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Section 2- Nazi measures against Jews in the early 1930’s
In the broader context, Nazi measures against Jews and undesirables in the 1930s
were indeed a first step on the road to the Final Solution; however the evidence suggests
that Hitler and the Nazi Party had not planned genocide from the beginning. It was only
after laws, policies, and deportations had failed to remove Jews from Germany and
Europe that mass murder was seen as the only answer. This paper will summarize the
early events that occurred leading to the Holocaust, and will provide evidence to support
the position that the Nazi anti-Semitic measures and tactics of the early 1930s were not
the first step in a long-range plan for the Holocaust.
Adolf Hitler was drawn to the German Workers Party because it held values such as
hatred for the treaty of Versailles, a loathing for capitalism, and anti-Semitism. He joined
the German Workers Party in 1919 and in 1921 became the leader of a new party, the
National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazi party). Nazism quickly became
synonymous with anti-Semitism - one of the Nazi’s main platforms was that Jews and
leftists were one and the same - enemies of Germany - and should be thrown out. Hitler
believed in the “stab in the back” myth that in World War I Jews had betrayed Germany
to the Western powers in exchange for money and political control. He also thought the
Aryan race was the superior race, and that Jews were the lowest of the low. An obsession
of Hitler’s was for German and Aryan expansion, and for the Germans to conquer
Lebensraum (living space). After Hitler’s arrest following the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923,
he spent the next year in jail writing his manifesto “Mein Kampf”. Although Mein Kampf
is incredibly racist, speaking of Jews as parasites, cowards, and filth, an ultimate plan for
genocide is not mentioned.
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In the beginning, Hitler’s ultimate goal was to have a Jew-free Germany. His idea
was to combat the “Jewish problem” through a series of legal and systematic measures
that would ultimately lead to their deportation from Germany. Once Hitler became
Chancellor in 1933, various laws were enacted to make life in Germany harder for Jews
with the expectation that eventually Jews would emigrate out of Germany. On April 1,
1933 the Nazis led a state-sponsored boycott of all Jewish professionals and Jewish
businesses. Although the boycott was not exactly successful, it led to Jews being
politically and socially marginalized, and soon they were stripped of their rights and
privileges as German citizens. In April of 1933, a Law for the Restoration of a
Professional Civil Service was decreed, firing every single Jew who was employed by the
state, from teachers to judges. Jews with professions in retail, medicine, and law were the
first to be singled out. This decree also came with an announcement that only 1.5% of
students in high schools and universities could be non-Aryans, rendering anyone who
was not Aryan German unable to get an education or a career. By the end of 1933, Jews
had been removed from all areas of influence over the German community: government
and bureaucracy, health and law systems, education, and culture. However, only 7-8% of
Jews emigrated from Germany - most remained because they assumed that this violence
and harassment would eventually fade away. In the Nuremberg laws of 1935, the Reich
Citizenship Law stripped Jews of all civil rights and liberties, further isolating them from
German society. Jews could no longer vote and had no social or legal standing. Included
in the Nuremberg laws was a Law for Protection of German Blood and German Honour,
prohibiting any marital or sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews.
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Propaganda put out by the Nazis in the early 1930’s focused on a “mythical” Jew
rather than a typical Jew Germans would encounter on a regular basis. Jews were
depicted in the press, in films, and on posters as a repulsive caricature in traditional
costume, which is very different from the Jews that Germans would encounter on the
street. They were personified as a danger to the entire German population, through the
worldwide Jewish conspiracy that Hitler and the Nazis believed. Progressively, through
dehumanization and depersonalization, Germans began to identify a typical Jew in their
country as this stereotypical one. This process of dehumanizing Jews through propaganda
was already beginning to be seen by 1935: in 1933, the Nazi anti-Jewish boycotts met
with some resistance and protest from Germans, but by 1935 this resistance had declined.
There were some, but fewer, protests on violence towards Jews, but there was very little
resistance to the Nuremberg Laws.
By 1937 Jews could not drive a car or eat in restaurants in Germany. Leading
Nazis thought that this would be the final straw for Jews and that they would finally
emigrate, solving the Jewish problem in Germany. However, by 1938 emigration was not
possible. The Nazis seized Jewish homes and property, and Jews were forced into
impoverished ghetto-like neighbourhoods in each city. Any substantial bank accounts
owned by Jews were taken by the Nazis. Jewish businesses still remaining open after
1933 (only 20-25%) were completely liquidated. This meant Jewish businesses were
closed, there was widespread unemployment among Jews, Jewish families had no money,
and a quarter of Jews in Germany were starving. It was virtually impossible for any state
to accept thousands of penniless refugees, and many states were reluctant to house Jews
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in general. Increasing radicalization of German society and the Nazi party, combined
with the impossibility of emigration, opened the door to much more extreme solutions.
