CAMBRIDGE A2 HISTORY: POLICIES TOWARDS MINORITIES, OPPOSITION AND JEWS
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The document outlines the progression of Nazi racial policies from 1933 to 1941, focusing primarily on the persecution of Jews and Romani people under the regime. Key components include the establishment of the Nuremberg Laws which defined racial identity and removed citizenship rights from Jews, as well as the implementation of eugenics programs aimed at enforcing racial hygiene. Overall, these policies intensified over time, moving from initial anti-Jewish measures to widespread discrimination and violence against multiple minority groups.
CAMBRIDGE A2 HISTORY: POLICIES TOWARDS MINORITIES, OPPOSITION AND JEWS
- 1. HISTORY CAMBRIDGE A2 (PAPER 4) PRESENTATION 8 HITLER MODULE 2. HITLER’S DOMESTIC AIMS UP TO 1941 POLICIES TOWARDS OPPOSITION, JEWS AND MINORITIES
- 2. PRESENTATION BASED ON Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics against Human Dignity The Czechs under Nazi Rule: The Failure of National Resistance Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust Hitler's Home Front: Wurttemberg Under the Nazis Race Relations Within Western Expansion The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Jerry Bergman, "Eugenics and the Development of Nazi Race Policy“ Peter Chroust, Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene
- 3. THE RACIAL POLICY OF NAZI GERMANY The racial policy of Nazi Germany included policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany (1933–45) based on a specific racist doctrine asserting the superiority of the Aryan race, which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene by compulsory sterilization and extermination of the Untermenschen ("sub- humans"), which eventually culminated in the Holocaust. Nazi policies labeled Jews, Romani people, Slavs (Poles, Serbs etc.) and persons of colour as inferior non-Aryan subhumans in a racial hierarchy that placed the Herrenvolk ("master race") of the Volksgemeinschaft ("national community") at the top. Jews were at the bottom of the hierarchy, considered inhuman and thus unworthy of life.
- 4. Eva Justin of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit measuring the skull of a Romani woman.
- 5. 1933 The first Nazi racial policies were implemented just weeks after Hitler took power in early 1933. These first anti-Jewish policies were moderate, and there were no clear legal guidelines about who was and was not “Jewish”. The majority of early anti-Semitic decrees were intended to extract Jews from important white collar occupations.
- 6. Bruno Beger conducting anthropometric studies in Sikkim
- 7. FIRST ANTI-JEWISH LAWS In April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service rescinded the employment of non-Aryan workers in government jobs. This prevented Jews from working as judges, doctors in state-run hospitals, lawyers in government departments and teachers in state schools. This law proved controversial and was opposed by president Hindenburg, who objected to the poor treatment of Jewish World War I veterans. Hitler amended the law to obtain Hindenburg’s approval.
- 8. SA troopers during an anti-Jewish boycott
- 9. ESCALATION IN VIOLENCE Yet bans from the civil service were not enough for some of the hard-line anti-Semites in the Nazi Party and the SA. Many in the rank and file of the party demanded tougher action against the Jews. Through the summer of 1935 there was an escalation in violence against Jewish people and property. In August 1935 Hitler ordered these ‘individual actions’ be halted, as they invited international condemnation and threatened the German economy. Radical elements of the SA, who beat up Jews or smashed their stores, also demanded immunity from prosecution or civil action.
- 10. RESTRICTING JEWISH INFLUENCE There were loud calls for laws to restrict Jewish economic influence; to prohibit inter-racial marriage or sexual relations; even to remove the citizenship of German Jews. Some Nazis insisted the government formulate criteria to define exactly who was Jewish.
- 11. 2 NEW LAWS TO DEFINE RACIAL IDENTITY By the NSDAP’s annual rally in September, Hitler was under considerable pressure to take more decisive action. Four days after the rally began, key Nazi officials were summoned to Nuremberg and told to draft anti-Jewish laws for presentation to the Reichstag. Hitler himself spent two days trying to decide on the legal definition of a Jew. He could not make up his mind, so left this to his officials. On September 15th Hitler addressed the Reichstag, then convened in Nuremberg. He proclaimed two new laws to define racial identity in Germany and outline the relationship between Jews and Aryan Germans.
- 12. THE LAW FOR THE PROTECTION OF BLOOD The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour. A ‘full- blooded’ Jew (Juden) was defined as anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents. A ‘full-blooded’ German (Deutsche-blutige) was anyone with four German grandparents. Those who did not fit into either category were ‘half-breeds’ or ‘mongrels’ (Mischlinge). The implementation of this law was accompanied by propaganda charts, which offered visual explanations of ethnic status. The law also outlawed marriages or extra-marital sex between Jews and non-Jews. German women under the age of 45 were also forbidden to work in Jewish households.
- 13. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 employed a pseudo-scientific basis for racial discrimination against Jews. People with four German grandparents (white circles) were of "German blood", while people were classified as Jews if they were descended from three or more Jewish grandparents (black circles in top row right). Either one or two Jewish grandparents made someone a Mischling (of mixed blood). The Nazis used the religious observance of a person's grandparents to determine their race.
