How did the Germans define who was Jewish? On November 14, , the Nazis issued the following definition of a Jew: Anyone with three Jewish grandparents; someone with two Jewish grandparents who belonged to the Jewish community on September 15, , or joined thereafter; was married to a Jew or Jewess on September 15, , or married one thereafter; was the offspring of a marriage or extramarital liaison with a Jew on or after September 15, Those who were not classified as Jews but who had some Jewish blood were categorized as Mischlinge hybrids and were divided into two groups: Mischlinge of the first degree--those with two Jewish grandparents.
Mischlinge of the second degree--those with one Jewish grandparent. The Mischlinge were officially excluded from membership in the Nazi Party and all Party organizations e. SA, SS, etc. Although they were drafted into the Germany Army, they could not attain the rank of officers. They were also barred from the civil service and from certain professions. Individual Mischlinge were, however, granted exemptions under certain circumstances.
Nazi officials considered plans to sterilize Mischlinge, but this was never done. During World War II, first-degree Mischlinge, incarcerated in concentration camps, were deported to death camps. What were the first measures taken by the Nazis against the Jews?
The first measures against the Jews included: April 1, A boycott of Jewish shops and businesses by the Nazis. April 7, The law for the Re-establishment of the Civil Service expelled all non-Aryans defined on April 11, as anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent from the civil service.
Initially, exceptions were made for those working since August ; German veterans of World War I; and, those who had lost a father or son fighting for Germany or her allies in World War I. April 7, The law regarding admission to the legal profession prohibited the admission of lawyers of non-Aryan descent to the Bar. It also denied non-Aryan members of the Bar the right to practice law. Exceptions were made in the cases noted above in the law regarding the civil service.
Similar laws were passed regarding Jewish law assessors, jurors, and commercial judges. April 22, The decree regarding physicians' services with the national health plan denied reimbursement of expenses to those patients who consulted non-Aryan doctors.
Jewish doctors who were war veterans or had suffered from the war were excluded. April 25, The law against the overcrowding of German schools restricted Jewish enrollment in German high schools to 1. Initially, exceptions were made in the case of children of Jewish war veterans, who were not considered part of the quota.
In the framework of this law, a Jewish student was a child with two non-Aryan parents. Did the Nazis plan to murder the Jews from the beginning of their regime? This question is one of the most difficult to answer.
While Hitler made several references to killing Jews, both in his early writings Mein Kampf and in various speeches during the s, it is fairly certain that the Nazis had no operative plan for the systematic annihilation of the Jews before The decision on the systematic murder of the Jews was apparently made in the late winter or the early spring of in conjunction with the decision to invade the Soviet Union.
The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened on March 22, The camp's first inmates were primarily political prisoners e. Communists or Social Democrats ; habitual criminals; homosexuals; Jehovah's Witnesses; and "anti-socials" beggars, vagrants, hawkers. Others considered problematic by the Nazis e. Jewish writers and journalists, lawyers, unpopular industrialists, and political officials were also included.
The following groups of individuals were considered enemies of the Third Reich and were, therefore, persecuted by the Nazi authorities: Jews, Gypsies, Social Democrats, other opposing politicians, opponents of Nazism, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, habitual criminals, and "anti-socials" e. Any individual who was considered a threat to the Nazis was in danger of being persecuted. The Jews were the only group singled out for total systematic annihilation by the Nazis.
To escape the death sentence imposed by the Nazis, the Jews could only leave Nazi-controlled Europe. Every single Jew was to be killed according to the Nazis' plan.
In the case of other criminals or enemies of the Third Reich, their families were usually not held accountable. Thus, if a person were executed or sent to a concentration camp, it did not mean that each member of his family would meet the same fate.
In the case of the Jews, it was because of their racial origin, which could never be changed. Why were the Jews singled out for extermination? The explanation of the Nazis' implacable hatred of the Jew rests on their distorted world view which saw history as a racial struggle.
They considered the Jews a race whose goal was world domination and who, therefore, were an obstruction to Aryan dominance. They believed that all of history was a fight between races which should culminate in the triumph of the superior Aryan race. Therefore, they considered it their duty to eliminate the Jews, whom they regarded as a threat.
Moreover, in their eyes, the Jews' racial origin made them habitual criminals who could never be rehabilitated and were, therefore, hopelessly corrupt and inferior. There is no doubt that other factors contributed toward Nazi hatred of the Jews and their distorted image of the Jewish people. These included the centuries-old tradition of Christian antisemitism which propagated a negative stereotype of the Jew as a Christ-killer, agent of the devil, and practitioner of witchcraft.
