By the time the NASDP obtained power and its leader, Adolf Hitler, achieved dictatorship powers through the “Enabling Act” of early 1933, systematic steps were put into place designed to isolate German Jews from a society that had accepted them since German unification in 1871. The Nazis Party had always held virulent anti-Semitic views. Hitler’s blueprint to eradicate “world Jewry,” Mein Kampf, had been available since its first publication in 1925 and 1926. The 1933 political victory in Germany allowed the new Nazi regime to pursue a series of policies that ultimately culminated with the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942.
1933 – 1939
Historian Marion A. Kaplan states that, “from the outset, the Nazi government used legislation, administrative decrees, and propaganda to defame and ostracize Jews and to lower their social, economic, and legal standing.” Some German Jews were involved in the Labor Movement or were members and activists in the Communist Party. It became second nature for the regime to equate these Jews with Communism and arrest, torture, and imprison them as enemies of the state. It was not too long before the terms “Bolshevik” and “Communist” became synonymous with “Jew.”
By September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws formally restricted the rights of German Jews and impacted their ability to function economically. Boycotts of Jewish businesses had been encouraged as early as 1933. By the end of 1935, precise racial definitions attempted to set apart Jews from pure blooded Germans. Jewish doctors were forbidden to treat non-Jews, Jewish teachers lost their jobs, and other professionals were forbidden to work in German communities.
The constant stream of propaganda, coupled with a strengthened police state relying on citizen informers in assisting the Gestapo, made it dangerous to be a Jew in Germany. German children were forbidden to play with Jewish children. The burning of books by Jewish authors was begun as early as May 1933 in Berlin. By the middle of the decade, music by Jewish composers was banned and certain genres like Jazz were deemed degenerate and were prohibited. A special exhibit of “degenerate” art opened in Munich in 1937 and was designed to educate Germans on the dangers posed by Jewish artists.
On November 9-10, 1938, Germans took to the streets, destroying Jewish businesses, burning synagogues, and murdering Jews in what was called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). Some of the worst atrocities occurred in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna. Historian Evan Bukey writes, “it was a medieval pogrom in ‘modern dress’…gangs of Nazis roamed the streets…desecrating synagogues, cleaning out department stores, and raiding apartments.” Austria had joined with Germany in March 1938, a result of the Anschluss plebiscite.
Jews attempting to leave Germany faced many obstacles. In a humiliating series of steps, the bureaucracy stripped exiting Jews of all assets. Jews were forced to sell businesses at below “fire sale” prices. In May 1939, more than nine hundred Jews were given exit visas to travel to Cuba aboard the St. Louis. A propaganda ploy, Cuban authorities refused to honor entrance visas and no other country, including the United States, would grant these unfortunates a safe haven. The ship returned to Europe.
Desensitization
The process of turning ordinary citizens into a despised group took only a decade, although some would argue that anti-Semitism had always been present in Germany society since the early Middle Ages. Yet, by 1900, German Jews had mainstreamed into society better than in other European societies. France had experienced far greater eruptions of anti-Semitism in the latter part of the 19th century than had Germany. The process of desensitizing a population and marginalizing one part of that society was accomplished over a relatively short period of time. This is the principal lesson of the 1930s.
Sources
Evan Burr Bukey, Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)
Marion A Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
