Nazi Racial Policy and the Holocaust

The persecution and murder of six million Jews is the defining crime of the Nazi regime. This lesson examines the escalation from legal discrimination to industrialised genocide and the historiographical debate about whether the Holocaust was planned or evolved through cumulative radicalisation.

Key Definition: The Holocaust (or Shoah) refers to the systematic murder of approximately six million European Jews by the Nazi regime, 1933–1945.

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Racial Ideology

Tradition	Contribution
Social Darwinism	Life as racial struggle
Eugenics	'Racial improvement' through selective breeding
Anti-Semitism	Christian anti-Judaism combined with modern racial theories
Volkisch nationalism	Glorification of German 'Volk' and blood and soil

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Escalation of Persecution

Phase 1: Legal Discrimination (1933–1938)

Date	Measure
1 Apr 1933	Boycott of Jewish businesses
7 Apr 1933	Jews dismissed from civil service
15 Sept 1935	Nuremberg Laws: Jews stripped of citizenship; intermarriage banned
1937–38	'Aryanisation' — forced sale of Jewish businesses

Key Definition: The Nuremberg Laws (1935) defined who was a Jew and stripped Jews of citizenship, criminalising marriage between Jews and non-Jews.

Phase 2: Violence (1938–1941)

Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938): 7,500 businesses destroyed, 267 synagogues burned, 91+ killed, 30,000 arrested. Jews then fined 1 billion RM. After 1939, Jews in occupied Poland forced into ghettos.

The T4 euthanasia programme (from October 1939) murdered ~70,000 disabled people in gas chambers — a rehearsal for the Holocaust, developing techniques and personnel for the death camps. An estimated 200,000 disabled people murdered by war's end.

Phase 3: The Final Solution (1941–1945)

Date	Event
June 1941	Invasion of USSR; Einsatzgruppen killed ~1.5 million Jews by shooting
Dec 1941	First death camp at Chelmno
20 Jan 1942	Wannsee Conference: coordinated logistics of the Final Solution
1942–44	Six death camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek

Scale