The persecution of German Jewry under Nazi rule manifested itself in two ways: in a cascade of new laws, decrees and regulations that stripped Jews of their rights, their professions, their property and their citizenship; and on the streets, where Jews were beaten, their shops smashed, their synagogues burned, and their families driven into emigration or hiding. The two reinforced each other. The laws gave the violence cover. The violence gave the laws their bite.
The fifteen years from the founding of the SA in 1921 to the outbreak of war in 1939 contain the whole pattern in miniature: how a movement of street fighters became the legal authority of a major European country, and how that legal authority then methodically dismantled the lives of the Jewish citizens it had been elected to govern.
What is here
Pre-War Antisemitism and Nazi Ideology 1933 to 1939 is the narrative spine of the section. It runs from the SA street violence of the 1920s through the Nazi seizure of power, the early laws of 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the Aryanisation programme, and the wave of organised violence that culminated in Kristallnacht. Read that page first if you want the connected story.
The other pages go deep on specific events. The Nuremberg Laws covers the 1935 racial laws in detail: how they were drafted, what they actually said, how they defined Jewishness, and what their immediate practical consequences were. Kristallnacht 1938 covers the November pogrom that ended any remaining doubt about where the regime was heading. The Evian Conference 1938 covers the international conference at which thirty-two countries told the German government that they would not, in any meaningful numbers, take in the Jews the regime was driving out. The Haavara Agreement covers the early transfer arrangement that allowed a small number of German Jews to emigrate to Palestine in the 1930s, and the bitter Jewish argument over whether such cooperation with the regime was right. The Kindertransport covers the British rescue operation of 1938 to 1939 that brought around 10,000 mostly Jewish children to safety, almost all of them never to see their parents again.
What this section is not
It is not the story of the killing. The killing came later, after the war began. The persecution of the 1930s was the persecution most German Jews lived through and survived. The roughly half a million Jews who got out of Germany and the other Reich-controlled territories before September 1939 are part of this story; most of those who could not get out and were still alive in September 1939 are part of the next. Their story belongs to the killing chapters that follow, but its first chapter is here.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards