Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds). During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000-just one percent of the total German population. Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.īy July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists. The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.Īt first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer, becoming Germany’s supreme ruler. On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power. Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.” Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.
Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.ĭid you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews.
Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust-even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine. Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler.
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