Opposition and Persecution

Question 1

What opposition came from the church?

Answer 1

• The Catholic Archbishop of Munster, von Galen, led a successful campaign to end euthanasia of mentally-disabled people.
• In 1937, the Pope’s message ‘With Burning Concern’ attacked Hitler as ‘a mad prophet with repulsive arrogance’ and was read in every Catholic church

Question 2

Who were the White Rose Group?

Answer 2

• Was formed by students at Munich University.

- Published anti-Nazi leaflets, but were discovered and executed in 1943.

Question 3

Who were the Reichsbanner?

Answer 3

• Paramilitary wing of the Social Democratic Party formed in the Weimar days
• Sabotaged railway lines and acted as spies.

Question 4

Who were “Swing Types”?

Answer 4

• Young people who rejected Nazi values, drank alcohol and danced to jazz.

Question 5

Who were the Edelweiss Pirates?

Answer 5

• A Nazi hating group
• Daubed anti-Nazi slogans
• Sheltered deserters and beat up Nazi officials.
• In 1944, the Cologne Pirates killed the Gestapo chief, Heydrich, so the Nazis publicly hanged 12 of them.

Question 6

Who was Martin Niemöller and what did he do?

Answer 6

• Many Protestant pastors, led by Martin Niemöller, formed the Confessional Church in opposition to Hitler’s Reich Church.
• Niemöller was held in a concentration camp during the period 1937-1945.
• Dietrich Bonhöffer took part in the 1944 bomb plot and was executed.

Question 7

What was the Kreisau Circle? What did they do?

Answer 7

• Group of army officers and intellectuals
• In 1944 they tried to bomb Hitler.
• The bomb was planted by Colonel Stauffenberg. It exploded, but Hitler survived.
• In retaliation, 5,000 people were executed.

Question 8

What were Hitler’s views on racial superiority?

Answer 8

• Whites were the master race and Slavics and Jews were clearly inferior, blaming them for most problems in Germany
• He wanted a population of pure Aryans, without homosexuals, gypsies, disabled people or anyone with different views
• Hitler got angry at the 1936 Olympics when Jesse Owens, a black athlete took four gold medals.

Question 9

What were the Nuremburg Laws?

Answer 9

• Passed in 1935
  1) Stopped Jews having German citizenship
  2) Banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews
  3) Banned sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews

Question 10

What was Kristallnacht?

Answer 10

• 1938
  1) A Jew murdered a German diplomat in Paris in November
  2) There was rioting, and the state used it as an excuse for police and civilians alike to attack Jews, burn and smash their homes and businesses and arrest them

Question 11

Where were Jewish people moved?

Answer 11

• After the invasion of Poland and Russia, more Jews were put under Nazi control
• From 1940, they were forced into ghettos, separate districts often walled off in confined spaces which were squalid: starvation and disease killed many
• A rebellion in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 was ruthlessly put down
• When Russia was invaded in 1941, soldiers were ordered to kill any Jew they cam across

Question 12

What was coined in 1942?

Answer 12

• The FINAL SOLUTION
• Death camps built in Eastern Europe with gas chambers eradicate all Jewish people
• Mainly Jews were killed but Slavs, Roma, black people, homosexuals, disabled people and communists were also killed
• Heinrich Himmler was mainly in charge of this
• Camps included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmo and Belzec
• By the end of the war, approx 6 million Jews had been killed by the Nazis

Question 13

What can we conclude about the Nazis having taken all of this into account?

Answer 13

They were total bastards.