Why did the Nazis treatment of the Jews change from 1939-45?

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QUESTION2

Why did the Nazis treatment of the Jews

change from 1939-45?

On the 1st September 1939 Adolf Hitler attacked Poland with his Nazi army. 2 days later Britain and France declared war on Germany heralding the start of the Second World War. For Hitler, the war had become a racial attack on the Jews in Europe. His plan was to get rid of the Jews in Poland and create more “Living Space” for his Aryan race, the Germans that Hitler found suitable for his Reich. However, Hitler found more Jews in Poland than he had anticipated and therefore found dealing with them harder than he first thought it would be. To deal with these extra Jews, Hitler would have to come up with plans and ways to deal with them. These would be more terrible than any previous treatment by the Nazis and far swifter. With the help of the Soviet Union, Germany had wiped Poland off the map, leaving the Jews only 2 options; “Special Treatment” by the Nazis or oppression by the Soviet Union.

Immediately after Hitler had occupied all of Poland, he began his systematic anti-Semitic treatment on the Jews in Poland. At first it was just bad treatment by Nazi Soldiers, humiliation that German Jews had been subject to for years. Random beatings on the street and occasional murders by Nazis on the street was not enough to deal with the 3 300 000 Jews in Poland. It was also hard for the SS to target Jews when they could mingle with citizens of the Reich; Hitler needed to separate the Jews from everyone else. He came up with the idea of putting them in Ghettos, these are small sections of towns where people were cramped in. The most notable of these Ghettos was The Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. In this Ghetto 30% of the city’s population were squeezed into just 2% of the space, the purpose of these ghettos was to separate the Jews and to also keep them in one place. This made it easy for Nazis to use them. Another reason for the ghettos was to kill some of the Jews; Hitler hoped that with the poor qualities in living that a lot of people would die of “natural causes” such as starvation and disease. Diseases were very common in the ghettos and were caught easily, the Nazis offered no medical care and so a Jew with an illness faced almost certain death. The Nazis wanted to keep such a strict control over the Jews that it was illegal for anyone to leave. The only exceptions were Jews on special forced labour, people who had work outside of the ghetto. Forced labour included things like building work, cleaning the streets and even moving the dead. This is one reason why the Nazis collected all the Jews together in ghettos because it made it easy for them to work for the Nazis. The work also killed a lot of people because of the hard working and hardly any food. The Nazis also forced the Jews to rebuild buildings that had been damaged during bombings of the city. In this way, the Nazis could kill two birds with one stone, they could get free work from the Jews and also in many cases, the Jews were worked to death.

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With the extra Jews in Poland, and the Jews in Russia who had been handed over, Hitler was running out of space to keep them. He came up with the idea of moving every Jew to the island of Madagascar, off the south east coast of Africa. However in July 1940, the time of the plan, Germany was at war with Great Britain who controlled the seas and made it impossible for the Nazis to ship them all the way to South Africa. On 22nd June 1941, Germany broke the treaty, it had signed with the Soviet Union in August ...

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