'Nazi Policies towards Jews were Brutal but Erratic'. Asses the validity of this judgement about the consequences of Nazi Anti-Semitism in the years 1933-39 In the years after the Machtergreifung in 1933

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‘Nazi Policies towards Jews were Brutal but Erratic’. Asses the validity of this judgement about the consequences of Nazi Anti-Semitism in the years 1933-39

In the years after the Machtergreifung in 1933, German Jews were subject to fluctuation levels of violence and intimidation at the hands of the Nazi Party and its supporters. The variations in intensity were the result of a number of factors including the occasion of the Berlin Olympics, and internal rivalries in the Nazi party about the best way to proceed with Anti-Semitic policy.

‘Brutal’ is defined in the Oxford dictionary as Cruel, harsh or savage,’ and in consideration of this, Nazi treatment of Jews between 1933 and 1939 was certainly brutal. The earliest example of this brutality comes during the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, when Nazi SA troops assaulted and murdered an estimated 45 German-Jewish citizens. This type of random violence exemplified by the SA was carried out daily in 1933, with victims being hauled into ‘Wild Camps,’ places of torture and murder set up in abandoned factories and army barracks. Michael Wildt, an author described random acts of such as ‘SA men kidnapped theatre director Paul Barnay and beat him with rubber clubs and dog whips so severely he was later hospitalised.’

These random attacks which characterized the years 1933 and 1935 were not linked with any specific Nazi policy; however they were clearly the consequence of Anti-Semitism within the party.

Nazi Anti-Semitic brutality reached new extremes on  a pogrom (organised massacre) organised by Goebbels in response to the murder of the German ambassador in France Von Rath. On the 9th of November 1938 over 20,000 Jews were assaulted, murdered or detained in concentration camps whilst SA troops vandalised Jewish owned shops and burned synagogues to the ground. The physical brutality of Nazis on this night was unparalleled in Germany at the time, with over 90 Jewish citizens being murdered in the random violence that filled Germany.  

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A Jewish man clearing broken glass after Reichkristallnacht

Whilst this physical brutality is certainly horrific, it is on a much smaller scale than other terror regimes of the era, such as Stalin’s Russia, where hundreds of thousands of innocent soviet citizens were sent to work camps and worked to death. Due to this, it could be argued that Nazi policy towards Jews was not remarkably brutal however the brutality of Nazi Germany also took on a much more extreme psychological dimension against Jewish citizens.

These incidents of ‘legal anti-Semitism’ were common in Nazi Germany, an example ...

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