On the evening of November 9, 1938, carefully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence âeruptedâ throughout the Reich, which since March had included Austria. Over the next 48 hours rioters burned or damaged more than 1,000 synagogues and ransacked and broke the windows of more than 7,500 businesses. Some 30,000 Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Police stood by as the violenceâoften the action of neighbors, not strangersâoccurred. Firemen were present not to protect the synagogues but to ensure that the flames did not spread to adjacent âAryanâ property. The pogrom was given a quaint name: Kristallnacht (âCrystal Night,â or âNight of Broken Glassâ). In its aftermath, Jews lost the illusion that they had a future in Germany.
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On November 12, 1938, Field Marshal Hermann Göring convened a meeting of Nazi officials to discuss the damage to the German economy from pogroms. The Jewish community was fined one billion Reichsmarks. Moreover, Jews were made responsible for cleaning up the damage. German Jews, but not foreign Jews, were barred from collecting insurance. In addition, Jews were soon denied entry to theaters, forced to travel in separate compartments on trains, and excluded from German schools. These new restrictions were added to earlier prohibitions, such as those barring Jews from earning university degrees, from owning businesses, or from practicing law or medicine in the service of non-Jews. The Nazis would continue to confiscate Jewish property in a program called âAryanization.â Göring concluded the November meeting with a note of irony: âI would not like to be a Jew in Germany!â
Victims of Nazism
While Jews were the primary victims of Nazism as it evolved and were central to Nazi racial ideology, other groups were victimized as wellâsome for what they did, some for what they refused to do, and some for what they were.
Political dissidents, trade unionists, and Social Democrats were among the first to be arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Under the Weimar government, centuries-old prohibitions against homosexuality had been overlooked, but this tolerance ended violently when the SA (Storm Troopers) began raiding gay bars in 1933. Homosexual intent became just cause for prosecution. The Nazis arrested German and Austrian male homosexualsâthere was no systematic persecution of lesbiansâand interned them in concentration camps, where they were forced to wear special yellow armbands and later pink triangles. The goal of persecuting male homosexuals was either for reeducationâwhat might now be called conversion therapyâor punishment. Jehovahâs Witnesses were a problem for the Nazis because they refused to swear allegiance to the state, register for the draft, or utter the words âHeil Hitler.â As a result, the Nazis imprisoned many of the roughly 20,000 Jehovahâs Witnesses in Germany. They could be released from concentration camps if they signed a document renouncing their faith and promising not to proselytize. Few availed themselves of that option, preferring martyrdom to apostasy. Germans of African descentâmany of whom, called âRhineland bastardsâ by the Nazis, were the offspring of German mothers and French colonial African troops who had occupied the Rhineland after World War Iâwere also persecuted by the Nazis. Although their victimization was less systematic, it included forced sterilization and, often, internment in concentration camps. The fear was that they would âfurther polluteâ and thereby diminish the race. The Nazis also singled out the Roma and Sinti, pejoratively known as Gypsies. They were the only other group that the Nazis systematically killed in gas chambers alongside the Jews. For the Roma and Sinti, too, racial pollution and their depiction as asocials was the justification for their persecution and murder.
In 1939, shortly after the war began, the Germans initiated the T4 Programâframed euphemistically as a âeuthanasiaâ programâfor the murder of intellectually or physically disabled and emotionally disturbed Germans who by their very existence violated the Nazi ideal of Aryan supremacy. They were termed âlife unworthy of life.â An economic justification was also employed as these Germans were considered âuseless eaters.â The Nazis pioneered the use of gas chambers and mass crematoria under this program. The murder of the disabled was the training ground for key personnel who were to later staff the death camps of Aktion Reinhard. The German public protested these murders. The Roman Catholic bishop of MĂŒnster, Clemens August, Graf von Galen, preached against them, and the T4 program was formally halted. Nonetheless, the murder and sterilization of these German âAryansâ continued secretly throughout the war.
Following the invasion of Poland, German occupation policy especially targeted the Jews but also brutalized non-Jewish Poles. In pursuit of Lebensraum, Germany sought systematically to destroy Polish society and nationhood. The Nazis killed Polish priests and politicians, decimated the Polish leadership, and kidnapped the children of the Polish elite, who were raised as âvoluntary Aryansâ by their new German âparents.â Many Poles were also forced to perform hard labor on survival diets, were deprived of property and uprooted, and were interned in concentration camps.
German expansion and the formation of ghettos
Paradoxically, at the same time that Germany tried to rid itself of its Jews via forced emigration, its territorial expansions kept bringing more Jews under its control. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and the Sudetenland (now in the Czech Republic) in September 1938. It established control over the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic) in March 1939. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the âJewish questionâ became urgent. When the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union was complete, more than two million more Jews had come under German control. For a time, the Nazis considered shipping the Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa, but discarded the plan as impractical; the Nazis had not prevailed in the Battle of Britain, the seas had become a war zone, and the resources required for such a massive deportation were scarce.
On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the establishment of the JudenrĂ€te (âJewish Councilsâ), comprising up to 24 menârabbis and Jewish leaders. Heydrichâs order made these councils personally responsible in âthe literal sense of the termâ for carrying out German orders. When the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of German-occupied Polandâs 400 ghettos, in the fall of 1940, the Jewsâthen 30 percent of Warsawâs populationâwere forced into 2.4 percent of the cityâs area. The ghettoâs population reached a density of more than 200,000 persons per square mile (77,000 per square km) and 9.2 per room. Disease, malnutrition, hunger, and poverty took their toll even before the first bullet was fired.
For the German rulers, the ghetto was a temporary measure, a holding pen for the Jewish population until a policy on its fate could be established and implemented. For the Jews, ghetto life was the situation under which they thought they would be forced to live until the end of the war. They aimed to make life bearable, even under the most trying circumstances. When the Nazis prohibited schools, they opened clandestine schools. When the Nazis banned religious life, it persisted in hiding. The Jews used humor as a means of defiance, so too song. They resorted to arms only late in the Nazi assault.
Historians differ on the date of the decision to murder Jews systematically, the so-called âfinal solution to the Jewish question.â There is debate about whether there was one central decision or a series of regional decisions in response to local conditions. In either case, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, its former ally, in June of 1941, the Nazis began the systematic killing of Jews.