Compare and contrast the persecution of the Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah(TM)s Witnesses and Homosexuals in Nazi Germany

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Compare and contrast the persecution of at least two of the following: Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Homosexuals.

        Following on from the Second World War, the biggest focus of world history became Hitler and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. When one hears of the horrors and atrocities committed by the Nazis during the War, we often stop to question how and why such policies of racial hatred could have been so easily undertaken and readily accepted by an educated and ‘civilised’ nation. In order to create their ‘utopian society’, the Nazis sought to forcibly ‘remove’ certain groups from existence, these groups included Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. This essay examines the different experiences of these groups in detail, commenting on their similarities and highlighting the different degrees of racial abuse used against them.

        Shortly after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich in January 1933, there was an increase in tensions with the Jewish community in Germany, with reports of violence against individual Jews and Jewish shops by members of the NSDAP and the SA in March of 1933. This marked the beginning of a barrage of ‘racial politics’ directed primarily at the small German Jewish community, which only accounted for roughly 1% of the German population.On the 22nd of March 1933 Hitler established a department of ‘Racial Hygiene’ in the Reich interior ministry. The creation of this department marked the beginning of Hitler’s racist and anti-Semitic policies, designed to safeguard the ‘purity’ of the German nation, and serves as a clear marker as to when the notion of the Jews as an underclass truly began.

        In 1933 there were approximately 499,682 Jews living in Germany, with 80.2% of these Jews being German.Although they only made up 1% of the German population, many historians have argued that the Jews were used as a scapegoat for the economic failures that Germany faced during the 1930s. The Nazis blamed the Jews for Germany’s weak economic position and used this as a platform to gain political support for their policies and to legitimise their regime. Although it is true that there were more Jews in some professions than others (in some there was a higher proportion of Jews than Aryans) the stereotype that all Jews were wealthy and that they accumulated this wealth to the detriment of Aryans, was merely Nazi propaganda. When the Nazis first came to power 17% of bankers were Jewish, 16% of lawyers were Jewish and 10% of all doctors and dentists were Jewish. Therefore because the Jews were a very small minority, yet had proportionately more influence in the professions than Aryans, they became an attractive target for the Nazis. What makes the widespread persecution of German Jews so surprising is that unlike other European countries, German Jews were deeply integrated into German society, with many having non-Jewish friends and some Jews marrying Christians. However, the previously easy and ‘lax’ relationships between Jews and non-Jews were to change most dramatically in the coming years. This anti-Jewish feeling ultimately manifested itself in the creation of the Nuremberg Laws, announced by Hitler on September the 16th 1935. This set of ‘Laws’ made marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Gentiles forbidden so as to protect the purity of the German race and failure to uphold these laws was punishable by imprisonment. (Kirk, p160)

Unlike other groups persecuted by the regime, the Jews could not withdraw into silence or hiding because no matter how much they tried to conceal their origins, there ‘racial identity’ condemned them to public vengeance. The Jews were also unique in their experience, as unlike Gypsies or Jehovah’s Witnesses some historians believe that the Nazis had a systematic plan designed to erase the entire Jewish race from existence. The first stage in this planned genocide was the boycotting of Jewish businesses and the removal of their civil rights. However, the boycotting of Jewish businesses, first carried out in March 1933, only lasted one day because of the public apathy, foreign reactions and the danger that it posed to the fragile German economy. Nevertheless, the boycott had planted the seed in the national consciousness and between May and August 1935 there was an increase in the propaganda for the boycott of Jewish business.

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        The Jews were targeted and suffered more from negative propaganda than any other group being persecuted by the regime. They were demonised and stereotyped through various posters and also films such as ‘The Eternal Jew’. This film, which was highly biased and racist, presented Jews as the cause of the problems facing Germany at the time, with the Jew being the accumulation of all that was wrong within German society. Not only were Jews persecuted more openly than any other group, the nature of the ‘Jewish threat’ was also seen as being much more sinister and sincere than the threats posed ...

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