The Laws:
15 September 1935,
LAW FOR THE SAFEGUARD
OF GERMAN BLOOD
OF GERMAN HONOR
Certain in the knowledge that the purity of the German blood is the fundamental necessity for the continuation of the German people, and endowed with an unflinching will to secure the German nation for all times to come, the Reichstag [parliament] has unanimously approved the following law, which is herewith made public:
Paragraph 1
(1) Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or German-related blood are forbidden. Marriages which have been performed in spite of this law, even if they have been performed in a foreign country, are void.
(2) Complaints declaring them void can originate only with the District Attorney.
Paragraph 2
Extramarital sexual intercourse between Jews and citizens of German or German-related blood are forbidden.
Paragraph 3
Jews are not allowed to employ female citizens of German or German-related blood under 45 years in their household.
Paragraph 4
(1) Jews are forbidden to raise the Reich and National flag and they cannot show the National colours.
(2) However, they are allowed to display the Jewish colours. The exercise of this disposition is under the state's protection.
Paragraph 5
(1) Whoever acts against Paragraph 1 will be punished with forced labour.
(2) The man who acts against Paragraph 2 will be punished with prison or forced labour.
(3) Whoever acts against Paragraph 3 or 4 will be punished with prison not exceeding one year and with a fine, or with one of these punishments.
Paragraph 6
The Secretary of the Interior will, together with the Deputy Fuhrer and the Attorney General, issue the necessary law and administrative ordinances.
Paragraph 7
This law is valid on the date of its publication, but Paragraph 3 will be valid only as of 1 January 1936.
Nuremberg, 15 September 1935
National Party Liberty Congress
Der Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor
[Signed] Adolf Hitler
Source:
THE REICH CITIZENS LAW
The Reichstag has unanimously approved the following law, which is herewith made public:
Paragraph 1
(1) A citizen is one who belongs to the protective association of the German Reich and therefore is especially obligated to it.
(2) Citizenship is acquired under the requirements of the Reich and citizenship law.
Paragraph 2
(1) A Reich citizen can only be a person of German or German-related blood who proves by his attitude that he is willing and capable of serving the German people and the Reich faithfully.
(2) The rights of Reich citizenship will be acquired through the granting of Reich citizenship certification.
(3) The Reich citizen is the sole bearer of full political rights along the lines of the laws.
Paragraph 3
The Secretary of the Interior will together with the Deputy Fuhrer and the Attorney General issue the necessary law and administrative ordinances.
Source:
THE REICH FLAG LAW
The Reichstag has unanimously approved the following law, which is herewith made public:
Paragraph 1
The colours of the Reich are black, white, and red.
Paragraph 2
The Reich and National flag is the swastika flag. It is also the merchant shipping flag.
Paragraph 3
The Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor shall order the form of the Reich wall flag and the Reich service flag.
Paragraph 4
The Secretary of the Interior will together with the Secretary of War issue the necessary law and administrative ordinances.
Paragraph 5
This law is valid at its day of publication.
Source:
Kristallnacht 1938
On the night of November 9th, 1938 the Nazis physically attacked the Jews destroying their homes and burning down their properties. In the space of a few hours, thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses were either badly damaged or destroyed. This night was later named Kristallnacht (which means, “the night of broken glass” for the shattered store windowpanes that lied on the German streets.)
Stormtroopers killed at least 91 Jews and injured many others. For the first time, Jews were arrested on a massive scale and transported to Nazi concentration camps. About 30,000 Jews were sent to Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen, where hundreds died within weeks of arrival.
The reason for this tragic event being the November 7 assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager whose parents, along with 17,000 other Polish Jews, had been recently expelled from the Reich.
The Ghettos
Once Hitler came into power, he began to move Jews into ghettos. Ghettos were usually established in the poor sections of a city, where most of the Jews from the city and surrounding areas were forced to live in. Walls were built to separate the ghetto district from the rest of the city and were often surrounded by barbed wire or walls, sealing them.
Space inside the ghettos was very crowed, approximately seven people to a room and food was very scarce; Jews were only given 300 calories per day, more or less two and a half loaves of bread per person per month.
However, the consequences of this were that diseases started to spread and shortly after, many people caught typhus, a disease carried by lice, which eventually caused over half a million Jews to die in the ghettos.
The Death Camps
Unlike concentration camps, death camps had no barracks for prisoners, other than those for workers at the camps. They weren’t even a place of inhabit, they were merely, as the name describes them, a place to die. Jews were deported from ghettos and concentration camps to the death camps unaware of what they were facing. The Nazis told them that they were being resettled for labour, issued them work permits, told them to bring along their tools and to exchange their German marks for foreign currency.