- 14. “The Nuremberg Laws achieved one of the main goals of the German radical right for more than half a century: the reversal of Jewish emancipation. Jews in Germany again became aliens in their own country. To mitigate the effect of the Nuremberg Laws on world opinion, and to gain their acceptance by the German public, Nazi propaganda claimed that the Nuremberg Laws marked the end of legal measures against the Jews.” Roderick Stackelberg, historian
- 15. THE REICH CITIZENSHIP LAW The Reich Citizenship Law decreed that only those of German blood were citizens of the state, while Jews were only recognised as Staatsangehoriger (subjects of the state). This measure effectively abolished their citizenship. Jews were no longer permitted to vote or hold public office. Jews already working for the government were to be ‘retired’ at the end of 1935. Mischlinge retained their citizenship, only if they were practising Christians.
- 16. PERSECUTION OF GERMAN JEWS The two Nuremberg Laws, as they soon became known, were unpopular with the Nazi Party’s radical anti-Semites, who thought they did not go far enough. Nevertheless they were worded broadly enough to permit wide-ranging persecution of German Jews over the next three years. Sometimes this persecution was officially sanctioned and expressed in government regulation; sometimes it was unofficial, carried out by agreement rather than by law. Jewish businesses were subject to boycotts and intimidation, then forced to close or declare bankruptcy. Once shut down, many businesses were seized by the government and sold cheaply to Germans. Employers and organisations inserted an ‘Aryan paragraph’ into their employment contracts, preventing Jews from obtaining certain jobs.
- 17. Jewish prisoners are issued food on a building site at Salaspils concentration camp, Latvia, in 1941
- 18. MORE PERSECUTIONS By 1938 Jews in Germany were prohibited from working as doctors, lawyers, teachers and journalists. Nazi legislation also included a degree of racial segregation. Jews were banned from using public facilities such as libraries, parks and beaches; they could not enter residential or business areas deemed to be ‘Aryan zones’. Jews could not claim lottery winnings, insurance payouts and state pensions. They were not permitted to use state-funded hospitals or receive education past the age of 14. Jews were forbidden to own radios and keep pets, while Jewish names were erased from World War I memorials. In Munich, the town council ordered the destruction of the city’s largest synagogue, declaring it to be a ‘traffic hazard’.
- 19. Gymnastics lesson in a Berlin Jewish school, 1936.
- 20. TARGETING MINORITIES LIKE ROMANY Jews were not the only target of Nazi racial policy. The regime also moved against Germany’s 20,000 Romany, colloquially known as ‘Gypsies’. The Romany were an eastern European race scattered around the continent, many living nomadically. Long before the rise of the Nazis, the Romany had been stereotyped as beggars, thieves and social parasites. Even during the liberal democratic Weimar period they had been subject to restrictive laws.
- 21. Sinti and Roma about to be deported from the German town of Asperg, 22 May 1940.
- 22. IDENTITY CARDS FOR GYPSIES Romany were required to carry identity cards and submit for fingerprinting; they were sometimes prohibited from travelling or settling outside a certain area. But the rise of the NSDAP saw anti-Romany activity take an even deadlier turn. In July 1933 the Nazis passed the eugenics-based Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily-Diseased Offspring, which authorised scientists to carry out forced sterilisations on those who might contaminate the Aryan gene pool.
- 23. Eugen Fischer with photographs of South African Basters, c. 1938.
- 24. STERILISATION AND CLEAN-UP The law specifically mentioned “Gypsies” as potential candidates for sterilisation. In 1934 Berlin passed laws restricting marriages between Romany and Aryan Germans, while the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 disenfranchised Romany as they had Jews. In June 1938 the Nazi regime launched Zigeuneraaufraumungswoche, or ‘Gypsy Clean-up Week’, with hundreds of Romany beaten, arrested, chased out of the country or detained in concentration camps.
- 25. In March 1941 Deputy Führer Rudolph Hess and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler visit an exhibition of proposed rural German settlements within occupied Eastern Europe.
- 26. OTHER NON-ARYAN GROUPS: BERBERS AND KABYLES Though the laws were primarily directed against Jews, other "non-Aryan" people were subject to the laws, and to other legislation concerned with racial hygiene. The definition of "Aryan" was never fully defined as the term was too imprecise and ambiguous, it was attempted to be clarified over time in a number of judicial and executive decisions. Jews were by definition non-Aryan, because of their Semitic origins. Outside of Europe in North Africa, according to Alfred Rosenberg's racial theories (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), some of the Berbers, particularly the Kabyles, were to be classified as Aryans.
- 27. JAPANES AND NORWEGIANS About 10,000 Japanese nationals (mostly diplomats and military officials) residing in Nazi Germany were given status of "Honorary Aryan" which allowed them to have more privileges than any other "non-Aryans". In Norway, the Nazis favoured and promoted children between Germans and Norwegians, in an attempt to raise the birth rate of Nordic Aryans. Around 10,000–12,000 war children (Krigsbarn) were born from these unions during the war. Some of them were separated from their mothers and cared for in so- called "Lebensborn" clinics ("Fountain of Life" clinics).
- 28. CONCLUSION The Nazi regime moved swiftly against Germany’s Jews, withdrawing their right to work in certain professions. 2. This did not satisfy radical anti-Semites in the Nazi Party, who by mid- 1935 were demanding stronger action. 3. In September Hitler unveiled the Nuremberg Laws, which defined ‘Jewishness’ and disenfranchised all Jews. 4. A wave of further decrees through the 1930s imposed even more restrictions and prohibitions on German Jews. 5. Another target of Nazi racial policy were the Romany, who were considered an unclean, socially undesirable race.