Lesson 3: Legalizing Murder

Timeline of Nazi Policy Towards the Jews

• 1879 The term "Anti-Semitism" was first coined by William Marr when he formed the Anti-Semitic League to put political anti-Semitism into practice, to denote Jews as a "race" apart from the Aryans. Denoted as a "race," there could be no correction of the hated characteristics of the Jews, as there might be if to be a Jew meant to be a part of a religion, therefore creating the possibility of conversion to Christianity to escape persecution.
• 1918 A "Jewish Order" was proposed in Germany restricting the rights and privileges of Jews in Germany, as well as their opportunities for political and professional advancement. Hitler and the Nazi regime later forged its Jewish Policy around these provisions.
• 1918 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, composed by French anti-Semites and distributed in Russia and Germany simultaneously, proposed that there was an international Jewish organization and conspiracy, the plan of which was to take over and rule the world. The document, which influenced people world-wide, including many in the US, charged that the tragedy of WWI was the result of this world-wide conspiracy of Jews and their hunger for power and destruction. Many hundreds of books, pamphlets, newspapers and magazine articles spread the anti-Semitic argument around the world.
• 1919 Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer, socialists and revolutionists in Germany who were murdered by counter- revolutionists because they were Jews and believed to be part of the international conspiracy.
  * WWI ends officially with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles
  * Germany is defeated. Germany is further humiliated by being forced to reduce its army and to pay $57 trillion for damages. This ruins the German economy and angers its citizens, many of whom, encouraged by their leaders, direct their anger at the Jews.
  * Adolph Hitler begins attracting crowds with his fiery speeches.
• 1920 The Nazis issue a 25-point program directed against the Jews.
• 1921 Hitler becomes leader of the Nazi Party.
• 1922 The German Foreign Minister, Walter Rathenau, of Jewish extraction, was murdered by members of an anti-Semitic nationalist organization who admitted they believed Rathenau belonged to a secret Jewish organization planning to dominate the world.
• 1923 Hitler leads an attempt to seize control of the government. This attempt fails and leads to his imprisonment.
• 1924 Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle), an autobiographical account of his political development in which he lays out his policy for Germany including his Anti-Semitic doctrines, his clear denunciation of the Jews and his plans for solving the "Jewish problem," was published.
  Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
• 1925 Hitler begins to rebuild the Nazi Party and commits it to legal means of winning power.
• 1929 The Great Depression begins.
• 1930 The Nazi Party becomes the largest single party in Germany.
• 1932 The collapse of Germany's Weimar Republic. 6 million German workers are unemployed.
• February 27, 1933 The Reichstag, or parliament, is dissolved. The Reichstag building was burned
  * Hitler calls for new elections
  * The responsibility for the police transferred to Hitler's own people.
  * Herman Goring was appointed Commissar of the Prussian police.
  * Josef Goebbels was appointed Minister of Information and Propaganda.
  * Heinrich Himmler laid the foundation for the "SS State," through which he would eventually extend his control throughout Germany and Europe.
  * Hitler withdraws from the League of Nations.
• March 23, 1933 The "Enabling Act" was passed, investing Chancellor Hitler with full legislative authority. This act abolished the parliamentary regime in Germany, passing the government entirely into the hands of the National Socialists-the Nazis.
• March 1933 50 concentration camps were opened in Germany
  * Hitler and his party mounted their assault on the labor unions, the Labor Party, the social Democratic Party. Hitler became absolute master of Germany.
• April 1, 1933 The anti-Jewish boycotts and legislation put in place. The restrictions specifically stated that protection was granted to " all foreigners without regard to their religion, origin, or race, and that the boycott is... directed exclusively against the German Jews."
  * Hitler and the Nazis instituted three methods to achieve their objectives of oppressing the Jews: terror, propaganda and legislation.
  * The homes and offices of all Jewish professionals (doctors, lawyers, teachers, professors, dentists, etc) were marked with a special sign where SA guards began to be stationed. Many professionals were arrested at their places of work, and such arrests were made throughout the country. Jewish lawyers and judges were no longer permitted to work.
• April 11, 1933 Legislation was implemented defining who was a non-Aryan, the official definition of a Jew.
• May 10, 1933 Goebbels organized public ceremonies at all the country's universities for the burning of books by banned authors.
• May 1935 The Nuremberg Laws formally established the separation of the races and defined who was a Jew. The law forbade marriages between Jews and "subjects of the state of Germany or related blood" and prohibited sexual relations between these two peoples, punishable by death. No Jew could be a citizen of the Reich, could vote on any political issue, or hold office. All Germans must know the laws.
• 1936 Hitler's troops enter the DMZ (the Ruhr region and the Rhineland), violating the treaty. When Britain and France didn't intervene, as expected, Mussolini, sensing Hitler's growing power, moved closer to him.
  * Hitler sends troops to fight on Franco's (the Spanish dictator) side of the Spanish Civil War, beginning the intervention in the affairs of Europe at large.
• 1938 Hitler institutes restrictive emigration policies for the Jews, making it difficult, sometimes impossible, for them to leave the country. He was abetted by the limited prospects of countries which would accept Jews; most western countries severely restricted their immigration policies of Jews. Western countries, including the US, saw isolationism and an animosity toward "foreigners" grow and thrive in their own countries.
• July 6, 1938 The Evian Conference of Western nations on Lake Geneva made it clear that there was no haven in their countries for Jewish refugees from Germany. Only the Dominican Republic accepted German Jews.
