From prejudice to law: antisemitism and exclusion up to 1935

In 1933, around 500 000 Jewish people lived in the German Reich – less than one per cent of the population. They were doctors and shopkeepers, teachers and workers, neighbours, classmates and fellow club members. Most spoke German as their first language, and many families had lived in the country for centuries. Around 100 000 Jewish men had fought as German soldiers in the First World War, and about 12 000 had been killed. They felt German – and they were.

How could neighbours become a group that was excluded, robbed and eventually murdered? The answer does not begin in 1933. In “Worldview and persuasion: ideology and propaganda”, you saw that antisemitism was at the heart of the Nazi worldview. This module explains where that hatred came from, why it was so useful to the regime and how exclusion began in the first weeks after the Nazi takeover. The next module in the series follows the path further: from the laws of 1935 to genocide.

One point before we begin: in this module, we look through the eyes of people observing events at the time and of those affected – not through the eyes of the perpetrators. And we call things by their name: prejudices are not opinions, but false claims about people.

Jewish people had lived in Europe since Roman times – their presence in Köln is documented as early as 321, in a decree by Emperor Konstantin. Over the centuries, Jews and Christians often lived peacefully alongside one another as neighbours, trading partners, doctors and patients. But hatred was also present from the beginning, and initially it came from religion.

Religious anti-Judaism

Early Christian writers were already accusing ‘the Jews’ collectively (everyone without distinction) of killing Jesus – even though the Romans had executed him. This accusation of ‘killing God’ was preached for centuries. In the Middle Ages, further myths emerged that still have an impact today: claims that Jews killed Christian children (the ‘ritual murder’ myth) or desecrated consecrated hosts, the blessed bread used in Christian Mass (‘host desecration’). Both were invented – yet they led to trials, torture and executions. These accusations and myths were used to justify hostility towards Jews on religious grounds. Hostility directed against the Jewish faith is called anti-Judaism.

Waves of violence

• 1096: On their way to the First Crusade, bands of crusaders and townspeople who had been incited to hatred attacked Jewish communities in the Rheinland, especially in Worms, Mainz and Köln. Hundreds died in both Worms and Mainz; in Speyer, the bishop saved most of the community. Thousands died overall. These were the first major pogroms in Christian Central Europe. A pogrom (a Russian word meaning ‘devastation’) is a violent attack by a crowd on a minority, involving looting, arson and murder.
• 1215: The Fourth Lateran Council, a Church assembly in Rom, ordered Jews to distinguish themselves from Christians through their clothing. Later, in many countries, this took the form of the pointed ‘Judenhut’ (Jewish hat) and a yellow patch or ring on clothing. Remember the year: the idea of marking people with a sign on their clothes returned in the German Reich in 1941 with the yellow ‘Judenstern’ (Jewish star) – the Nazi name for their compulsory badge. You will learn more about this in the next module.
• 1348–1350: As the plague swept through Europe and killed one in three people, people looked for someone to blame. Jews were accused of poisoning wells – an accusation without any evidence, often extracted under torture. In hundreds of towns and cities, including Basel and Strassburg, entire communities were murdered or burnt to death, sometimes even before the plague had arrived.

Exclusion and expulsion

In most towns, Jews were allowed neither to own land nor to join a guild (an association of craftspeople). The main occupations left to them were trade and lending money at interest (a fee for borrowed money). The Church prohibited Christians from charging interest; Jews were not bound by this prohibition. Moneylending therefore became one of the few occupations open to Jews. This is how the prejudice about ‘Jews and money’ arose: it followed from exclusion, not the other way round. People in debt often blamed an entire group. This was a pretext, not a justification – hatred targeted people who had been forced into this role, and pogroms were often also about loot and cancelling debts. Jews were expelled entirely from England (1290), Frankreich (1394) and Spanien (1492). In many towns, they had to live in enclosed districts that were locked at night – the word ‘ghetto’ comes from Venedig, where the first was established in 1516.

Remember: Religious anti-Judaism targeted faith. Anyone who was baptised was – at least in theory – no longer regarded as Jewish. This changed fundamentally in the 19th century.

