were not allowed to employ German women under 45 as maids, cleaners, etc. The second law, ‘The Reich Citizenship Law’, stripped Jews and others not considered of German blood, of their citizenship, which meant they lost certain civil and political rights and became “subjects of the state”. This denaturalisation allowed the Nazis to exclude Jews from the “national community”, or “Volksgemeinschaft”, and so granted legitimacy to their persecution and, eventually, extermination of Jews.
However, a clear definition of who was a Jew and who was a German was needed before these laws could be enforced. So, those with four German grandparents were considered “of German blood”; those with three or more Jewish grandparents were now Jewish; and those with one or two Jewish grandparents became Mischling, or “of mixed blood”. As a result, the categorisation of a Jew was not based not on that individual’s religious beliefs, but on his ancestry.
In the weeks before and during the 1936 Winter and Summer Olympic Games held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin, respectively, the Nazis toned down much of their anti-Jewish activities and there was a lull in their anti-Semitic campaign. “Jew Unwelcome” signs were taken down from many public places like parks and swimming pools. Hitler did not want criticism of his government’s actions to result in the Games being transferred to another country, as this would’ve been a serious blow to Germany’s international reputation.
In 1937 and 38, German authorities again stepped up the maltreatment of Jews, in particular the Aryanisation of businesses. Aryanisation was the dismissal of Jewish workers and managers of a company and/or the takeover of Jewish-owned businesses by non-Jewish Germans who bought them at extremely low prices which were determined by the government or Nazi party officials. German decrees expanded the ban on Jews in professional life: Jewish doctors were forbidden to treat non-Jews, and the licenses of Jewish lawyers to practice law were revoked. On top of this, Jews had to register their property, making it easier to confiscate by the Nazis later. Jews were also punished financially by being made to pay more taxes. Jews had to add Sarah (women) and Israel (men) to their names and their passports, which could be used to leave Germany but not to return, were stamped with a red letter ‘J’, which identified that they were Jewish.
On the evening of November 9, 1938, organised anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout the Reich. Over the next 48 hours rioters burned or damaged, what is calculated to be more than 1,000 synagogues and ransacked and broke the windows of more than 7,500 businesses. The Nazis arrested around 20,000 Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60 and sent them to . The police were instructed only to regulatate (no looting, destruction of strictly Jewish property only, etc.) the riots. Firemen were only present in order to ensure protect that the flames from burning synagogues did not spread to adjacent “Aryan” property. The Jewish people were fined 1 billion reichsmarks for the damage. The government also used the horrendous events of that night as an excuse to confiscate 20% of all Jewish property. In the aftermath of what would come to be known as Kristallnacht (‘the Night of Broken Glass’), Jews realised that they had no future in Germany and more than 115,000 emigrated.
The Nazis had always been openly anti-Semitic: as early as 1919, Adolf Hitler had written ““Rational anti-Semitism... Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether”. In his book, Mein Kampf, he further developed the idea of the Jews as an evil race striving for world domination. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in religious, political and racial anti-Semitism. The Nazis portrayed Jews as a race and not a religious group and branded them Untermenschen (“subhumans”). This anti-Semitism could be resolved: religious by conversion, political by expulsion. Racial anti-Semitism could be resolved in one way and one way only: extermination. So, what started as discrimination, progressively worsened and eventually culminated in the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”, or as it is more commonly referred to: the Holocaust.
