Once in power, Hitler wasted little time in putting his Anti Semitic policies into action.
The Jews were blamed for killing Christ. They were also a very unique nation and set themselves apart from others. They also spoke Yiddish, not to Hitler’s likening. However most Jews had acceptable and high role jobs (doctors and lawyers etc). So this brought jealousy towards the Jewish Nation. Also a very high disliking from Hitler.
On 1st April 1933 the Stormtroopers organised a boycott of Jewish Shops throughout Germany. Sometimes Stormtroopers stood outside shops and physically prevented people entering. In the same year, Jews were banned form having jobs in the German civil service or in medicine, teaching and journalism.
In 1933 Jews were banned from most public places such as swimming pools, restaurants, parks and cinemas, but as much more serious were the Nuremberg Laws passed in the same year. There were two of these laws. The Reich Citizen Law deprived Jews of the German citizenship, while the Law for the Protection of German Blood and honour outlawed marriages and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. These were followed by persecution as hundreds of Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Large numbers of Jews decided to emigrate form Germany-in the 1930s, half the German Jewish population left the country. Many others felt they could not leave their homeland and hoped that things would not get worse. But in 1938 they did. A Jewish student shot dead a German diploma in the embracing in Paris. The authorities in Germany reacted by ordering widespread attacks on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. In this Kristallnacht, 8000 Jewish homes and shops were attacked, and synagogues were burned to the ground. Over a hundred Jews were killed and thousands were sent to concentration camps. When he heard of the cost to German insurance companies of all the damage, one leading Nazi is reported to have said, “We should have smashed fewer windows and more heads.”
Kristallnacht was followed by a new set of Anti Semitic laws. The Jewish community had to pay one billion marks for the murder of the diplomat in Paris. Jews were no longer allowed to run businesses and Jewish children were banned from school. It seemed that things could get no worse, and few people could have imagined what was in store for Jews across Europe.
Life for the Jews under the Nazis became increasingly more difficult during the 1930’s. Their civil rights were withdrawn and thousands of them were sent to concentration camps. During the Second World War the Nazis took control of much of Europe and millions of Jews came under their control. Many of them were herded into ghettos in the cities. the conditions were so awful that thousands starved to death. Others were sent to concentration camps to join other victims of the Nazi Regime. In 1941 the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. As the Germany army advanced, 3000 men in the Einsatzgruppen followed it. This was a group of four death squads whose job it was to kill communist officials and Jews in the occupied territories. By the end of 1941 half a million Jews had been shot or poisoned by exhaust fumes. In January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin a “ Final Solution “ to the “ Jewish Problem “ was found. The Jewish people of Europe were to be rounded up and sent to extermination camps where they would be put to death. By the summer six concentration camps had been converted into extermination camps and in the next four years almost six million Jews were murdered it what has become know as the Holocaust.
The Nazis also persecuted other minorities Homosexuality was despised by the Nazis, as it was not keeping with their ideal of the Aryan masculinity. From 1936 homosexuals were forced to go on national register and were placed under police supervision with a night curfew. Many were castrated and up to 15,000 homosexuals were sent to concentration camps during the 1930s. Some were later used in medical experimentation.
People of Eastern Europe descent also received harsh treatment at the hands of the Nazis, who considered them work-shy vagrants. They too lost their citizenship in Nuremberg Maws and had to live on specially designated sites. If they refused they were sent to concentration camps. Many people labelled gypsies were sterilised. During the Second World War, they suffered the same fate the Jews.
Even tramps and beggars were dealt with severely. Up to half a million of them were rounded up and put into labour camps. Many of them were also sterilized.
In 1933 the Nazis passed a law to saw that all mentally disabled people should be compulsorily sterilised. In 1939 a euthanasia programme was introduced against mentally and physically disables Germans. Some 70,000 adults and 5000 children were put to death by lethal injection, gassing or starvation. Disabled people simply did not fit in with Nazi views on the master race. Nazi propaganda was used to persuade people that euthanasia for the disabled and for anyone that was the stereotypical German was a good thing.