They used food to lure Jews onto the trains; and once these arrived at the death camps, trucks transported those who were too weak to walk directly to the gas chambers whilst the others were told that they would have to be deloused (freed of lice) and enter the baths. The baths were in fact the gas chambers and the shower heads in the baths were actually the inlets for poison gas.
Before the bodies were removed by workers with gas masks and burned in crematoria, the teeth of the victims were stripped for gold, which was melted down and shipped back to Germany.
The Final Solution
On 20th of January 1942 the Nazis met at Wannsee to plan what they called the final solution for the Jewish problem which consequently would lead to the genocide of the entire Jewish race. The "Final Solution" called for the murder of all European Jews by gassing, shooting, and other means. Death camps were built in remote areas of Eastern Europe and Jews were gathered up in Germany, Eastern Europe, France and any other Nazi-controlled location.
The largest and most famous of these camps however, was Auschwitz in Poland where 4 million people were sent to but only 60,000 survived.
The German SS and police alone murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centres either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting.
Approximately six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed during the Holocaust -- two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe before World War II.
Other Groups Persecuted by the Nazis
Although the Nazis were most famous for persecuting Jews they also persecuted members of other races, these being : Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, left of center political prisoners, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic clergy, and common criminals.
In most camps, prisoners were forced to wear identifying overalls with colored badges according to their categorization: red triangles for Communists and other political prisoners, green triangles for common criminals, pink for homosexual men, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, black for Gypsies and yellow for Jews.
Nazi control over the Churches
Hitler’s relationship with the Catholic Church was simple at first; he signed a Concordat with the Catholic Church in 1933 under the following simple term, he agreed to leave the Catholic Church alone and allowed it to keep control of its schools as long as the Church stayed out of politics.
However, Hitler loathed the Catholic Church because he saw it as a “branch of the Jewish race” in fact, in 1938 Goebbels Nazi Minister of Propaganda, noted:
"The Fuhrer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race... Both [Judaism and Christianity] have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end, they will be destroyed."
This statement made churchgoers and clergy members started to rebel against Hitler and the Nazis and in 1941 Catholic Bishop Galen led a popular protest against the Nazi policies of killing mentally ill and physically disabled people, forcing the Nazis to temporarily stop.
Hitler also tried to get all of the Protestant Churches to come together in one official Reich Church which would be lead by the Protestant Bishop Ludwig Muller, but many Germans still felt that they were truly loyal to the original Churches as opposed to the new state-approved ones.
Control of Education
Indoctrination of Children
Indoctrination and the use of propaganda were to be a common practice in Nazi schools and the education system. From a young age, Children were taught the Nazi policies and told to worship the Fuhrer, basically they were brainwashed. Indoctrination became rampant in all subjects. At every opportunity, teachers were expected to attack the life style of the Jews which in the long term stimulated a sense of hatred towards the Jews in the mind of Germany children which coincidentally was precisely what Hitler wanted.
Teachers in Nazi Germany
Enforcing a Nazi curriculum on schools depended on the teachers delivering it. All teachers had to be seen by local Nazi officials and any teacher considered disloyal was fired immediately.
All teachers had to be careful about what they said seeing as children were encouraged to inform the authorities if a teacher said something that didn't fit in with the Nazi's curriculum for schools.
Subjects underwent a major change in schools.
- History was based on the glory of Germany - a nationalistic speech was compulsory.
- Biology became a study of the different races to 'prove' that the Nazi belief in racial superiority was a sound belief and "Racial Instruction" started as the age of 6.
- Geography taught pupils about the land Germany got taken away from her in 1919 and the need for Germany to have living space (lebensraum)
- Science was military based. The curriculum required that the principles of shooting, military aviation science, bridge building and poisonous gasses be studied.
After the Nuremburg Laws, Jewish school children were not allowed to attend schools because the Nazi government claimed that a German pupil sitting next to a Jew could become contaminated by the experience.
School timetable in Nazi Germany
The daily timetable for girls’ schools in Nazi Germany
Source: Walsh History in focus, GCSE Modern World History (second edition) Book.
Hitler Youth Movements/ Women
Nazi idealistic view of the future for Germany
The Hitler Youth – Boys
The Hitler Youth was founded in 1926 and it served to train and recruit future members of the "Storm Regiment"(Sturmabteilung) the adult paramilitary wing of the NSDAP. It was seen as being as important to a child as school was and later in 1939 membership was made compulsory. The Hitler Youth catered for 10 to 18 year olds. There were separate organisations for boys and girls; the task of the boys section was to prepare the boys for military service.
As a member you would have participated in all sorts of marches and parades, you would have been taught army skills, known how to handle a rifle, been a strong cross-country runner and of course taught the principles and beliefs of Adolf Hitler. The Youth was a way for Hitler ensuring that from a young age the boys of Germany supported and agreed with him, even if that meant they were brainwashed.
