Unit 5: Nazi policies to Jews 1938-40 Flashcards
Anti sematic policies?
April 1938: Registration of Jewish assets over 5000 marks
October 1938: Jewish passports stamped with a large ‘J’
November 1938:
- Jews forbidden to visit theatres
- Reichkristallnacht
- Expulsion of all Jewish pupils from schools
September 1939:
- German invasion of Poland
- Ghettoisation of Jews in Poland
October 1939: Euthanasia program authorised by Hitler
November 1939: Jews in occupied poland made to wear Star of David
April 1940: German invasion of Western Europe
what was the Anschluss with Austria?
- banned under the TofV but Nazi long term aid and was achieved in March 1938
- German troops were welcomed enthusiastically by Austrians
effect of Anschluss with Austria?
- Czechoslovakia became next target
- H demanded Sudetenland to be handed to Germany (achieved in 1938)
- March 1939: occupation of the entirety of Czechs
- August 1939: Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed a nonaggression pact where the USSR wouldn’t oppose the German invasion of Poland
- September 1939, Germany invaded Poland (Br+Fr declare war three days later)
anti-Semitic decrees April-Nov 1938
April 1938: Decree of registration of Jewish property, could confiscate all property owned over 5000 marks
April 1939: roughly 40,000 Jewish owned buisnesses 1940 only 8000
30,000 Jewish travelling salesmen lost their jobs
1938: Lost their entitlement to public welfare (depended on Jewish charities ➡️ Central Institution fro Jewish Economic Aid)
Oct 1938: passports stamped with large J (identifiable and stripped identity)
1939: Jews with non-Jewish names had to change them to Sarah and Israel
Hitler still turning down idea of making all Jews wear a yellow star in public
what was Reichkristallnacht?
TP (before this many Jews able to carry on with normal existence to extent)
9-10th Nov 1938: Night of the Broken Glass
- Jewish homes/buisnesses looted and vandalised
- synagogues set abalaze
- 91 Jews killed and thousands injured
- looting of cash, silver, jewellery, damage to shops and businesses which amounted to millions of marks
- police ordered to put 20,000-30,000 Jews in preventive detention
who completed the night of the long knives?
- Nazi leadership organised, Goebbels gave instructions to Nazi officials to organise the violence + vandalims but careful to make sure it didn’t seem like it was orchestrated by the Nazis’s
- G wanted to please H by marking 15th anniversary of the 1923 Munich Putsch
- some of Nazi Hierarchy was concerned about the violence running out of control (days after H gave Goering a role to ‘sort things out’)
cause of the night of the long knives?
- murder of Ernst Vom Rath (minor German official in Paris) who was killed by young Polish Jew angry at the treatment of his parents by the regime on 9th November
what was the reaction to the night of the long knives?
- many Germans were horrified by the destruction but some joined in with the violence
- In Leipzig and Hamburg pedestrians appalled
- British official in Berlin claimed ‘he had not met a single German from any walk of life who does not disapprove to some degree of what has occurred’
- most understood the violence was organised by the state
affects of the night of the long knives?
- watershed moment
- Goering moved quickly to make sure insurance companies didn’t pay for Jewish compensation
- The Decree for the Restoration of the Street Scene in relation to Jewish buisness premises meant that the Jews had to pick up cost of repairs
- Jewish community to pay 1 billion Reichsmark in compensation for the disruption to the economy
- The Decree Excluding Jews from German Economic Life was issued on 12th Nov and the Aryanisation of Jewish businesses was accelerated
aim of emigration?
to make Germany Judenfrei (Jew free) first through voluntary emigration but as war progressed became forced and from 1938 seen as the solution to the Jewish problem
voluntary emigration?
1933: 37,000 Jews left Germany
March 1933-November 1938: 150,000 Jews voluntarily left Germany
1938,9 9000 Jewish Children sent to Britain
- Nazis made hard by seizing assets
- older Jews stayed as thought surge of anti-Semitism they had seen before
controlled emigration?
- Reinhard Heydrich used Austria to develop SS policy = the Central Office for Jewish Emigration was set up (1939, Heydrich took charge)
- 45,000 of Austria’s 180,000 Jews had been forced to emigrate
- SD amalgamated all Jewish organisation into a single ‘Reich association of the Jews in Germany’
cause of war against poland?
- emphasise moved from forced emigration to deportation and the resettlement of Jews
- Sept 1939, Nazi race policies were shaped by war
- plan to create Lebensraum for ethnic Germans by driving Poles and Jews out of West Prussia so the land could be germinanised
effect of war with Poland?
- 1931, 3,000,000 Jews in Poland
- 1939, 1,900,000 Jews in Poland where in territory occupied by Germany
- planned to use general government district as dumping ground for Jews
- End of sept 1939, Hitler said all Jews were to be moved from area between the river Vistula and the River Bug (conditions so bad intended people to die)
- October 1939, 70,000-80,000 Jews deported from Katowice
- Nov 1939-Feb 1940, the SS attempted to deport one million people eastward, 550,000 were Jews
what was the Madagascar plan?
- wild idea first prompted by French anti-Semites in 1930’s to remove Jews
- Foreign ministery’s department for Internal German Affairs proposed that Madagascar should be taken from France to become German dumping place for Jews
- Nazis planned to send 4million Jews to Madagascar (living conditions intended to be harsh) leading to long term elimination of the Jews by ‘natural wastage’
- Since 1936 working on schemes for mass emigration of Jews to Palestine (huge problems, under British rule)
- late summer/autumn 1940 Germany’s failure to end the war w Britain meant the British navy would be able to disrupt the mass transportation of Jews by sea to Madagascar