• September 29, 1938 The Nazis invade Czechoslovakia, with the acquiescence of France and England.
• 1938 The annexation of Austria and the coming to full power of Adolph Eichmann as the head of the SD (Security Service) and one of the Nazi's major mass murderers.
• November 7, 1938 Herschel Grynspan-in retaliation for the Polish Jews residing in Germany, having been driven back again by Poland into no-man's land without food or shelter-entered the German Embassy in Paris and shot the third secretary, Ernst von Rath.
• November 9, 1938 Kristallnacht, "The Night of Broken Glass." The country-wide pogrom against the Jews initiated by the SA (Storm Troopers) and the SD in which Jewish shops (more than 7,500) across the country were destroyed, 191 synagogues were burned and more than 150 synagogues were otherwise destroyed. The debris of the destroyed shop windows gave the pogrom its name. More than 30,000 Jews were arrested and incarcerated in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Many hundreds of Jewish homes were looted and ruined and Jewish institutions were damaged, looted and closed.
• November 10, 1938 A similar pogrom took place in Vienna where 42 synagogues were burned, some centuries old. Property in Jewish apartments and businesses were confiscated. 4,600 Jewish men from all over Austria were sent to Dachau. 4,383 Jewish shops in Vienna were closed. 1,950 Jewish apartments were forcibly vacated. In neither country did any of the German or Austrian population intervene to save the Jews or their property. Thousands of them helped with the looting and with the smashing of shop windows. Many moved into the Jews' vacated homes.
• 1938 saw the total destruction of the economic base for the Jewish population, depriving them of any means of support or ability to defend themselves. The result was the isolation of the Jewish population from any means of resistance.
• 1939Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war then the result will be...the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!
  Adolf Hitler
• August 23, 1939 A non-aggression pact was signed between Germany and the Soviet Union, establishing that if one of them should be the object of military aggression by a third party, the other would not aid the third party, and dividing Poland between the two powers.
• September 1, 1939 Germany invades Poland in what is called the Blitzkrieg (lightning war).
• September 17, 1939 Soviet forces crossed the Polish frontier to the east and moved westward into the Polish heartland.
• September 27, 1939 Warsaw, Poland's capital, falls.
• December 19, 1939 Reinhard Heydrich established a special department in charge of the special transfer of the masses of Jews for the purpose of resettlement or elimination. Adolph Eichmann was charged with the evacuation and the deportation of the Jews. 10,000-15,000 people were deported out of major centers each month. Concentration camps and ghettos were established where inhabitants lived and died under the worst imaginable conditions.
• May 10, 1940 Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of England, and the German armies began their blitzkrieg against the countries in the west. In 1940 the Vichy government in France passed anti-Jewish laws.
• 1939-1941 Methods of deportation were perfected, the Jewish population was completely displaced, forced labor was instituted, forced labor camps were built, ghettos were enlarged, the ghettos continued to be beleaguered and the inhabitants continued to fight for life.
• 1941-1942 The Germans move east in an attempt to beat the Soviets.
  * The Einsatzgruppen, the German killer squad, move east to massacre Poles, Russians and Jews (primarily Jews).
  * The first death camps were set up. Chelmo, in Poland, was the first in operation.
  * Holland, France, Belgium, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Slovakia were overrun by the Germans.
• September 19-25, 1941 80,000 Jews were slaughtered by the Einsatzgruppen in the Russian Ukraine, 34,000 in Kiev where the Babi Yar slaughter, one of the bloodiest and most notorious, took place. Most of the victims were old, sick, women and children.
• December 7, 1941 The US enters the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, HI by the Japanese.
• January 20, 1942 The Wannsee Conference, chaired by Heydrich, took place in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. There Heydrich stressed the need for "an overall solution to the Jewish problem in Europe," and where he proposed holding "joint discussions of all relevant central agencies on the other activities involved in this final solution." Heydrich, now in charge, could harness all the civilian and economic administrations of Germany and the occupied territories for the purpose of carrying out Germany's mission, the destruction of the Jews.
• 1942 The death camps at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau begin extermination operations. Himmler orders the liquidation of the ghettos.
• June 1942 The ghetto at Cracow, site of Oscar Schindler's heroic rescue of more than 1,000 Jews, saw three separate selections of Jews, 5,000 of whom were sent to Belzec.
• Between July 22 and September 12, 1942 the unparalleled destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews took place. 350,000 of the Jews there were transported to death camps, primarily Treblinka.
• October 1942 6,000 more Cracow Jews were sent to Belzec.
  * The ghettos throughout Poland are razed and their inhabitants sent to death camps.
  * Deportation to death camps takes place in France, Holland, Belgium and Norway.
• 1943 Erntefest, meaning "harvest festival" and the term used for the destruction of the Jews, occurred almost simultaneously, on Hitler's orders, all over Europe in Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria.
• 1944-1945 The last phase of the Final Solution; the Soviet armies approach from the east, the Allied forces from the west; the death camps speed up operations and are then evacuated; death marches from the camps to Germany took place. Few prisoners survived. Hitler's army invades Hungary. Allies invade Normandy, France (D-Day).
• January 17, 1945 Raoul Wallenberg, savior to an estimated 100,000 Jews was taken prisoner by the Soviets in Budapest, Hungary and was never heard from again.
• January 18, 1945 Auschwitz-Birkenau is evacuated and liberated by the Russians.
• January-May, 1945 Other camps all over Europe are liberated by the Allies. There were few survivors.
• May 8, 1945 Germany surrenders to the Allies.
• November 1945 The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal commences.

