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Antisemitism was not an incidental feature of Nazi ideology; it was at its centre. Between January 1933 and May 1945 the Nazi regime progressed from legal discrimination against German Jews, to social exclusion, to expropriation, to deportation, to the systematic murder of approximately six million European Jews. This lesson traces that escalation as a historical process. The aim is to understand the laws, policies and administrative steps through which the German state, occupying regime and its collaborators carried out genocide. The register of what follows is deliberately analytical and specific: dates, legal instruments, numbers, institutions. Language that aestheticises violence obscures understanding. The historical task is to see how a modern European state, operating through familiar bureaucratic procedures, organised the murder of its own citizens and the population of much of occupied Europe.
Open violence against Jews began within weeks of Hitler's appointment. The first coordinated state action was a national boycott of Jewish shops and professional offices on 1 April 1933. SA men stood outside Jewish-owned businesses across Germany holding signs reading "Germans, defend yourselves — do not buy from Jews!" The boycott lasted a single day and was not universally observed, but it signalled that the state endorsed economic pressure against Jewish citizens.
Legislation followed quickly. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933 required the dismissal of civil servants of "non-Aryan descent". A clause at the insistence of President Hindenburg exempted Jewish veterans of the First World War, but this exemption was gradually eroded. The law applied across the civil service and university professoriate; within the first year, around 2,000 Jewish academics had lost their posts. Complementary laws reduced the number of Jewish pupils in schools, restricted Jewish access to the medical and legal professions, and removed Jewish actors from the stage.
| Measure | Date | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Boycott of Jewish shops | 1 April 1933 | One-day coordinated action by the SA |
| Law for Restoration of Civil Service | 7 April 1933 | Dismissed Jews from the civil service (with Hindenburg's veterans' clause) |
| Law against Overcrowding of German Schools | 25 April 1933 | Capped Jewish pupils at 1.5% of school populations |
| Editors' Law | 4 October 1933 | Excluded Jews from journalism |
| Reich Chamber of Culture | 22 September 1933 | Excluded Jews from cultural professions |
The effect was cumulative. By the end of 1933, being a Jewish German had become a formal civil disability. The state had made clear that its Jewish citizens did not share in the rights of the new Volksgemeinschaft.
The annual Nuremberg rally in September 1935 was used to promulgate a new body of law that recast the status of Jews in Germany from citizens with restricted rights to non-citizens. Two laws, passed on 15 September 1935, formed the core.
The Reich Citizenship Law (Reichsbürgergesetz) distinguished between a "citizen of the Reich" and a mere "national" (Staatsangehöriger). Only those of "German or related blood" could be Reich citizens; Jews were reduced to nationals without political rights. The law therefore removed the vote, access to public office and the protection of citizenship from German Jews at a stroke.
The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour (Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre) forbade:
Breaches were punishable by imprisonment or hard labour. A further law (November 1935) defined "Jew" in part by descent, using the religious affiliation of grandparents — people who had converted to Christianity decades earlier, or whose parents had, were defined as Jewish for purposes of the law.
| Category | Definition used by the 1935 laws |
|---|---|
| Full Jew | Three or four Jewish grandparents |
| Mischling first degree | Two Jewish grandparents, without Jewish religious practice or marriage to a Jew |
| Mischling second degree | One Jewish grandparent |
| German | No Jewish grandparents |
The Nuremberg Laws therefore created a racial classification, imposed it on a population defined partly by religion, and attached to it the removal of civil rights and of the right to marry or form households across the classification line. They provided the legal framework for every further step.
Between 1935 and 1938 antisemitic policy continued through regulations, local initiatives and economic pressure. In 1938 the pace accelerated sharply.
On 7 November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew in Paris whose family had been among thousands of Polish-born Jews deported from Germany ten days earlier, shot Ernst vom Rath, a junior German diplomat. Vom Rath died of his wounds on 9 November — the anniversary of the 1923 Munich Putsch.
The regime used vom Rath's death as a pretext for a coordinated wave of violence. On the night of 9–10 November 1938, in what the regime called the "November action" and which became known as Kristallnacht ("the night of broken glass"), SA, SS and Nazi Party members in plain clothes carried out attacks across Germany and annexed Austria.
On 12 November Göring met senior ministers to respond — not by punishing the perpetrators but by fining the Jewish community collectively one billion Reichsmarks. The cost of repairs to smashed shops was charged to the insured Jewish owners, and insurance pay-outs were confiscated by the state. A Decree on the Elimination of the Jews from German Economic Life (12 November 1938) forced all remaining Jewish-owned businesses into "Aryan" hands.
Kristallnacht marked a transition. Legal discrimination had become open, state-organised violence; the pretence that Nazi antisemitism was a matter of orderly regulation was abandoned. Emigration accelerated — around 115,000 Jewish Germans left Germany between November 1938 and September 1939, joining the roughly 150,000 who had already emigrated between 1933 and 1938. But the world was increasingly unwilling to admit them. The Évian Conference of July 1938 had convened thirty-two states to discuss the refugee crisis and had produced almost no increase in quotas.
Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 brought under Nazi control a Jewish population of roughly three million, vastly larger than the Jewish population of Germany itself. The scale of the problem — as the regime defined it — changed. Policy in the occupied territories moved rapidly from expulsion to concentration to murder.
From October 1939 the German occupation authorities in Poland began forcing Jewish residents into sealed urban districts known as ghettos. The two largest were at Łódź (established April 1940) and Warsaw (sealed on 16 November 1940). At its peak the Warsaw Ghetto held approximately 400,000 people in an area of 3.4 square kilometres. Food rations were set at starvation levels; typhus spread; an estimated 92,000 residents died of hunger and disease between 1940 and the summer of 1942.
| Ghetto | Established | Peak population |
|---|---|---|
| Łódź | April 1940 | ~160,000 |
| Warsaw | November 1940 | ~400,000 |
| Kraków | March 1941 | ~20,000 |
| Vilnius | September 1941 | ~40,000 |
| Minsk | July 1941 | ~100,000 |
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