Nazi Racism

The Nazis defined Jews as an inferior “race” dangerous to the superior Aryan “race” and responsible for most of Germany’s problems, including defeat in World War I and the economic depression. The reasons for targeting Jews, Hitler declared in a 1938 speech, were “based on the greatest of scientific knowledge.” Hitler attacked many ethnic and social groups, but he took anti-Semitism to new and frightening heights. In the rhetoric of Nazism, Jews were “vermin,” “abscesses,” and “Bolsheviks.” They were enemies, biologically weakening the race and plotting Germany’s destruction—all of which, given scientific knowledge then and now, was of course utterly false. Thus Hitler’s concept of building community also included making some members of the community enemies within. By branding Jews both as evil businessmen and as working-class Bolsheviks, Nazis fashioned an enemy for the population to hate.

Nazis insisted that terms such as Aryan and Jewish (a religious category) were scientific racial classifications that could be determined by physical characteristics such as the shape of the nose. In 1935, the government enacted the Nuremberg Laws, legislation that deprived Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and other Germans. Abortions and birth-control information were readily available to enemy outcast groups, including Jews, Slavs, Sinti and Roma, and mentally or physically disabled people, but were forbidden to women classified as Aryan. In the name of improving the Aryan race, doctors helped organize the T4 project, which used carbon monoxide poisoning and other means to kill large numbers of people—200,000 handicapped and elderly—late in the 1930s. The murder of the disabled aimed to eliminate those whose “racial inferiority” endangered the Aryans. These murders prepared the way for even larger mass exterminations in the future.

Jews were forced into slave labor, evicted from their apartments, and prevented from buying most clothing and food. In 1938, a Jewish teenager, reacting to the harassment inflicted on his parents, killed a German official. In retaliation, Nazis and other Germans attacked some two hundred synagogues, smashed windows of Jewish-owned stores, ransacked apartments of known or suspected Jews, and threw more than twenty thousand Jews into prisons and camps. The night of November 9–10 became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. Faced with such relentless persecution, more than half of Germany’s 500,000 Jews had emigrated by the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Their enormous emigration fees helped finance Germany’s economic recovery, while neighbors and individual Nazis used anti-Semitism to justify stealing Jewish property and taking the jobs Jews were forced to leave.