  Why Didn't More Jews Leave Germany?

  Assignment: Read Chapter 5, "Quiet Before the Storm," and Chapter 6, "The End of Illusions," in Holocaust Chronicle.

  As we read about the persecution of the Jews in the 1930s, the question often arises, "Why did the Jews not leave Germany?"

  Between 1933 and 1939 about half of Germany's 500,000 Jews did leave the country of their birth. However, this was a difficult decision for them to make, and an equal number chose to remain, believing that the situation in Germany would stabilize and eventually improve. Kristallnacht, in November 1938, proved a turning point; it was unprecedented in its violence and most Jews still living in Germany now desperately wanted to leave. But, by then it was too late; most could not find countries that would give them refuge.

  The decision to emigrate was not an easy one prior to November 1938. Many Jewish families had lived in Germany for generations. The German language, culture, and way of life was important to them; for many being German was more important than being Jewish. Germany was their home and 30,000 German Jews had fought and died for their country in World War I.

  Moving to a new country would be a major upheaval. They would be arriving as refugees, as strangers in a strange land, and would perhaps be viewed with distrust and suspicion. They would have to start their lives again, searching for a new job, a place to live, and learning a new language. Those who did emigrate left not only their home, but also their friends and sometimes their loved ones behind. Jews that left Germany also lost most of their belongings and property as the Nazis used a "flight tax" to confiscate much of their wealth.

  There was also the problem of finding a country that would take them. Permission was needed to live in another country and all countries would only accept a fixed number of refugees each year. Until 1938, most Jews who decided to leave Germany were able to find a country that would give them shelter. Tens of thousands went to countries such as France, Holland, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Palestine. However, when the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, the numbers of Jews seeking refuge outnumbered the number that the countries of the world were prepared to help. In 1936 the British government limited the number of Jews allowed into Palestine to 12,000 a year. The United States, historically a country of refuge, severely limited the number of refugees it was prepared to admit.

  In 1938 thirty-two countries met at the Evian Conference to find a solution to the crises. Country after country refused to increase the number of refugees it was prepared to help. Thousands of Jews found themselves trapped inside Germany just as Nazi persecution became even more severe.

  On page 132 of Holocaust Chronicle, there is a photo of Myron C. Taylor. Taylor argued for an easing of restrictions for refugees, specifically children. The goal of the majority of Americans and American politicians was to keep the United States out of international conflict.

  
  
  

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