League of German Maidens
The League of German Girls or League of German Maidens was the female branch of the Hitler Youth founded in 1930, membership became compulsory in 1936.
Unlike the Hitler Youth, the League of German Maidens did not have any military training; it taught girls how to be good housewives, “Hitler’s soldiers’ future mothers”.
The League used campfire romanticism, summer camps, folklores, tradition, and sports to educate girls within the National Socialist belief system, and to train them for their roles in German society: wife, mother, and homemaker.
At first, the League consisted of two sections: the Young Girls League, for girls ages 10 to 14, and the League proper for girls ages 14 to 18. In 1938, a third section was introduced, the Belief and Beauty Society, which was voluntary and open to girls between the ages of 17 and 21.
The Belief and Beauty organizations offered groups where girls could receive further education and training in fields that interested them. Some of the works groups that were available were arts and sculpture, clothing design and sewing, general home economics, and music.
The Role of Women in Nazi Germany
Adolf Hitler had a very traditional view of what the German wife and mother should resemble.
They should be good mothers bringing up children at home while their husbands worked. Hitler saw no reason why a woman should have to work and therefore made sure that their education taught them from the earliest of years that this was the lifestyle they should follow.
There was a great deal of resentment towards working women at the time and this was clearly exposed when the famous film star Marlene Dietrich got accused of not being “a true German woman” after appearing in public wearing trousers.
All the newspaper headlines read: “No true German woman wears trousers.”
The reason being for all this hustle and bustle was because as housewives and mothers, their lives were controlled, women were not expected to wear make-up or get their nails done. They couldn’t dye their hair or wear high heals, only flat shoes were expected to be worn.
Women were also encouraged to have a well built figure as slim women,
However, working and “non-German” women were not Hitler’s biggest concern; the birth rate had unfortunately been descending rapidly since he rose to power, so he decided it was time for a change.
Coincidentally, on August 12th had been the birthday of Hitler’s mother so, on this day each year, the golden Cross was awarded to women who had given birth to the largest number of children. The gold cross went to women who had produced 8 children; silver was for 6 children and bronze was for 4 children; but still this wasn’t enough so Hitler tried other “baby boosters” such as the Law for Encouragement of Marriage.
This law stated that all newly married couples would get a government loan of 1000 marks which was about 9 month’s average income. 800,000 newly weds took up this offer. However, this loan was not to be simply paid back. The birth of one child meant that one quarter of the loan did not have to be paid back. Two children meant that 50% of the loan need not be paid back. Four children meant that the entire loan was cleared.
Typical day at Labour camp for 18-25 year olds
An 18-25 year old’s day in Nazi Germany. Source: Walsh
Young people and their support for the Nazis
Even though the Hitler Youth and the League of German Maidens had a lot of members not all young Germans agreed with the Nazis, there were at least two distinct types of teenagers which refused to undergo the mistreatment of the Nazis: the “swingers” and the Edelweiss Pirates.
The “swing” movement consisted of group middle-class teenagers who liked listening to English and American music, talking about sex and ‘hanging-out’ with Jews. They used long hair, scruffy clothes and had what the authorities would call “a slovenly look”. They were the hippies of the 40’s, some would say.
The Edelweiss Pirates however, they were a much more aggressive group; they consisted of young people, between the ages of 14 and 18, who either left school (which was allowed at 14) or getting out of the Reich Labour Service and military service. They did everything the Hitler Youth did only in a mockery way instead, they had both boys and girls included and like the “swingers” had a much cooler attitude to sex.
Unlike the teenagers involved in the ”swing” movement the Pirates rebelled against the Nazis giving them serious trouble; they attacked Hitler Youth marching bands, ambushed their patrols, beat them up and conspired against them. In fact, one of their slogans was “Eternal War on the Hitler Youth". However, this wasn’t their worst behaviour for in 1944 the pirates reached the line; they took part in an attack on the Gestapo during which the chief was killed. This was the last drop for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, so they publicly hanged 12 leaders of the Pirates that same year in Cologne.
The Media, Censorship and Propaganda
How did the Nazis control the media using censorship?
The Nazis controlled the media rigorously; nothing was published, said or sold without Goebbels’ permission. The obsession with something not “Goebbels-approved” getting to the people was such that in 1933 he organised a book-burning where students, teachers and professors burned any and every book that wasn’t acceptable within the Nazi ideas and policies. However, Goebbels obsession didn’t just remain in books, soon artists, writers and even singers had to have their work approved before they could release it!
Soon, the newspapers became dull and the love for art vanished, so to put an end to this Goebbels decided to create the Reich Chamber of Culture to encourage artists to creation upon Nazi ideology. The Chamber was divided into seven subordinated chambers for literature, music, films, theatre, radio, fine arts, and press and of course all of them were directed by Goebbels.