Also significant was the political antisemitism of the latter half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, which singled out the Jew as a threat to the established order of society. These combined to point to the Jew as a target for persecution and ultimate destruction by the Nazis.
Certain initial aspects of Nazi persecution of Jews and other opponents were common knowledge in Germany. Thus, for example, everyone knew about the Boycott of April 1, , the Laws of April, and the Nuremberg Laws, because they were fully publicized. Moreover, offenders were often publicly punished and shamed.
The same holds true for subsequent anti-Jewish measures. Kristallnacht The Night of the Broken Glass was a public pogrom, carried out in full view of the entire population. While information on the concentration camps was not publicized, a great deal of information was available to the German public, and the treatment of the inmates was generally known, although exact details were not easily obtained. As for the implementation of the "Final Solution" and the murder of other undesirable elements, the situation was different.
The Nazis attempted to keep the murders a secret and, therefore, took precautionary measures to ensure that they would not be publicized. Their efforts, however, were only partially successful. Thus, for example, public protests by various clergymen led to the halt of their euthanasia program in August of These protests were obviously the result of the fact that many persons were aware that the Nazis were killing the mentally ill in special institutions.
As far as the Jews were concerned, it was common knowledge in Germany that they had disappeared after having been sent to the East. It was not exactly clear to large segments of the German population what had happened to them. Did all Germans support Hitler's plan for the persecution of the Jews? Although the entire German population was not in agreement with Hitler's persecution of the Jews, there is no evidence of any large scale protest regarding their treatment.
There were Germans who defied the April 1, boycott and purposely bought in Jewish stores, and there were those who aided Jews to escape and to hide, but their number was very small. Even some of those who opposed Hitler were in agreement with his anti-Jewish policies. Among the clergy, Dompropst Bernhard Lichtenberg of Berlin publicly prayed for the Jews daily and was, therefore, sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis.
Other priests were deported for their failure to cooperate with Nazi antisemitic policies, but the majority of the clergy complied with the directives against German Jewry and did not openly protest. The attitude of the local population vis-a-vis the persecution and destruction of the Jews varied from zealous collaboration with the Nazis to active assistance to Jews.
Thus, it is difficult to make generalizations. The situation also varied from country to country. In Eastern Europe and especially in Poland, Russia, and the Baltic States Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania , there was much more knowledge of the "Final Solution" because it was implemented in those areas. A leading British-born Holocaust historian, Professor Michael Burleigh, said the book was "original and outstanding, genuinely important".
Another authority on the camps, Professor Omer Bartov, of Brown University, Rhode Island, US, described Backing Hitler as "path-breaking - a crucial contribution to our understanding of the relationship between consent and coercion in modern dictatorship". Gellately, professor in Holocaust history at Clark University, Massachusetts, offers a mass of detail to support the theme of an earlier work, Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which caused an international sensation in Goldhagen's theme was that "what the Nazis actually did was to unshackle and thereby activate Germans' pre-existing, pent-up anti-semitism".
Gellately began his inquiry after finding a press report -published as routine - of a woman reported to the Gestapo for "looking Jewish" and allegedly having sex with a neighbour.
His media trawl, with a research assistant, found that as early as local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a "model" concentration camp initially for communists.
On May 23 the Dachauer Zeitung said the camp was Germany's most famous place and brought "new hope to the Dachau business world". By the main and widely read Nazi-owned paper Volkische Beobachter was reporting a widening of policy to other "political criminals" including Jews accused of race defilement.
By communist prisoners were no longer mentioned: in a photo-essay in the SS paper Das Schwarze Korps emphasised the camps as places for "race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals". This broadening mission, as Gellately calls it, was reflected in Volkische Beobachter photographs of "typical subhumans" including Jews with "deformed headshapes".
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Canada's top doctor says cooler weather, easing restrictions creating 'turbulence'. Don't Miss false. Veterans in Iqaluit brave cold temperatures in ceremony.
Excited dachshund frolics in neck-deep Sask. Meet the world's most premature baby. Most-Watched false. Homeowner issues cautionary tale. Premature baby born at 21 weeks sets record. The Climate Barometer. Canada's Most Trusted News. Download the CTV News app now. True, the regime later toned down its propaganda. But the camps still sometimes featured in Nazi magazines and on the radio during the pre-war years.
During the Second World War, concentration camps became more visible than ever. As the number of inmates and camps grew, and the SS prioritized slave labour, encounters with ordinary Germans became common. There were labour camps in many towns and villages , and locals saw prisoners march to work or worked nearby; sometimes locals even requested prisoners to work for them.
The reactions of ordinary Germans varied. Some tried to help, offering food to prisoners. Others abused them or joined in manhunts for fugitives.
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