Equal rights at last: emancipation

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the idea that all people should have equal rights slowly gained ground in Europe (the Enlightenment). This idea lies at the heart of human rights: they apply to everyone, regardless of origin or religion. Step by step, Jewish people gained civil rights – this is called emancipation (equal rights). In the German Reich, legal equality was completed in 1871: Jews could enter any profession, study at university, vote and hold public office. In practice, barriers remained, for example to careers as military officers. Nevertheless, many seized the opportunity and helped shape life in towns and cities – as doctors, lawyers, scientists, artists, shopkeepers and journalists.

A new hatred: racial antisemitism

At precisely this time, a new form of hostility towards Jews emerged. In 1879, the journalist Wilhelm Marr popularised the word ‘antisemitism’ – it sounded scientific and was intended to make the old hatred look modern. (The word is misleading: ‘Semites’ actually refers to a language family that includes Hebrew and Arabic, but only Jews were ever meant. Nevertheless, ‘antisemitism’ remains the usual specialist term; more simply, you can say ‘hatred of Jews’.) Antisemitic parties and associations gained supporters in the German Empire, but remained a minority.

The crucial difference from religious anti-Judaism was that Jews were now regarded not as a religious community, but as an alleged ‘race’ with inherited, unchangeable characteristics. This left no way out – baptism, assimilation, patriotism: nothing ‘helped’. The Nazis adopted precisely this idea in their ‘racial doctrine’, which you know from “Worldview and persuasion: ideology and propaganda”.

	Religious anti-Judaism	Racial antisemitism
Period	mainly antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern period	from the late 19th century
Accusation	wrong faith (‘killing God’, myths)	allegedly an ‘inferior race’, inherited characteristics
Way out	baptism (in theory)	none – ancestry ‘counts’
Promoted by	Church, townspeople, rulers	associations, parties, newspapers – from 1933, the state
Consequences	exclusion, expulsion, pogroms	loss of rights, persecution, genocide

The boundary was blurred: anti-Jewish religious prejudices did not disappear in the 19th century, and the Nazis revived old myths – in 1934, the hate-filled newspaper ‘Der Stürmer’ even spread the invented ‘ritual murder’ myth.

Remember: Anti-Judaism targets Jewish people because of their faith; antisemitism targets them because of their alleged ancestry. Both are hatred of Jews – but racial antisemitism leaves no way out.

The ‘Protokolle der Weisen von Zion’

At the beginning of the 20th century, a text appeared in Russland that supposedly contained secret minutes of meetings of Jewish ‘elders’: plans to seize world domination through banks, the press and revolutions. All of it was invented. The ‘Protokolle der Weisen von Zion’ is a forgery, pieced together from older texts – including a French satirical pamphlet against Emperor Napoleon III that had nothing to do with Jews. The British newspaper ‘The Times’ demonstrated this as early as 1921. Nevertheless, the book was translated into many languages and printed in millions of copies; the Nazis used it as ‘proof’ of a Jewish world conspiracy.

In Bern in 1933, Jewish communities sued people distributing the ‘Protokolle’. The court heard expert witnesses and concluded in 1935 that the text was a forgery. (A higher court overturned the verdict in 1937 on procedural grounds – not because the book was authentic.) This did little to help: the ‘Protokolle’ remains in circulation today.

Why did so many people believe it? A conspiracy myth offers a simple explanation for a complicated world: a secret enemy is behind everything. This comes as a relief – there is no need to think any more, only to hate. And it cannot be disproved in believers' eyes: every piece of evidence against it is treated as part of the conspiracy.

The ‘stab-in-the-back myth’

After the defeat in the First World War, military leaders around Hindenburg and Ludendorff and right-wing politicians claimed that the German army had remained ‘undefeated in the field’. It had supposedly been betrayed from home – by Social Democrats, revolutionaries and ‘the Jews’ – through a ‘stab in the back’. In fact, the war had been lost militarily by autumn 1918; the generals themselves had pressed for an armistice. The myth shifted the blame away from them – and made Jews scapegoats.

