Moreover, during the first months of the occupation of Poland, the Germans executed thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.ĭuring this period, the Nazis were planning to deport the Jews from the occupied territories to reservations in Poland or to the territory of the Soviet Union after its planned conquest. The Jews were not allowed to leave the ghetto without permission, and they sometimes had to do forced labour. They went hungry and lacked medical care. Several families often shared a single house. They were housed in ghettos, Jewish housing estates, which looked more like prisons. The occupation of Poland meant that 1.7 million Polish Jews were now under German rule. The war had made emigration all but impossible. The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 heralded a new, more radical phase in the persecution of the Jews. The Second World War: Radicalisation of the persecution of the Jews When the war broke out in September 1939, about 250,000 Jews fled Germany because of the violence and discrimination. Jewish houses, synagogues, and shops were destroyed and thousands of Jewish people were imprisoned in concentration camps. In 1938, the Nazis organised pogroms all over Germany: the Kristallnacht (Crystal Night). Jews also lost their citizenship, which officially turned them into second-class citizens with fewer rights than non-Jews. In 1935, the Nuremberg Racial Laws came into force. They were no longer allowed in some pubs or public parks. Jews were no longer allowed to work in certain professions. To encourage them to do so, they took away their livelihoods. The Nazis sometimes killed Jews, but not systematically or with the intention of killing all Jews.Īt that point, the main goal of the Nazis was to remove the Jews from Germany by allowing them to emigrate. Jews fell victim to discrimination, exclusion, robbery, and violence. Also readīetween 19, the Nazis made life in Germany increasingly impossible for the Jews. But in the end, nothing went against Hitler's wishes and he was the one who made the final decisions. Competition between different government departments also led to increasingly radical measures against the Jews. Sometimes the initiative came from lower placed Nazis, who were looking for extreme solutions to the problems they faced. The Holocaust can, therefore, best be seen as the outcome of a series of decisions, influenced by circumstances. Only after the outbreak of the Second World War did the Nazi top conceive of the idea and the possibility of murdering the European Jews. In his book Mein Kampf and his speeches, Hitler never made a secret of his hatred of the Jews and his opinion that there was no place for them in Germany, but initially, he had no plans for mass murder. Yet there is no straight line from the antisemitism of the Nazis to the Holocaust. At the same time, the Jews were accused of being followers of communism who were after world domination by means of a revolution. They also accused the Jews of being capitalist exploiters who profited at the expense of others. In 1918, Germany lost the First World War. With the rise of racially inspired ideologies in the nineteenth century, the idea arose that Jews belonged to a different race and were therefore not part of 'the people' or the nation. In Russia, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, there were outbreaks of violence in which groups of Jews were mistreated or murdered. During the plague pandemic around 1350, Jews were expelled and persecuted. In times of unrest, Jews were often singled out as scapegoats. In the Middle Ages, they were often made to live outside the community in separate neighbourhoods or ghettos and were excluded from some professions. For a start, they were held responsible for the death of Christ. Jews in Europe have been discriminated against and persecuted for hundreds of years, often for religious reasons.
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