Chapter 18 - Nazi policies towards Jews Flashcards
1
Q
What was the role of Jews in Germany?
A
- Less than 0.75% of the population were Jewish (approximately 500,000 people)
- There had been a Jewish community here for approximately 1600 years
- The vast majority of Jewish families were totally assimilated and spoke the native language
- Jewish individuals could be found in towns across the country but the largest communities were in large cities
- Reform Judaism (a form of Judaism that broke away from the more traditional orthodox Judaism) began here and had become popular
2
Q
What was the role of Jews in Poland?
A
- Approximately 10% of the population were jewish (around 3,300,000 people)
- There had been a Jewish community here for approximately 800 years
- Yiddish was often spoken as a first language at home, though for others the native language was spoken
- Many jewish families and individuals loved in small towns or shtells where the majority of the population was jewish
- Many jewish families were orthodox in their religious life and followed the Ashkenazi tradition
3
Q
What was the role of Jews in Norway?
A
- Approximately 0.05% of the population was Jewish (around 1400 people)
- There had been a Jewish community here for 80 years
- Although a very young community, the synagouges were all named in the local language
- The community was concenjtarted in two cities, the majority had arrived from Eastern Europe
- There were only 3 synagouges in the entire country, all of them were orthodox and Ashkenazi
4
Q
What was the role of Jews in Greece?
A
- Approximately 1.2% of the population were Jewish (around 73,000 people)
- There had been a Jewish community here for approximately 2200 years
- Communities were found living in the cities and on islands
- The population was made up of Romainot and Sephardi Jews and a small number of Italian Jews
5
Q
What were the reasons for anti-semitism?
A
- The romans
- According to the story of the Gospels, Jesus was executed for treason
- Christianity blamed the Jews rather than the romans
- The jews were forced to leave their own country and live as foreigners in other land when rome occupied Jereusalem
- People with no home
- In 1920, the Jews were expelled from England
- Gradually jews were banished from western Europe and began to move towards eastern Europe
- Money
- The church had forbidden Christians to lend money to eachother and charge interest
- However, that was one of the few things jews could do
- This meant jews were often seen as wealthy bankers (even though that was rarely the case)
- Nazi racial policy
- Germany had only existed since 1871 causing there to be a nationalistic feeling and a belief in master race
- In the 1930s, Hitler used the anti-semitism thayt already existed to increase his power
- Jewish men ad women looked differently to those of the aryan race and were therefore singled out by the Nazis
6
Q
How did the nazis persecute jews?
A
- Between 1933 and 1939, the nazi regime began an intensive campaign of persecution and legal discrimination against Jews in Germany
- To carry out nazi policies towards the jews, Hitler needed to steer a careful course, emphasising legality
- During this period, Hitler and the nazi leadership set out a scheme of anti-semitic legislation
- At the same time, a relentness propaganda campaign was launched to “educate” the german people about the need to purge Jewish influences from German society
7
Q
What was the boycott of Jewish shops?
A
- On 1st April 1933, the nazi regime imposed a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses
- Hitler claimed that this action was justified retaliatiom against Jews in Germany and abroad who had called for a boycott of German goods
- Goebbels organised an intensive propaganda campaign to maximise the impact of the boycott, which was carried out by gangs of brown-shirted SA men
- The SA marked out which places of business were to be targeted and stood menacingly outside to intimidate would-be customers
- Shops were the main target of the boycott, but it also applied to Jewish professionals such as doctors and lawyers
- Court proceedings involving Jewish lawyers and judges were disrupted in Berlin, Breslau and elsewhere
- Many jewish lawyers were attacked in the street and had their legal robes stripped from them
- Jewish doctors, school teachers and university lecturers were also subject to similar rough treatment by the SA
- The boycott made a big public impact and featured prominently in news coverage in both Germany and in foreign countries but it was not an unqualified success
- It was unclear in many cases what was a “Jewish” business and what wasn’t
- Many businesses were half jewish and half German in ownership, and many others were controlled by foreign creditors or German banks
- A number of German citizens defiantly used Jewish shops to show their disapproval of Nazi policies
- The boycott was abandoned after only one day
- At the time, the boycott seemed to show the unleashing of nazi violence by am aggressive new dictatorship flaunting its power just a week after the passing of the Enabling act
- The real situation was rather different
- Hitler was not at all enthusiastic about a “revolution from below” bringing chaos in Germany
- He was anxious to keep the SA under control and he was genuinely converned about adverse reaction from his conservative allies in Germany or foreign public opinion
- It is possible that Hitler only ever intended the boycott to be a brief affair
- From this perspective, Hitler allowed the boycott to go ahead only as a limited, grudging concession to the radical activists
- His aim was to avoid instability while he carried out his “legal revolution”
- However, Hitler was willing to allow a considerable degree of Nazi intimidation
- It was useful to him as an expression of “spontaneous public anger” that onlt his new government could satisfy
- For Hitler, anti-semitic legislation was a two edged sword
- Just enough and the nazis could claim that only they could maintain order in an unstable Germany
- Too much and Hitler’s position might be threatened by the conservative elites on whom he still depended
8
Q
What were the civil service laws on 1933?