The importance of radio
Goebbels soon discovered that radio broadcasting was useful for the propaganda of the Nazi ideology; he could get his message across all of Germany at the same moment, something that before this was impossible. Goebbels made it easier for more Germans to express themselves (under his consent of course) making cheap radio stations available for anyone. The only problem remaining was the fact that not everyone in Germany could afford to own a radio, so Goebbels placed huge loudspeakers in the streets and public bars. Goebbels would stop until everyone in Germany could hear Hitler’s speeches and Nazi announcements because, at the end of the day propaganda meant more voters and more votes meant more power.
Cinema and the German film industry
After 1933, the donations and resources given to the cinema grew massively; Germany was making movies more than ever and she even released two world-wide famous films: Triumph of the Will and Hitler Youth Quex.
However, the quality of the cinema decreased; technically it was excellent, but practically it lacked emotion, creativity and self-expression.
Some historians say it was because of all the propaganda, in the adverts, the newsreels anticipating the films and even in the films themselves! Consequently, people started getting sick of it and the cinema ratings decreased.
Mass Rallies – Nuremberg rallies
Goebbels organised mass rallies to cheer up the people of Germany, get them involved in something, give them a sense of inclusion like their a part of something. The most important of theses was the Nuremberg rally; Annual meetings would be held every year by the Party. They consisted of torchlight parades, marches in party formations, and mass rallies addressed by Nazi leaders such as Hitler and Goebbels.
The Hitler Youth were an important part of the event. Hitler Youth boys from all over Germany set out on mass marches to Nuremberg.
The Nuremberg Rally was a multiple day affair and one day was devoted specifically to the Hitler Youth. he climax of this day was a speech by Hitler to the massed Hitler Youth boys and girls.
The 1936 Olympics
The 1936 Olympic Games were held in Berlin, although at first there was some dispute between the Nazi leaders whether they should be the hosts of not, but eventually they concluded they should. The second issue of dispute was between Germany and the USA; the USA found that the Nazis had a very repressive regime when it came to anti-Jewish politics as a result they decided to boycott the games in protest so, the Nazi included at least one token Jew in their team.
After everything was settled Goebbels and Hitler used this opportunity to propaganda the wonders of the Aryan race to the whole world. They built a brand new stadium that could hold 100,000 people to try to prove their superiority. When foreign countries walked in the stadium they were impressed by Goebbels efforts and started questioning the Aryan race in a good way, but this wouldn’t last long for to the dismay of Hitler and the Nazis a black athlete called Jesse Owens won the Olympic Games; he won 4 medals and broke 11 records, followed by other 10 black members of the USA who conquered 13 medals between them. This proved Hitler and Goebbels completely wrong about Aryan superiority which also made other countries doubt and question all the basic Nazi principles and policies. In the end, Goebbels’ insistent propaganda backfired upon him.
Judgement – Did Germans gain from the Nazi rule?
It if safe to say that the rule of the Nazis brought some improvements to the lives of many Germans; Hitler did impressive things for the people of Germany, he provided work, improved transport and assured financial security. He made German culture more youth-oriented, and the Hitler Youth and the League of German Maidens were brought up properly and provided with fun activities. People were happier, more involved, it was almost as if the nation was whole again. Germans had restored hope and faith; they participated in ceremonies and rallies. It seemed as if the depression had finally worn off.
However, things weren’t as glamorous as they seemed; Hitler wasn’t really the hero he appeared to be, he was a narcissistic dictator who was determined to implement his loathsome ideas and policies into Germany. It’s is implausible to think how one man led to the genocide of the Jewish race let alone of many others too! Hitler persecuted his people in such a way that made the whole world question his humanity. The people of Germany in the time of the Nazis suffered, screamed and wept; it was a time of great depression for everyone, even Hitler’s close acquaintances. How do we know this? If everyone was happy during the Nazi rule, there wouldn’t have been people like Sophia Scholl, The Edelweiss pirates or Oscar Schindler; there wouldn’t have been opposition let alone resistance!
In conclusion, Germans did gained from the rule of the Nazis, but only in the short term, life was made a bit easier, unemployment decreased and a load was taken off their shoulders, but not for long because once Hitler took that weight off them, he put an even larger on. Adolf Hitler alongside with his insane policies and rules brought Germany pain, suffering and desperation. He wrecked the life of millions of Germans, destroyed millions of lives and traumatised thousands of people! The Final Solution was an inexplicable tragic event which left no words with which to be described, and the culprit of all this? Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The people of Germany in the long term, which is what really counts, we truly unhappy and gained nothing from the rule of the Nazis except for misery, pain and despair.
