Account for Nazi Racial Policies, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Germany from 1933-45.

Account for Nazi Racial Policies, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Germany from 1933-45.

With the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor in March 1933. This appointment allowed Hitler to enforce his Nazi ideology on the State of Germany. Contained in this ideology were Nazi Racial policies. It would be these policies that would cause Anti-Semitism to erupt over much of Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust to occur.

Much of Nazi ideology was contained in Hitler’s book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), published in 1924. A key part of this ideology was concerned with race. According to Hitler, the Aryan race, of which all Germans were members, was the master race. All other races were inferior or Untermenschen (sub-human), particularly the Jews whom he believed were the mortal enemies of the Aryans. According to German historian K.S. Pinson, “The Jew, in the Nazi ideology, was the embodiment of all their enemies rolled into one. He was the ‘November Criminal’ and the traitor; he was both a Marxist and an international capitalist…above all he was the destroyer of the purity of the German race.” For their own survival therefore, the Aryans must struggle against the Jews and defeat them, or be destroyed themselves. Thus, was the second element of Hitler’s thought, the necessity of struggle. The master race must struggle against the inferior races or be destroyed themselves. It was therefore wicked to show mercy to the inferiors, as it could end in the destruction of civilisation.

Hitler’s desire to achieve Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) of Aryans is a key reason for the growth of Anti-Semitism (an action or attitude that is anti-Jewish) in Germany. In the early 1930s there were approximately 500,000 Jews in Germany making up less than 1% of the total population. However, they were a visible minority holding high positions and status in German society. To combat this, between 1933 and 1939 over 400 pieces of anti-Jewish legislation were introduced by the Nazis, designed both to deprive the Jews of their civil rights and affirm Aryan Germans in their sense of racial superiority.

The campaign against the Jews reached a new level with the Nuremburg Laws in September 1935. The two laws, which were announced at the annual Party Rally at Nuremberg, deprived all German Jews of their citizenship and forbad marriage between Germans and Jews. With each succeeding regulation the position of Jews in Germany became more difficult. They could no longer attend German school or universities, were excluded from many professions and forbidden to own land. Their property was taken from them and their businesses forced into bankruptcy or ‘Aryanisation’ that is sold at low prices to Aryan firms or individuals. The attacks on the Jews had now moved from being the work of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS) to government action in the form of laws.

In 1937 the campaign against the Jews continued at an even greater ferocity. Jews were forced from German economic life. All Jewish businesses had to be registered and many were seized by the government. New regulations after 1937 prevented Jews from entering theatres, restaurants and public parks. Jews were required to have special identity papers and have a red ‘J’ stamped on their passport. The Reich Chamber of Culture also prohibited Jews from participating in the artistic and cultural pursuits of the nation; the forbidden fields included literature and media.

On the 9th of November 1938, in response to the murder of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by a Jewish student, the Nazis launched a systematic pogrom on the Jews in Germany. In what came to be know as Kristallnacht, SA and SS troops with the approval of the Nazi leadership, systematically smashed and burnt Jewish property across the country. Kristallnacht was the most violent outburst against the Jews before the start of war. During the next few days the Nazis rounded up over 20,000 Jewish men and placed them in concentration camps and the Jewish community was forced to pay thirty million Reichmarks for the cost of the destruction, as well as a fine of one billion Reichmarks. Also in 1938, Anschluss (the union of Germany and Austria) was achieved; as a result Nazi racial laws were also applied to the Jews of Austria.

In January 1939 Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and the SS intelligence branch, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), was put in charge of the Jewish Emigration Office. Those who could pay for visas and gain acceptance elsewhere left Germany. In 1933 there were some 500,000 Jews living in Germany; many emigrated while 164,000 remained to face a bleak future In February 1940 the deportation of Jews from Germany began; 134,000 were deported, and only 8,000 returned. In January 1939 Hitler addressed the Reichstag saying that another war will mean the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’.