Although there was horrible treatment of Jews in the 1930’s, it was only in 1939
when the war began that radicalization of Jewish treatment increased exponentially. By
1939 and 1940 as Germany was actively conquering Lebensraum, Hitler ran into a
logistical problem: where to put the thousands of Jews he was clearing out to create room
for German resettlement. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, had a plan to deport all Jews
to a reservation on Madagascar. However, until the plan of deportation to Africa could
occur, a temporary decision was made for ghettoization. Ghettos were built in five major
Polish cities: Warsaw, Lublin, Lodz, Cracow, and Lvov. In the ghettos, Jews were forced
to live in horrible conditions, often referred to as “death traps”. In Eastern Poland in
1941, racial attacks were encouraged, and the Einsatzgruppen (Mobile Killing Squads)
were created. Their task was to kill all Jewish men, women, and children in Poland and
Ukraine. They would round up all Jews in a local town, walk them to the forest, force
them to dig mass graves, and proceed to shoot them all. In total, 2.5 million people
(including 1.3 million Jews) were wiped out by the Einsatzgruppen.
As the war proceeded and invading German armies moved further into the Soviet
Union, it was impossible to put the thousands of displaced Soviet Jews into the ghettos
because the ghettos were already too overcrowded. Hitler and Himmler decided that the
Einsatzgruppen, though effective, were slow. At the Wannsee Conference in January
1942, the first clear mention of a “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” was explicitly
stated as mass murder by death camp. Six camps were constructed, all in Poland:
Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Birkenau (which was tied to the
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Auschwitz work camp). The conditions of the camps were horrendous and inmates were
malnourished and diseased until it was time for their execution. Between March 1942 and
October 1943, about two million Jews were taken from the ghettos in Poland and taken in
this manner. As the possibility of German defeat became more real, the process of killing
was heightened and instead of using all their resources for military, the Germans
increased their extermination plans. By late 1944-1945, Germans continued to prioritize
mass murder despite increasing prevalence of air raids from Allies, failure on two fronts
of military campaigns, and the reality that they needed all remaining efforts to defend
Germany itself. By 1944 and 1945, the closer Germany got to defeat, the more they
wanted to exterminate individual populations. By 1945, 12,000 Jews per day were
arriving at the death camps, which were now being used for extermination only - no one
was sent for labour. Near the end, the camps were running around the clock because
every occupied territory was shipping thousands of Jews to the death camps. Even as
word came that the Soviets and Americans were going to be liberating the camps,
Himmler demanded the prisoners be taken and walked to their death. These “death
marches” occurred in late winter of 1945 and claimed the lives approximately 400,000
Poles, Jews, and prisoners of war. From 1941 to 1945, five million went through the
camps. In the Holocaust, there were almost twelve million total victims - and nearly all of
them went through the camps.
It was an indirect path to genocide, and it can be argued that the steps taken
leading to mass murder were circumstantial. Although anti-Semitic policies came into
play in the early 1930’s, it is difficult to explicitly link them with a plan of extermination.
Hitler wanted a Jew-free Germany and Europe, and the policies made in the early 1930’s
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were intended to force Jews to emigrate, solving his problem. However, eventually the
policies made it impossible for Jews to emigrate so the Nazis gradually increased the
persecution of Jews due to whatever was happening with Germany in the war. Although
concentration camps like Dachau opened as early as 1933, their purpose was punishment
and slave labour. Jews and other undesirables could be sent to camps such as Dachau and
Buchenwald as punishment for breaking laws (or even if they were presumed to be
breaking laws) but the function of these camps was not death. Although many died in
these camps, they were not explicitly constructed for mass murder. Jews were used as
slave labour and were seen as useful for this purpose.
It is only the precise circumstances and series of events that occurred during the
war that led the Nazis to conceive of and implement a policy of mass extermination.
Evidence suggests that early 1930’s policies were enacted merely for the purpose of
forcing Jews to emigrate; and once those failed, persecution exponentially increased. It is
not reasonable to conclude that Hitler had a long term plan beginning in 1933 when he
became Chancellor, when evidence seems to indicate that the Holocaust only occurred
after the Nazis’ other solutions to the Jewish problem had failed.
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