Treatment of ethnic minorities in Nazi Germany (4)

Question 1

Key dates in 1933 about Anti-Semitic measures

1st April

7th April

Answer 1

1st April = official boycott of Jewish shops and businesses is called by Nazis. Local violence against Jews escalates.

7th April = Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service excludes Jews and ‘politically unreliable’ people from government posts, including the civil service and teaching.

Question 2

Key events in 1934

Answer 2

More exclusion of Jews from working for the armed services, taking university or professional examinations

Question 3

Key events in 1938

9th November
3rd December

Answer 3

+ November = Kristallnacht: one of the first large-scale organised acts of violence against Jews - burning synagogues and looting shops and homes.

+ December = All Jewish businesses had to be taken from the Jews and Aryanised.

Question 4

Key events in 1939

September

28th October

Answer 4

Sept = Curfews introduced (8pm in winter and 9pm summer). Radios were forbidden for Jews. Political opponents and Jews began to be assassinated.

October = first Jewish ghetto set up in Poland.

Question 5

Key events in 1940

12th February

Answer 5

First large deportation of German Jews to ghettos

Question 6

Key events in 1941
8th December

Answer 6

December = Experimental death camp at Chelmno begins gassing Jews.

Question 7

Nazi racial policies:

Nazi’s belief in racial purity

Answer 7

• Wanted Germany to be populated by Aryan Germans.
• The pursuit included getting rid of the elderly and disabled, even if they were pure-blood Germans.
• Brought in the eugenics theories current in Weimar Germany and quickly brought in laws into to control breeding and pursuing the increasingly violent persecution of ethnic minorities - especially Jews.

Question 8

Racial policies:
Nazi’s sterilisation programme

Answer 8

• 1st Jan 1934 = began compulsory sterilisation programme.
• Doctors and hospitals had to report those they saw as ‘unfit’ to breed to the new Hereditary Health Courts, established all over Germany, to decided who to sterilise.
• Supposedly only for hereditary defects, but it extended to include Jews, Roma, Gypsies, criminals and black and mixed race people.
• Law widened in June 1935 to allow abortion of the unfit.

Question 9

Was Sterilisation a known Law and what were the numbers of people sterilised

Answer 9

• Well known = publicised in the press and at public meetings. Even taught at schools, using pamphlets, books and films.
• Estimated 400,000 sterilised between 1934-45, almost all against their will. 5,000 known to have died, most being women, and unsure how many died after leaving the clinics.

Question 10

Racial policies:

Making Germany ‘Jew-Free’

Answer 10

• Hitler’s position was not strong enough in 1933 to begin the mass slaughter (the Holocaust), so Nazis worked towards the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ by degrees.
• Used propaganda before gaining power, but now began to separate the Jews from community via 1) legal separation and 2) bans and boycotts from April 1, organised by SA/Hitler Youth.

+ April 1933 = restricted the number of Jewish university students, banned from sporting groups, and stopped those with ‘Jewish names’ from sending telegrams

Question 11

The Nuremberg Race Laws 1935 (June)

Two of the Main Laws ?

Answer 11

Laws passed to exclude Jews from many areas of life (later extended to Romani/Blacks).
- Reich Citizenship Law deprived Jews of German citizenship and the Law for the Protection of German Blood forbids marriage, or sex, between Germans-Jews.

+ Displayed a yellow star and on Jewish-owned shops, encouraging random violence, by the Hitler Youth/SA.
+ Propaganda urged separation to prevent contamination of ‘Pure Germans’, marking Jews as dirty and dangerous.
+ Language = never used human terms, e.g ‘vermin’. By the time the Nazis were transporting Jews to camps, simply called ‘cargo’.

Question 12

Getting away

Answer 12

• Initially encouraged Jews to leave Germany and took a ‘flight tax’ of 30-50% of their wealth.
• From 1933-39 = 450,000 emigrated often into France + Netherlands which ended up being occupied by Nazis.
• Emigration became harder as the Nazis grew less willing to let Jews go as other countries began to set quotas than accepting everyone.

Question 13

11th March 1938 - ‘liberation’ of Austria

Answer 13

• Imposed the same restrictions on the 185,000 Austrian Jews in place in Germany.
• Introduced humiliating tasks to dehumanise the Jews.
• Said Jews could leave but the flight tax was nearly everything but a suitcase.
• 60,000 left when the outbreak of war stopped emigration and caused a shift in Nazi policy.

Question 14

War and a change in policy = Invasion of Poland 1939

Answer 14

Special SS units were set up to root out and kill Polish and resistance leaders and also killed Jews in increasing numbers by shooting, or locking them into a synagogue and setting it alight.

Question 15

Change in policy

Potential plan: The Madagascar Plan

Answer 15

• Proposed in June 1940 to forcibly relocate Jews of Europe to Madagascar after efforts by the Nazis to encourage the emigration of the Jewish population of Germany before WWII were only partially successful.
• Adolf Eichmann released a memorandum on 15 August 1940 calling for the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years with the island governed as a police state under the SS.
• Postponed after loosing the Battle of Britain in September 1940, and it was permanently shelved in 1942 with the commencement of the Final Solution, the policy of systematic genocide of Jews.

Question 16

War and a change in policy = Invasion of the USSR 1941

Answer 16

Committed mass murder - rounding up Jews, forcing them to dig huge graves, making them strip and stand on the edge of the graves and shooting them.

Question 17

Racial policy

Ghettos

Answer 17

• Poles and Polish Jews that weren’t shot were rounded up into ghettos in cities like Warsaw - first set up in October 1939.
• Conditions = deliberately over-crowded and food and medical supplies were kept to a minimum. Electricity and water were only available for a few hours a day.
• About 5,000 were sent to the Lodz Ghetto - already 160K Jews at the start, and over 40K were sent there from Germany.

Question 18

Nazi propaganda and the use of Ghettos

Answer 18

• Stressed the fact that Jews were dirty and lice and flea-ridden - a situation they created.
• ‘The Strength Through Joy’ organisation ran bus trips through the Lodz ghetto, so people could see for themselves what a depraved race Jews were = another method of dehumanisation of the Jews.

Question 19

Racial policies

Concentration camps and the Final Solution

Answer 19

• Filled with groups the Nazis saw as ‘undesirable’ - forced to wear a patch on their clothes to show their ‘crime’.
• Jobs: dig roads, work on the lands or factories.
• Conditions: appalling = little food, people died from starvation, dysenery, or mistreatment by the guards with crematorium to burn the dead.
• Final Solution (genocide) was decided at the Wannsee Conference on 20th Jan 1942 = it authorised the use of death camps and culminated in the Holocaust (killed 6 million Jews.)