Hitler had very strong beiefs about the Jews. Hitler considered the Jews to be the lowest of the ‘inferior’, races. In his book ‘Mein Kampf’ he described them as ‘race polluters’. He thought they were responisble for all Germanys problems. He said they were responsible for all the ills in society – for the economic exploitation, for unemployment and for all forms of corruption. This was obviously not true but this did not stop Hitler beilveing it. Jews were accused of being capitalist exploiters and communist revolutioaires. Hitler explained the contradiction in this by saying that Jewish plots changed shape according to the circumstandes. Hence the Weimar Republic was a ‘Jew Republic’ and the army had been ‘stabbed in the back’ in Novermber 1918 by a gonverenment inspired by Jews. There was a lot of jelously because the Jews were very sucseful in buisneses, culture and medicine. The box below was in a Nazi leaflet printed in 1922 with a title reading ‘The anti-semites want to incite you’,
This descipres all the things people have against the Jews and if it is put in a leaflet people will see it and this will lead to more people disliking or even hating the Jews. Propagana was used and the ideas that Jews had bad meat, where fat, ugly and unhyginec was rasied. This was to try and stop people shopping in Jewish shops.
A lot of very strong belifes were held against the Jews and in most cases Hitler was exagateing. Although he wanted to get the message though that ordinary Germans were part of a master race and had every right to take what they needed from other races. All their problems could be blamed on ‘infier; races, and espically the Jews. It was a new and leath combination of old predudcies.
At first when nothing serious was done about the Jews but they were seriously insulted at times. Then for the first 5 years Nazis gradually deprived the Jews of their rights as German citizens. It then started to get more serious. From the start Jews were refused the protection from the police and, on 1 April 1933, SA men organized a boycott of Jewish shops. In September 1922 Jews banned from inheriting land. In 1933-35 all Jews were banned from professional jobs. The year 1935 produced a lot of laws. This was probably because President Hindenburg was no longer there. Parks, swimming baths, restaurants and pubic buildings were all closed to Jews. In the same year the Nuremberg Laws (or the Laws for the protection of German blood and German honour) made illegal any marriage or sexual intercourse between Germans and Jews. A children’s book was put forward to teach young children about ‘dirty Jews’ and the stereotypes. Non-Aryans were crudely categorised. In 1938 as the photo shows Jews were openly humiliated and forced to scrub the streets. From 1938 onwards the position of the Jews in Germany deteriorated rapidly. There was more than one reason for this. First, the Nazi regime was much more in control than it had been in the early 1930s. Secondly the indoctrination and terror were removing possible opposition. And third Hitler had a lot of success abroad. The Nazis were gaining a lot more power. The turning point came on one night named ‘crystal night’. During Crystal Night over 7,500 Jewish shops were destroyed and 400 synagogues were burnt down. Ninety-one Jews were killed and an estimated 20,000 were sent to concentration camps. It was named ‘Kristallnacht’ (crystal night) after the broken glass, which littered the streets everywhere. It was probably organised by Joseph Gobbles and the SA although he claimed the violence was a result of ‘righteous indignation’ of German people against those who were swindling them. After Crystal Night the numbers of Jews wishing to leave Germany increased dramatically. It has been calculated that between 1933 and 1939, approximately half the Jewish population of Germany (250,000) left the country. This included several Jewish scientists who were to play an important role in the fight against fascism during the war. A higher number of Jews would have left but anti-Semitism was not restricted to Germany and many countries were reluctant to take them.
The ‘Final Solution’ was the decision in 1941 to kill all Jews. Mass shootings in Eastern Europe were put ahead. Einstagruppen killed thousands in their own homes and villages. Jews were transported across Europe in cattle trucks. In addition to the original concentration camps a number of extermination camps were set up, mainly occupying Poland. Here over 6 million Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1945 at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, which envisaged the killing of all Jews in German occupied Europe.
