‘The Final Solution’: Nazism & The Holocaust
The Nazis were a Far-Right political party led by Adolf Hitler. They were voted into power in Germany in 1933, promising Germans a better life and an end to financial problems.
Hitler told Germans that Germany lost World War One and was suffering financially because of the Jews. In rallies, radio broadcasts, and in writing, the Nazis convinced non-Jewish Germans that the Jews (as well as some other Eastern European groups, people who were LGBT, disabled, Roma (travellers), Black, and mixed heritage) were not the same race as them and should not have equal rights. They taught that Jews were ‘sub-human’ (less than human), while the White Germanic ‘Aryans’ were supposedly a perfect ‘Master Race’.
One of the main features and contradictions of Nazi antisemitismHostility to or prejudice against Jews as individuals or as a collective. is that Jews were portrayed as inferior ‘sub-humans‘, but they also claimed that Jews were extremely powerful threats who controlled world governments and economies to overpower the poor German Aryans!
As soon as the Nazis gained power in 1933, Jews suffered violent attacks and harassment. Jewish businesses were boycotted with Nazis intimidating customers on the streets, and Jewish lawyers and civil servants were forced to leave their jobs. Eventually most professions were forbidden to Jews. The Nazis also removed books by Jewish authors in libraries and burned them in public squares. Some towns banned Jews from entering.
Kristallnacht
On the evening of November 9, 1938, Nazi leaders began a series of ‘pogroms’ (attacks) on the Jewish population throughout Germany. This event came to be called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) because of the shattered glass that littered the streets after the vandalism and destruction of Jewish-owned homes, businesses, and synagogues.
During this pogrom, 91 Jews were killed, 267 synagogues destroyed, and an estimated 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and taken to concentration camps. This was the first time Nazi officials made many arrests of Jews simply because they were Jews, without any reason for arrest. Following Kristallnacht, the Nazi regime ordered the Jewish community to pay a 1 billion Reichsmark “atonement tax” for the clean up as well as creating many anti-Jewish laws.
Kristallnacht marked the beginning of a very dark chapter in European antisemitism. Most German civilians showed no concern about the violence, which showed the Nazi leadership that the public was prepared for more extreme action. This eventually led to the industrialised murder of six million Jews in extermination camps, gas chambers, and mobile death squads whose job it was to make whole regions ‘Judenrein’ – ‘cleansed’ of Jews.
It isn’t possible for this course to cover the full extent and horrors of the Holocaust, but it is necessary to understand that the main reason for the world’s largest genocide was antisemitism. To this day, the world’s Jewish population (estimated at 15 million) has still not fully recovered to the population level it had before the Holocaust (approximately 16.5 million).
