From the day that Hitler took power in January, 1933 there were efforts to terrorize Jews and exclude them from German life As soon as Hitler eliminated his political opposition in Germany and suspended the Weimar Constitution, he and his associates started to build a wall between Jews and the other Germans. Jews were expelled from schools and fired from their jobs because they were Jews. There were organized boycotts of Jewish businesses enforced by brown-shirted thugs known as "stormtroopers" or the SA. These early measures were only the beginning. The second step in isolating German Jews from the rest of the country were the Nuremberg laws passed in 1935 which made the anti-Semitic agenda of the Nazis the law of Germany. The Nuremberg laws forbade Jews from practicing professions such as medicine, law, and teaching. These laws also regulated interaction between Jews and other Germans. Jews were forbidden from employing non-Jews and it was a criminal offense for a Jew to have a romantic relationship with a non-Jew. Even the act of kissing a non-Jew could bring a long prison sentence. These laws were enforced by the courts and the brown-shirts. During this period Jews were also encouraged to emigrate from Germany, as long they left their property behind. After five years of Hitler's regime German Jews were isolated and terrorized. They were no longer a part of German life. All that really remained of their former position were Jewish merchants with which Germans were continuing to patronize. This ended on November 10, 1938, when, at the instigation of Joseph Goebbels, gangs of thugs attacked Jews and vandalized Jewish businesses. About two hundred Jews were murdered and thousands of businesses wrecked in a pogrom called "Kristallnacht" from the broken glass that littered the streets from the vandalized businesses After Kristallnacht the courts failed to punish the criminals. Instead 30,000 Jews were kidnapped and sent to concentration camps where they waited for other Jews to pay a large ransom. Two thousand of the prisoners died while they were waiting for release. The third step in leading the German people to co-operate with the Nazis began with Kristallnacht. For a brief period after Kristallnacht, the Jews in Hitler's Germany were encouraged to leave Germany. This ended with the conquest of Poland in September, 1939, when the Third Reich had about 2,500,000 more Jews with which they had to deal. Instead of isolation and forced emigration, the Nazis began to concentrate Jews in ghettos. Locked behind high walls, the Jews were even more invisible. It had been hard to hate a person that the average German dealt with on a daily basis, but the absence of the Jews and the different culture of the masses of Polish Jews made the anti-Semitic propaganda of Hitler, Rosenberg, Streicher and Goebbels even more effective. One of the reasons it was effective was the change in all aspects of German life and ideas wrought by the Nazi regime. The intellectual leaders of German culture who did not agree with the Nazis, including church leaders, were either silenced or forced to leave the country. The German people were subjected to a constant barrage of propaganda designed to convince them that Jews were evil. This ranged from the pornographic scare literature of Julius Striecher's newspaper "Der Sturmer" to Alfred Rosenberg's complex explanation of Nazi philosophy, The Myth of the 20th Century. It included movies such as "Der ewige Jude ("The Eternal Jew") and books such as Henry Ford's anti-Semitic The International Jew. Much of this propaganda was based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a well-known forgery which claimed to be a plan to take over the world written by Jews. In Hitler's totalitarian state no argument or refutation of this hate literature was permitted and the people who could have raised their voices were gone. A generation of young people grew up under the influence of Nazi propaganda that they had never heard contradicted. By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, Jews had become isolated and despised in the Third Reich. The situation was ripe for the final step in Hitler's program - the extermination of the Jews. The extermination began with mass shooting by groups known as the Einsatzgruppen, which followed the German armies invading the Soviet Union, and gradually was converted to the gas chambers of the concentration camps. Although there were concentration camps in Germany, all of the mass shootings and extermination camps were located far from the heartland of Germany. While many people knew what was happening, the reality of the extermination was not immediately apparent to the average German. It was something that was occurring far away and, about which they knew very little other than the fact that it was happening. Some, of course, could not believe that the crime of genocide was being committed. Many were more worried about the war that was directly affecting their lives and unable to form a real opposition due to Hitler's repression. The almost unbelievable crimes of the Holocaust meant very little to the average German. It was something they tolerated without understanding just as it is difficult for us now to understand the horror of the Nazi crimes. The situation of those carrying out the plan of extermination was different from the people at home. They were directly involved with the real horrors of murdering many people and could not just conveniently ignore what that meant. The men assigned to this task did it for a variety of reasons which ranged from a feeling that all orders should be obeyed to total agreement with Nazi philosophy. Even for these men, the effects of participating in mass murder were so noticeable that the leaders of the Third Reich decided to discontinue the shooting in favor of poison gas at the extermination camps. In the concentration camps, some were brought slowly into cooperating with genocide, like Josef Kramer the last commandant of Belsen. He began his career in the concentration camps in an administrative position where he did not come into contact with the interior of the camp. As he was promoted inside the system, Kramer became accustomed to the brutality to the point where, when Belsen was liberated, he did not consider the inmates as human. Others like Rudolf Hoess, the commander of Auschwitz, were brutal individuals before they were recruited into the concentration camp system. Hoess was a convicted murderer who was so callous about the murders he committed that a psychologist examining him found that he was nearly a psychopath. The road that led ordinary Germans to become participants in genocide was a long one. As one SS general, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, stated at the Nuremberg Trial when asked if genocide was a an outgrowth of National Socialist philosophy: "If for years, for decades, a doctrine is preached to effect that the Slav race is an inferior race, that the Jews are not even human beings, then an explosion of this sort is inevitable." The fact that ordinary Germans could be induced to cooperate with the Holocaust, either by silence or by active participation, is a clear warning about the ultimate effect of bigotry. Where to start your researchLife inside the Third Reich is described in:
How the Holocaust was perceived by the people who participated in it is described in:
A psychological evaluation of Rudolph Hoess can be found in:
Books about the psychology of hate and the Aryan Myth include:
An archive of Nazi propaganda can be found at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/. | ||
Last modified: May 30, 1999
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