racial social and religious policices

Question 1

What was Volksmeinschaft and what did it aim to do?

Answer 1

the ‘peoples community' 
Meant to overcome old german divisions of class religion and politics and bring together different sections of society to create german society built on nazi ideas.

Question 2

When were the Nuremberg laws introduced and what were they?

Answer 2

15th of September 1935

Reich citizenship act
Said only those of ‘German blood’ were citizens

Law for the protection of German blood and German honour
Banned marriage between Jews and German citizens

Question 3

When was first official boycott of Jewish shops and professions?

Answer 3

1st April 1933

Question 4

Write down everything about Kristallnacht

Answer 4

9th november 1938

‘Night of crystal glass’
Sparked by the assiasination of Ernst vom Rath by a Polish Jew in Paris

Destruction of numerous jewish homes, 100 deaths, attacks on 10,000 jewish shops and businesses, burning down of 200 synagogues, deportation of 20,000 Jewish people to concentration camps

Question 5

When was Kristallnacht?

Answer 5

9th November 1938

Question 6

Jews were forced to leave Germany, emigration actively encouraged until which year?

Answer 6

1941

Question 7

On 28th October 1938, how many polish Jews resident in Germany were expelled?

Answer 7

17,000 Polish Jews resident in Germany

Question 8

How many Jews were there in Germany in 1933 compared to 1939

Answer 8

1933 - 503,000 Jews in Germany

1939 - 234,000 Jews in Germany

Question 9

Write down everything about ‘Biological outcasts’

Answer 9

Biological outcasts - anyone seen as biologically ‘inferior’, e.g gypsies, jews, and the mentally or physically ill. The ‘law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring’, July 1933, allowed the compulsory sterilisation of those with hereditary conditions. In a twelve-year period 350,000 people were sterilised under this law. There were 220 hereditary health courts. ‘Law for protection of the hereditary health of the German nation’ also banned marriage for anyone suffering from a mental disability or with a hereditary disease.

T-4 program - 1939
the program claimed over 70,000 victims during its two years of open operation, and then went underground - the total number killed under the T4 Program, including this covert phase, may have reached 200,000 or more.

Question 10

Write down everything about ‘social outcasts’

Answer 10

Social outcasts - ‘asocials’, e.g homosexuals, alcholocs, criminals. The ‘orderly’ were rounded up and put into forced labour camps, the ‘disorderly’ were imprisoned and sometimes sterilised and experimented on. Between 10,000 - 15,000 gay men imprisioned.

Question 11

How many people were sterilised under the ‘law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring’?

Answer 11

350,000

Question 12

How many did the T-4 program murder?

Answer 12

70,000 victims during its two years of open operation, and then went underground - the total number killed under the T4 Program, including this covert phase, may have reached 200,000 or more.

Question 13

Hitler youth membership in 1938 compared to 1932

Answer 13

By 1938 hitler youth membership was at 7,100,000, compared to 200,000 in 1932

Question 14

When were all youth organisations bar the Hitler Youth banned?

Answer 14

In 1936 all other youth organisations banned

Question 15

What were Hitlers beliefs about women?

Answer 15

Hitler believed in a return to ‘traditional’ values of women in the home as mothers, and was opposed to social and economic female emancipation

Question 16

What were used as incentives to get women to marry and have children?

Answer 16

Marriage loans, increased family allowances, reduction of income tax proportionate to the number of children, and medals for having lots of children were used to encourage women to have more children

Question 17

When was the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage passed?

Answer 17

June 1, 1933

Question 18

How were industrial workers, peasants and small farmers, and land owners affected by the regime respectively?

Answer 18

Industrial workers - trade unions were closed down and the German Labour Front was established, responsible for virtually all areas of work

Peasants and small farmers - Nazi initiatives on agriculture such as writing of farm debts, by 1936 there was growing disillusionment as policies such as the reich entailed farm law were causing problems and they saw little economic gain from the regime.

Land owners - lived comfortably with the regime when their economic interests were not really threatened.

Question 19

What did Hitler believe about Christianity?

Answer 19

Christianity and Nazisim was incompatible

Hitler did not support christianity - “One is either german or Christian. You can’t be both.”

Question 20

Write down everything about social policies towards women - employment

Answer 20

Limited female employment - women were banned from jobs in medicine, law, and higher ranks of the civil service, and employers encouraged to discriminate in favour of men. While the female percentage of the workforce decreased, from 37% to 31%, the number of women working actually increased drastically, from 4.8 million in 1932 to 7.1 million in 1939. This was because of the improving economic state but also the war; when men were conscripted into the army, the nazis were forced to ease off on the anti-feminist policies to allow women to work.

Question 21

Write down everything about social policies towards women - marriages and children

Answer 21

Incentives for marrying, having children and staying at home - Marriage loans, increased family allowances, reduction of income tax proportionate to the number of children, and medals for having lots of children were used to encourage women to have more children. The birth rate increased dramatically, as did the divorce rate as, somewhat contradictory to their apparent support of family values, the nazi party encouraged divorces in marriages where children had not been born.
Law for the Encouragement of Marriage June 1, 1933

Question 22

What was the German Faith Movement?

Answer 22

The German Faith Movement 1933 aimed to replace christianity
Aimed to cultivate a ‘teutonic paganism’. Promoted by nazi thinker Alfred Rosenberg. Four main themes: supporting ‘blood and soil’ ideology, replacing christian ceremonies with pagan equivalents, the rejection of christian values, the cult of the personality
never took off, only 5% of the population in 1939 being members.

Question 23

In terms of churches, what two policies were the Nazis caught between?

Answer 23

Torn between a policy of total suppression - alienate many germans - and a policy of limited persecution - too much independence for churches

Question 24

How did the Nazis initially try to consolidate/appease/coordinate? churches, and then try to undermine them? what was the churches reaction to the nazis trying to undermine them?

Answer 24

Hitler attempt to initially conciliate the churches - Paid tribute to churches in first speech as chancellor, encouraged SA members to attend protestant church services, and used ‘Day of Potsdam’ to suggest unity between church and state

Signed a ‘concordat’ with catholic church, 20 July 1933

Tried to undermine churches by closing church schools and limited catholic youth groups, personal campaigns to discredit clergy’s (e.g monasteries accused of sexual and financial malpractices - 400 arrested), campaign to remove crucifixes from schools, arrest of an increasing amount of pastors and priests

The Church opposed these moves - Niemoller delivered a sermon saying ‘we must obey God rather than man’, pope pius XI (eventually) spoke out against nazism in a public letter in 1937, but didn’t go as far as condemning Nazism.

Churches reluctant to oppose regime as they distrusted the left and feared communism, they had nationalist sympathies, feared the power of the nazi state.

Following military victories 1939-40, persecution intensified. Closed monasteries, attacked church property, restricted church activities.

Question 25

In 1936, what percentage of teachers belonged to the Nazi Party

Answer 25

In 1936, 32% of all teachers belonged to the Nazi Party