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Weimar and Nazi Germany The impact of the Treaty of Versailles German Foreign Policy 1919 to 1933
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Nazi Anti-Semitism Anti-Semitism is dislike or hatred of the Jews. Background • Hitler’s believes have many links with Social Darwinism.
Social Darwinism is a belief in the survival of the fittest. Hitler applied
this to race and national politics. Why did Hitler hate the Jews? A number of possibilities. A Jewish master at Art College rejected Hitler. This may have sparked his hatred, as he was a very keen artist. Jews were prominent within the Communist party of the Soviet Union; this led to a political reason to turn Jews into scapegoats. Many Germans blamed the Jews for ‘stabbing Germany in the back’ after the First World War; the hatred may have been fostered by his involvement in this conflict and a belief in this theory. Political gains from anti-semiticism The Jews were accused of exploiting ordinary German workers and for being communists. Both the communists and war profiteers were disliked by the German populace, blaming the Jews and promising to rid Germany of the problem could gain political support from the oppressed masses. Anti-Semitic policies 1933-1945 Upon gaining power Hitler set about establishing a programme of selective breeding and racial indoctrination. • The SS were in charge of a selective breeding policy. This involved
selecting racially pure women for SS officers to father the children of.
Persecution of the Jews Stage 1: Denial of rights 1933 -1938 • 1933. Jews lose the right to be German citizens. During the period 1933 –1938 Jews were also sent to concentration camps. This was not in the large numbers that were to follow, nor were the camps ‘Death Camps’ at this stage. Jews sent to concentration camps in this period were imprisoned due to their response to the Nazi rule or a perceived threat of aggressive reaction to Nazi rule. Stage 2: Acceleration of persecution 1938 –1941 November 1938: Kristallnacht (Crystal Night: so named because of the
amount of glass smashed). By 1941 the Jews had lost all civil liberties including: the right to choose their children’s names (official list of permissible names); forced to live in a ‘ghetto’ (sealed area of a town or city) and they had to wear a Yellow Star of David on their clothes. Stage 3: 1941 –1945 The Holocaust. After the conquest of Eastern Europe the Jewish population of ‘Germany’ had grown to in the region of 8 million (an exact figure is impossible to calculate). Many areas of Eastern Europe were highly populated with Jews. The Wannsee Conference in 1942 decided how to deal with these Jews. At Wannsee the Nazi leadership decided upon the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish problem’. Jews were to be exploited as far as possible (i.e. forced to work to the point of death on starvation diets) and, if incapable of or unsuitable for demeaning (dirty/ undesirable) jobs they were to be terminated. The ‘Final Solution’ was therefore a policy designed to rid the third Reich of the Jews. This would be achieved through initially the deployment of Einsatzgruppen (Mobile Death Squads) and later the introduction of Death Camps such as Auschwitz, which were essentially factories designed for the purpose of killing as many people as possible and disposing of their remains. Other Jews would die as a result of sheer hard work. The Holocaust is estimated to have resulted in the mass murder of an estimated 6 Million Jews. In addition to this there were many Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists and Russian (Soviet) prisoners who perished at the hands of the SS in death camps or via the use of Einsatzgruppen. |
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