THE RACIAL STATE
ANTI-SEMITIC POLICY
• In 1933, the Holocaust was not inevitable, there was no talk of the ‘ nal solution’ at this early
stage.
• Many Jews chose to leave Germany if they had the ability to do so (funds, paperwork): in 1933,
there were 525,000 Jews in Germany, but only 118,000 by 1938.
• When the war broke out, a further 30,000 Jews left Germany.
There were four stages:
1. Stage 1 (1933-1937): the removal of Jewish civil rights and citizenship through government
legislation.
2. Stage 2 (1937-1939): the removal of the Jews from German economic and social life. There
was a shift from legal discrimination to threats and violence as anti-semitism became more
radical.
3. Stage 3 (1939-1941): the policy of extermination begins; the move towards the Final Solution.
During this time millions more Jews were brought under German control.
4. Stage 4 (1942-1945): The Final Solution began following the Wannsee Conference (the plans
and organised mass extermination of all European Jews).
STAGE ONE:
• AIM 1 — to isolate the Jews from the rest of the community.
• AIM 2 — to mark the Jews as di erent from the rest of the community so that German
citizens will accept/support the actions taken against them.
• AIM 3 — categorise Jews as non-Aryans and reinforce the view that Jews are second class
citizens and inferior to Germans (which was the key message of Nazi racial policy).
• AIM 4 — remove Jews from positions of in uence.
• AIM 5 — to push the Jews out of Germany and encourage Jews to emigrate.
STAGE TWO:
• AIM 1 — to further isolate Jews from the rest of the community by building on stage one
actions.
• AIM 2 — to mark the Jews as di erent.
• AIM 3 — prevent Jewish people from participation in the economic life of Germany.
• AIM 4 — complete the elimination of the Jews from the political, legal, social, cultural and
economic life of Germany.
STAGE THREE:
• AIM 1 — the Invasion of Poland brought another 3 million Jews under Nazi control. Hitler saw
the Slav people as sub-human and he saw the Polish territory as Lebensraum.
• AIM 2 — Nazi policy focused on concentrating Jews in speci ed areas, where Jews were put
into ghettos. Extermination camps were bout in Poland, to be used for the extermination of the
Jews in Eastern Europe, and in the summer of 1941, the Nazis began to convert Auschwitz
into an extermination camp.
• AIM 3 — the Nazis moved into the Western Soviet Union in June 1941, where a special group
of SS soldiers known as Einsatzgruppen were used to murder Jews and they moved
through soviet territory. By the end of 1941, they had shot dead 500,000 Jews.
STAGE FOUR:
• AIM 1 — Nazi aim changed from the emigration of Jews to the ‘resettlement’ of Jews.
• AIM 2 — by the summer of 1940, Heydrich (head of SD) suggested the emigration of 3,250,000
Jews under German control to a suitable territory — the response was The Madagascar Plan.
• AIM 3 — The Madagascar Plan was deemed in-amiable because the plan required peace with
Britain who controlled the seas of around the island, therefore the alternative became mass
murder — ultimately leading to The Final Solution.
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, MASS MURDER UNDER THE NAZI RULE
At least 13 million people were murdered by the systematic mass murder of the Nazi regime. In
the words of Hitler: for ‘the maintenance of the purity of German blood.’
The beginning of anti-Semitism…
• The German politicians who had supported equal rights for Jews were always out of tune with
popular sentiment.
• After 1918, many right-wing nationalist groups called the Weimar Republic ‘a Jewish Republic.’
• Nazi propaganda made the Jews a scapegoat for every problem in Weimar Germany; such
as in ation, unemployment and economic collapse.
Jewish discrimination in Nazi Germany (1933-1937)…
• In April 1933, the rst of what eventually became 400 Nazi racial laws discriminating
against Jews was put into e ect. Jews were categorised as non-Aryans and stripped of a
great number of civil rights.
• The second major Nuremberg Law: ‘For the Protection of German Blood and German
Honour’ prohibited marriage between Germans and Jews and stripped Jews of all civil and
political rights.
The growth of radical anti-Semitism (1937-1939)…
• From 1937, Jews were driven out of certain towns which declared themselves ‘Jew free.’
• In 1938, an event that became known as Kristallnacht (‘Night of Broken Glass’) saw the
destruction of 7,500 Jewish shops, 400 synagogues burnt down and over 90 Jews were
killed.
The euthanasia programme (1939-1941)…
• Was the rst example of organised mass murder undertaken by the regime and this programme
was directed towards those de ned as ‘racially inferior.’
• The T4 programme ran until 1941 and was designed as a programme of ‘mercy killing’ for the
mentally ill and physically disabled.
• It was carried out in secret at six German mental hospitals, with the consent of relatives or
patients. Over 100,000 of Germany’s mentally ill and sailed children and adults were killed
by the programme and is an example of state-organised mass killing.
The persecution of the Jews (1939-1941)…
• The defeat of Poland brought a further 200,000 Jews under Nazi rule, and Poland became the
rst country to receive the full blast of Nazi racial policy.
• Jewish ghettos were established in the Gerneralgouvernement area of Poland and they
became giant concentration camps.
• In the Warsaw ghetto, hundreds of thousands of Jews died from ‘natural causes’ which was
most notably starvation or a socially engineered disease. In 1943, around 60,000 Jews in the
Warsaw ghetto turned on the Nazis and mounted a bold uprising which was brutally
suppressed by the SS.
The transition to systematic extermination: mass shootings in the Soviet Union…
• It was once believed that only radical Nazis in the SS and SD were involved in major genocide
operations, but it is now clear that a large number of ordinary German personnel were involved
within the killing of Jews.
• The Einsatzgruppen were mobile killing units which rounded up Red Army O cers,
Communists and Jews ready for execution. Those chosen had to dig mass graves before
being shot into them.
• Within a mere 5 months, over 500,000 Jews were killed in such mass executions.
The Wannsee Conference (1942)…
• The Wannsee conference was designated to mapping out a coherent and e cient programme
‘for exterminating the Jews.’
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