In order to gain Lebensraum or living space for the master race, expansion was necessary. This resulted in the invasion of Poland in 1939, and the commencement of World War II. Nazi Racial Policy was now enforced in Poland and subsequent German-controlled lands in Europe. In the same year Jewish inhabitants of major cities began to be placed into ghettos. Disease and overcrowding were commonplace. The Warsaw ghetto in Poland became the largest, accommodating about half a million people.

In 1941, Germany launched war on the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa. As the German army advanced further east, special units were formed within the SS with the sole purpose of killing Jews and other undesirables in the occupied territory of the east. These Einstazgruppen or Special Action Units were formed under the authority of Reinhard Heydrich. As the German army advanced into Russia the Einstazgruppen operated with absolute authority behind the line. Most of the victims were Russian Jews or captured political leaders. Most were shot and buried in mass graves. In the first year of their activity in the occupied east these SS death squads killed 1.4 million Jews and Russians.

In late 1941 the decision was made to relocate all the Jews in Germany and the occupied territories and to transport them to the east. The official reason was resettlement; the reality was the decision had been made to exterminate the Jews. There is no exact date or document that shows when Hitler authorised the so-called Final Solution, but the fact that he approved it is not in doubt. There is no doubt what the order intended. At his trial in 1961 for his part in carrying out the Final Solution, Heydrich’s deputy, Adolf Eichmann, observed that it was an order for ‘the planned biological destruction of the Jewish race in the eastern territories.

In January 1942 Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, called a secret conference of senior government officials at Wannsee, to discuss the technical details for the Final solution. Eichmann presented a list of the number of Jews involved, some eleven million, and the conference considered the problems of the transportation of such large numbers and the most effective way of dealing with them once that reached the concentration camps that were then opening in Poland. ‘The talk’ Eichmann said, ‘was of killing, elimination and annihilation’. From 1942 Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe were transported east to the extermination camps. Many were killed almost at once, other were used the slave industry, such as working in Albert Speer’s Ministry of Munitions and Armaments creating miracle weapons, before the majority of them were also killed. The systematic extermination campaign began in 1942 and continued until the advancing Russians overran the camps in 1944. Approximately six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis. This systematic extermination of the Jewish people became known as the Holocaust.

No serious historian has ever doubted that Hitler knew and approved the Final Solution, but because there is no direct evidence that Hitler ordered the destruction of the Jews (the F?hrerbefehl), the subject has generated some debate amongst historians. Some historians, including Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat, favour the so-called structuralist position. They argue that the Final Solution was not triggered by some general order or direct initiative, but rather simple evolved over time. Other historians, including Karl Dietrich Bracher and Lucy Dawidowicz, dispute this. They are the so-called intentionalist school and see Hitler as the key element in bringing the Final Solution into being. They argued that the Final Solution was intended and everything that Hitler said about the Jews, he meant. Dawidowicz agues that the plans for destroying the Jews were always part of Hitler’s thinking, “There never had been any ideological deviation or wavering determination” she states “in the end only the question of opportunity mattered”. That opportunity came in 1941 as the Germans occupied large areas of Eastern Europe.

The Holocaust and the Anti-Semitism experienced in Germany under the Nazi regime is a direct result of Nazi Racial Policies. These racial polices aimed to and succeeded in isolating, depriving, humiliating and restricting Germany’s Jewish population over the 1933 to 1945 period of Nazi rule. These aims were taken to the extreme and almost resulted in the complete destruction of the European Jewry, otherwise know as the Holocaust.

Account for the defeat of Germany in World War II.

The end of World War II came for Germany in May 1945. With the Americans and British advancing into Germany from the west, and the Russians from the east, Hitler killed himself, and was succeeded by Admiral Doenitz, who soon concluded the surrender formalities. Germany did not lose the war because of Allied superiority of economies and armed forces, but because the Allies could mobilise their economies, armed forces and maintain moral support. Other factors that influenced Germany’s defeat include: Hitler’s failure to adjust Germany for Total War; the nature of German military and government internal structures; the eventual Allied control of the seas and air; Soviet and US arms production; the Allied success and Nazi Germany’s failure to maintain wartime morale; and the importance of leadership.

