By 1936 earnings were ten times more than the dole money that people had received in 1932.
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Using two or more other groups from the list above and explain how the effects of Hitler’s appointment as Fuhrer were connected:Women and Children
When Hitler came to power women were forced to give up their careers, instead their new career was the three “Ks”: Kinder, Kirche und Kuche. If a woman was not working she would have to get married and have children. The Law for the Encouragement of Marriage gave all newly married couples a loan of 1000 marks. On the birth of their first child they could keep a quarter of the money, for the second child the second quarter. Thus if the couple had four children they kept all the money. If a woman had more than eight children she was rewarded with a gold medal. Special homes for unmarried mothers were also set up which also acted as brothels, where an unmarried woman could go to become pregnant by a “racially pure” SS man. All of these measures encouraged a growth in the population.
Even in the home German women were not free to follow fashion, they were expected to dress in traditional German peasant fashions, with long hair kept in plaits or buns. They could not wear make-up or smoke in public. They were simply encouraged to have children.
Once the children were old enough to attend school Hitler could remove them from parental influences and make them loyal to him and Nazi ideals. To this end the Nazis rewrote the school curriculum with all subjects having a military basis. German children were encouraged to join the Hitler Youth Movement, which by 1939 had a membership of 8,000,000. Prior to this a German child was expected to show loyalty to their family first.
The Hitler Youth movement was broken down as follows:
The Hitler Youth Movement was seen as exciting to most German children, it was free entertainment, they marched in parades wearing a uniform, went on summer camps where they learnt to read maps and boys were taught to clean a rifle. Everyone became a strong cross country runner and comfortable camping out. These were all attributes of a future army. However parents didn’t see the Hitler Youth Movement as fun and saw it for what it really was. Henrik Metelmann, who enjoyed being a member of the Hitler Youth in the 1930s said:
“It was a great feeling. You felt you belonged to a great nation again. Germany was in a safe hands and I was going to help to build a strong Germany. But my father of course felt differently. [He warned] ‘Now Henrik, don’t say to them what I am saying to you.’ I always argued with my father as I was very much in favour of the Hitler regime which was against his background as a working man.”
In my opinion these two groups are connected. Hitler needed a large German population that was loyal to him and Nazi beliefs, effectively a new generation of Germans who would not question him. He did this by forcing women to stay at home and produce large families. Once the children were old enough he indoctrinated them into Nazism in schools and trained them in the Hitler Youth Movement as his future army.
Were any of these groups more seriously affected than the others? Explain your answer as fully as you can.
In my opinion the group that was affected the most under Hitler were the Jews. Although other groups were affected by Hitler’s rise to power, for instance women lost their careers and liberty and the unemployed gained employment. The Jews lost their liberty, employment, citizenship, were forced to pay a fine of 1 billion marks, forced to scrub streets on their hands and knees, had businesses and belongings stolen from them and finally lost their lives. I support this opinion with the following facts.
Many Jews were highly educated and successful businessmen or bankers whose initially loyalty would have been to their religion and their families. To the improvised Germans it must have been galling to see “immigrants” into Germany prospering on their (the Germans) misery. Added to which the Jews had always been persecuted as the killers of Christ.
Hitler himself had various personal reasons for hating the Jews, from his childhood in Vienna where Jews were successful business people whilst he himself lived in poverty. His belief in the superiority of the Aryan race was also offended by the fact that the Jews were so successful in business. Hitler also blamed these same Jewish businessmen and bankers for Germany’s defeat in the First World War.
When Hitler came to power in 1933 he immediately set about making life difficult for Jews. His first act was to ban Jews from working in the civil service, law, universities, schools and media; this enabled Hitler to keep his election promise of cutting unemployment. In 1934 Jewish shops were marked with a Yellow Star of David, and these shops, and other Jewish run businesses were attacked by the SA and SS troopers and shunned by Aryan Germans. In 1935 the Nuremburg Law came into effect, which took away German citizenship from Jews and banned them from marrying non-Jews, Hitler wanted this so that Germany would be populated by a purely Aryan race whose first loyalty would be to him and the Nazi party. At the same time Goebbel’s propaganda machine turned out anti-Jewish messages which encouraged the German people to turn on the Jews, who found themselves unable to buy food, medicines or even room in a hotel. Many thousands of Jews fled the country but equally many more stayed unable to leave.
Following the shooting of a Nazi Official by a Jew in 1938 Hitler ordered Himmler the leader of the Police and the SS to take action against the Jews. On the 10th November 1939 almost 10,000 Jewish shopkeepers had their windows broken and their shops looted. Homes and synagogues were burnt down; dozens of Jews were killed or arrested. This day became known as “Kristallnacht”.
From 1941 German Jews were forced to wear the Star of David on their clothing. Whilst in occupied countries Jews were rounded up and placed in ghettos. When Senior Nazis met in 1941 to discuss the final solution to the Jewish problem Himmler, was charged with the extermination of the Jewish race and any other race considered to be non-Aryan. Himmler attempted to achieve this by building concentration camps (i.e. Auschwitz) to which all Jews and non-Aryans were to be transported. The old, sick and young were killed immediately with the remainder being forced into slave labour; others were used for medical experiments.
