Source C is a Nazi propaganda cartoon showing Jewish children being expelled from a German school. The Jews are shown as ugly, spiteful, mean rebellious children, who are sticking out their tongues and pulling the Aryan girls’ hair. The Aryans are celebrating and cheering to see them leave. It is not very reliable as it is propaganda, but it is true that they are being expelled from 1935. Clearly this is biased propaganda sending out the message that Jews are unwelcome and it is right to do so. Although it is biased it is backed up by the fact that Jews were expelled by law from German schools from 1935. Aryan children were also taught to draw Jews as big nosed and big lipped people what were scruffy.
3. During the 1930’s many laws were passed by the Nazi’s restricting the lives of the Jews. Some of these were:
- Jewish children could not go to ice-cream parlours, cinemas, museums or libraries.
- Jews were not allowed to be sports fans or be present at sports events.
- Jews could not use public facilities like swimming pools or tennis courts.
- Bicycles were taken away.
- Travel by Jews was only authorized at certain times of the day and then not at all.
- Curfews were initiated.
- Visits between Jews and gentiles were forbidden.
They took away Jewish children’s pets and sometimes poisoned or killed them.
Jews were eventually restricted to their homes, gardens, and courtyards.
I know from my own research that the Nazi’s passed many laws like the Nuremburg laws during the 1930’s and this was clearly part of their policy on race. However we would need other evidence to confirm that these laws were widespread across Germany.
4. Things got even for the Jews in November 1938 when Hitler stepped up his actions against them with violence. On 7 November 1938, a young Polish Jew struck and shot two German officials in the Nazi-German embassy in Paris. He was angry about the handling of his parents by the Nazi-Germans. Goebbels took the opportunity to impress Hitler, and ordered revenge. There was a Kristallnacht- night of broken glass- November 9, 1938 where all the Jewish shop windows were broken and Jews houses were broken into and everything broken. Also synagogues were burnt down and some Jews were murdered or arrested. All this was done because the storm troopers were insisting that they were looking for weapons. There were a few accounts that were given by Jews. One was by a Jewish woman named Lore Gang-Saalheimer. She came home to find her whole house has been trashed by the storm troopers. There were no ornaments or cabinets left in one piece. There was also another account given by Karl Hartland, the son of a Jewish banker who recalls that his family had received a phone call to say that the synagogue was on fire and that Jews were being arrested. After they had gone he saw that everything had been smashed to pieces or turned upside down and painting had been destroyed. There was a summary done of the damage done that evening. There was 191 synagogues destroyed and 76 completely knocked down, 20,000 Jews were arrested, 91 Jews were killed, 3 foreigners were arrested, there was looting in all Jewish shops and warehouses and 815 businesses were destroyed. Many Germans were shocked by this action when the level of damage was exposed, so Hitler ordered it to be blamed on the Jews. Collectively the Jews were made to pay back one billion RM in damages; the fine being raised by confiscating 20% of every Jew's property.
5. It was not only the Jews that were under attack by Hitler. He wanted not only racially pure Germans but also physically, mentally and emotionally fit people in his Germany. Source I tells us that the Nazi’s encouraged large families. They thought that more children meant more soldiers for Germany in the future. The children according to Hitler had to be racially ‘pure’. By 1933 a law had been introduced to prevent people from giving birth to genetically unsuitable children. They forced sterilisation on individuals that were handicapped, epileptic, deaf, or blind to stop it being passed onto their children.
In 1937 the Gestapo brought in 385 black children to be sterilised. They also brought in thousands that were handicapped to be killed. In total there were 72,000 men, women, children that were handicapped or unfit, and also alcoholics killed by injections or gas.
6. Things got even worse for the Jews when World War Two broke out in 1939 and they were rounded up into camps. The Jews were recognised because they had to wear yellow stars on their arms. There was a seventeen year old named Hilda Geffen-Ludomer who became a ‘U-boat’ (lived in hiding). Her mother had told her to run away in October 1942 when the police had come to take the family away. She stayed with friends for six months before finding the Kobers who took her in as their “niece”.
On 17 August, Jews had to add "Israel" (males) or "Sarah" (females) to their names, and a large letter "J" was to be stamped on their passports on 5 October. On 15 November Jewish children were banned from going to normal schools. By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under economic pressure and failing profits, or had been convinced to sell out to the Nazi-German government.
Some other Jewish children were sent to religious houses and were brought up as Catholics. Sometimes the boys would dress up as girls so that they were not found out because boys tended to be strip searched in the streets to check if they had been circumcised as Jews had been. Some Jews also hid in graves in a Berlin cemetery or in family vaults to avoid being found.
Other Jews hid away in any other place they could find. The famous Anne Frank hid in the back of her house behind a bookcase where a secret staircase was hidden. She talked in her diary about having to be quiet day and night. She missed a lot of things and these included cycling, dancing, whistling, looking out into the world as well as many other things. Being kept trapped in hiding was one of the worst things that ever happened to the Jews that managed to hide.
7. Life in an external camp was terrible. There was a special camp that did experiments on twins. They had to learn the word “nachtwache” which means “night watchman”. This was because in the night they had to go to the toilet. If they couldn’t call out the word they urinated in their beds. If they did this they would be sent to the crematorium. They were put under painful and terrible experiments.
There was an account from Kurt Gerstein who was a young storm trooper officer who opposed the Nazi regime and tried to secretly sabotage and pass on information about the extermination camps. He witnessed a lot of Jews being gassed at Belsen, and eventually committed suicide but left a small account before doing so. In this account he described what it was like to see the Jews arrive off trains and be undressed completely before having to go into the gas chambers to be gassed. He remembers families going in together and also mothers and babies. He says that you can hear some of them crying from outside the gas chamber. Then after they are dead they throw the corpses out and dentists pull out the gold teeth.
Below is a plan of Treblinka camp. In camps like the one below millions of Jews were killed. It is estimated that overall about eight million Jews were killed between 1942 and 1945 in Nazi occupied areas of Europe.
8. The Nuremberg Laws
In 1935-36, persecution of the Jews increased rapidly. In May 1935, Jews were banned from joining the Army, and in the summer of the same year, anti-Jewish propaganda appeared in Nazi-German shops and restaurants. The Nuremberg Laws were passed around the time of the great Nazi rallies at Nuremberg; On 15 September 1935 the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour" was passed stopping marriage between any Jew and non-Jew. At the same time the "Reich Citizenship Law" was passed, and was reinforced in November by a decree, stating that all Jews, even quarter- and half-Jews, were no longer citizens of their own country. This meant that they had no basic citizens' rights, e.g. to vote. This removal of basic citizens' rights allowed harsher laws to be passed in the future against Jews. The drafting of the Nuremberg Laws is often credited to Hans Globke.
In 1936, Jews were banned from all professional jobs, which stopped them having any effect in education, politics and industry. Because of this, there was nothing to stop the anti-Jewish actions that spread across the Nazi-German economy.