In his military planning, Hitler believed in the importance of a short war and spoke of the ‘gigantic all destroying blow’. This had been the strategy behind the tactic of blitzkrieg. Germany had always planned for a quick war, which resulted in the nation not been prepared for the long war that developed. Hitler had never prepared the German economy for a long war. Believing in a quick war, there was no attempt to bring the nation to an immediate total war footing as the government believed that it could maintain the standard of living for the civilian population. By 1943 all of this started to change. Germany started to suffer defeat, and in February 1943, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Goebbels, called on the German people to wage total war. As a result of this ‘shielding’ the German population from the full impact of the war during its early years, the introduction of total war had a dramatic effect because the civilian population had to make increased sacrifices which resulted in a fall of morale, which was another reason for Germany’s eventual defeat.

Another reason for the fall of Germany in 1945 was because of its internal political structures. The organisation of Germany’s war effort was poor. They failed to make the best possible use of the resources available to them. Many different sections of the Nazi state made decisions about the war and wartime economy, which often overlapped or even contradicted each other. Also intense rivalry existed between the different groups in the Nazi regime. This had a major economic impact. The significance of Germany’s internal structure was that because of internal rivalry Germany was unable to maximise its technological potential. In 1942, Germany did have the potential for victory, but its failure to mobilise the homefront resulted in its collapse in May 1945.

Failure to gain control over the air and sea’s also resulted in Germany’s defeat. If the Allies could not counter the German sub-marine threat, Britain would have been defeated. Britain combated this threat by developing RADAR. RADAR and support vessels allowed Trans-Atlantic vessels to remove the power of the German U-Boat threat. Since the Allies gained control of the seas, they were able to attack Germany with complete Allied military power. The eventual defeat of Nazi Germany also had much to do with Allied airpower. As a result of the strategic bombing of German armaments factories, the Luftwaffe was unable to provide tactical bombing support in the Eastern front or at Normandy. The German aircraft production could not keep up with the losses caused by the Allies. The significance of the control of the air was that the Allied use of fighter planes on the Germany homefront meant that Germany had to remove many of its fighters away from the battlefront to protect the homefront. This also enabled the Allies to gain control of the battlefront.

The military dominance of both the US and the USSR gave the Allies considerable military power over Germany. The main reason for this is the differences of the wartime economies. In the USSR, no opposition to the war effort was tolerated, every aspect of the economy was aimed at war, wartime arms production was kept simple, and women worked for the war effort. The US also managed to transfer itself from 1941-2 into a major military power; it did this by using capitalism and the ideas of free enterprise. Germany on the other hand, tried to maintain homefront morale and total war was not adopted, Germany developed multiple types of weapons, and Hitler refused take advantage of women on the homefront. Germany, therefore could not match Allied arms production, which was another factor of German defeat.

Germany failed to have a strong military leader. Unlike in the US and Britain where Roosevelt and Churchill were popular for the course of the war; German support for Hitler started to decline dramatically after the failure to defeat Russia in 1941 and as the ‘Führer Myth’ continued to crumble. Hitler believed in his own infallibility, he assumed that he was a genius especially in military strategy, and began taking more control over the military. Hitler’s direct intervention greatly harmed Germany’s success in three ways. Firstly, by delaying total war gave the Allies a considerable economic and military advantage; secondly, his order to invade the USSR resulted in the creation of a two front war, and finally in late 1941 Hitler took direct demand of the field army which limited its movement and success.

On the 6th of June 1944 (D Day), the Allied invasion of Hitler’s so-called Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) began. Despite determined German resistance, the landing succeeded and on the first day 150,000 troops came ashore. Paris was liberated on 25 of August, and in May 1945 Germany was defeated. The key factors that influenced this defeat include: Hitler’s failure to adjust Germany for Total War; the nature of German military and government internal structures; the eventual Allied control of the seas and air; Soviet and US military dominance;

and the failure of Hitler as a successful leader.