A
- In April 1933, the Nazis introduced the law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, requiring Jews to be dismissed from the Civil Service
- This was not as straight forward as the Naziz hoped
- There was no objective, scientific definition of who was racially Jewsih according to physical characteristics or blood group
- Under the 1933 law, people were considered non-Aryan if either of their parents or either of their grandparents were Jewish
- Another difficulty was that President Hindenburg insisted on exemptions for German Jews who had served in the First World War and for those whose fathers had been killed in the war
- Hitler reluctantly accepted this as a political necessity and the exemption was kept in place until after Hindenburg died in 1934
- The exemption amendments lessened the law’s impact because it applied to up to two thirds of Jews in the civil service
- The civil service law had a devastating economic and psychological impact on middle class jews in Germany and contributed to the increasing levels of jewish emigration
- In 1933, 37,000 Jews left Germany
- Most jews, however, stayed behind
- At that time, they could not know how much wrose the persecution would become
9
Q
What further anti-semitic legislation was put in place in 1933?
A
- Similar laws were passed after the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, aimed at excluding Jews from the professions
- These measures were not as effective as the Nazis would have hoped, partly because there were exemptions for those who had fought in the first world war and partly because Jews in medicine, the law and education were numerous and well-established, so it was not feasible to remove them all at once
10
Q
What was the impact on the legal profession?
A
- Jewish lawyers made up about 16% of Germany’s legal profession, often working in family firms
- Of the non-Aryan lawyers practicing in 1933, 60% were able to continue working in spite of the new regulations
- In the years that followed, the regime introduced stricter regulations to try to close the “loopholes”
- The exclusion of lawyers was a gradual process over several years
11
Q
What was the impact on doctors?
A
- More than 10% of Germany’s doctors were Jews
- They were attacked by Nazi propaganda as “a danger to German society”
- Nazi officials at a local government level and in private associations initiated their own anti-Semitic measures
- Some local authorities started removing Jewish doctors from their posts
- Anti-semitic propaganfa against Jewish doctors treating aryans was laced with lurid stories about inappropriate and malicious actions supposedly carried out by Jewish doctors
- The nazi regime was pushed along by these local initatives
- The regime announced a ban on Jewish doctors in April 1933
- In theory, Jewish doctors could now only treat Jewish patients, but many jewish doctors carried on their normal practice for several years after 1933
12
Q
What was the impact on education?
A
- Also in April 1933, the Law against Overcrowding of Germany schools and universities restricted the number of Jewish children who could attend state schools and universities
- It was promoted on the basis that Aryan students would receive more resources and attention, instead of wasting time and money on students who would “grow uo to be enemies of Germany”
- Nazi propaganda stressed the danger that a well educated Jews would be a greater threat to Germany than an uneducated one
- Germam children were being told that their former friends and classmates were unworthy of being in the same schools as them and that they were a burden and threat to Germany
- Not all Jewish children were forced out of state schools at this point
- The process was not completed until 1938
- Jewish children could also still attend private education and Jewish schools (which were one of the few places Jewish teachers could find work)
- These schools had many problems in gaining funding and in maintain academic standards, but Jewish children were not yet completely denied an education
- The key aim of the nazis, of course, was the segregation of Jewish children from Aryan children
- In the universities, many Jewish professors came under pressure from students and local government officials and many lost their jobs
- German acaemics willingly seized the opportunity to replace them
13
Q
What was the impact on the press?
A
- In October 1933, the Reich Press Law enabled the regime to apply strict censorship and to close down publications they disliked
- Jews had had a prominent role in journalism and publishing in Weimar Germany, and the press law effectively silenced the large number of Jewish journalists and editors, many of whom were forced to leave the country
- The closing down of the free press was not only a matter of laws and regulations, there were also many instances of violence and intimidation
14
Q
What were the Nuremberg Laws, 1935?
A
- In 1935, the Nazi regime extended the anti-semitic legislation through the Nuremberg Laws, so called because they were announced at the annual party rally at Nuremberg
- In 1935, many fanatical anti-semites in the Nazi movement were restless because they believed Nazi persecution of the Jews had not gone far enough
- They urged hitler to move further and faster
- These radicals became the driving force behind the demands for anti-jewish legislation
- At the Nuremberg Party Rally of 1935, Hitler announced that the Communist Internationa had declared war on Nazism and that it was time to “deal once and for all with Jewish Bolshevism”
- On the 15th September 1935, the Nuremberg laws were introduced:
- The Reich Citizenship Law meant that someone could be a German citizen only if they had purely German blood. Jews and other non-Aryans were now classified as subjects and had fewer rights
- The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour outlawed marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans. It was made illegal for German citizens to marry Jews. It was also illegal for jews to have any sexual relations with a German citizen
15
Q
What was the impact of the Nuremberg Laws?
A
- The laws made the enforcing of anti-semitism the major concern of civil servants, juddges and the gestapo
- The law was later extended to cover any physical contact between Jews and Aryans
- The mere fact of an allegation was enough to secure a conviction
- Aryan women were pressured to leave their jewish husbands, on the grounds that men who lost their jobs through anti-semitic legislation would be a burden on their partners
- Although some relationships continued, there was a high risk of being denounced to the gestapo
- Punishments were harsh and Jewish men convicted under the terms of the law for the protection of German blood and Honour were often re arrested by the Gestapo after being released and then sent to concentration camps
- The position of jews withoit the rights of citizenship left them with obligations to the state, but with no political rights and powers against Nazi bureaucracy