The word comes from the Old Testament (3. Buch Mose): a goat was loaded with the people's sins and sent into the wilderness. A scapegoat is someone blamed for problems they did not cause. During the crises of the Weimar Republic – inflation in 1923 and the Great Depression from 1929 (“Weimarer Republik, Weltwirtschaftskrise und der Aufstieg des Nationalsozialismus”) – this pattern repeatedly gained new followers: people who were suffering looked for someone to blame, and propaganda supplied them with a target.

Remember: Conspiracy myths and scapegoating go together: an invented story supplies someone to blame, and that person or group explains every crisis. No evidence is needed – only repetition.

Adolf Hitler lived in Wien from 1908 to 1913. Hostility towards Jews was part of everyday political life there: the popular mayor Karl Lueger incited hatred against Jews in his speeches, while the politician Georg von Schönerer combined hatred of Jews with the dream of a Greater German Reich. In ‘Mein Kampf’ (1925), Hitler claimed that he had become an antisemite in Wien.

Most researchers take a different view. The historian Brigitte Hamann studied Hitler's years in Wien closely: at the time, he had Jewish acquaintances and sold his paintings through Jewish dealers; there is no documented evidence of radical hatred of Jews from this period. His account in ‘Mein Kampf’ is self-presentation – he wanted to portray his hatred as an early ‘insight’, rather than the product of a crisis.

Hitler's radical antisemitism is documented only from 1919 in München – after defeat in the war, after the revolution of 1918/19 (uprisings forced the Kaiser to abdicate in November 1918) and after the short-lived Münchner Räterepublik (a revolutionary government modelled on Russia's, which was ended by armed force in May 1919). Hitler was then moving in circles of völkisch (extremely nationalist and racist) groups.

The first written evidence is a letter dated 16 September 1919 to a soldier named Adolf Gemlich. At the time, Hitler worked as a speaker for the Reichswehr (the republic's army). In the letter, he distinguishes two types of antisemitism: one arises ‘from purely emotional motives’ and ends in pogroms. He calls the other ‘antisemitism of reason’; it must lead to a ‘systematic legal campaign’ against Jews. At the end, he states the aim:

‘Its ultimate goal, however, must unalterably be the removal of the Jews altogether.’

— Adolf Hitler, Brief an Adolf Gemlich, 16. September 1919

For context: in 1919, Hitler was an unknown soldier, and the letter was a reply to an enquiry – it shows how Hitler thought at the time, not what happened later. The letter does not say what ‘removal’ was meant to involve. What stands out is the idea of pursuing hatred of Jews not only through angry violence, but ‘systematically’ and ‘legally’. In policy from 1933 onwards, you find both: laws excluding Jewish people, alongside open violence that the state tolerated or organised itself.

Your task: read the sentence from the letter carefully and pay attention to the language. How does the word ‘removal’ sound – and what does it turn the people concerned into? Make a note of your answer; you will need it in the further study section at the end of the module (task 3). You will encounter this cold language again in the next module.

Remember: Hitler's hatred of Jews was not innate, nor simply a ‘legacy of Wien’. It grew during the crisis after 1918 – from the same patterns you have learnt about above: scapegoating and conspiracy myths.

In the worldview: one enemy explains everything

For the Nazis, history was an eternal ‘racial struggle’ – an alleged struggle between ‘races’ for survival. In this worldview, ‘the Jew’ – always singular, as if referring to a single being – was the arch-enemy behind everything bad: the defeat of 1918, the Treaty of Versailles, capitalism (the Nazi term was ‘Finanzjudentum’, meaning ‘financial Jewry’) and, at the same time, communism (the Nazi term was ‘Jewish Bolshevism’).

Do you notice anything? Capitalism and communism are opposites: one is based on private ownership of factories, banks and land, and on profit; the other seeks to transfer that property into common ownership. An enemy image that claims to explain both at once is self-contradictory – and nobody has ever provided evidence for it. This shows that facts are not the point: what matters is a scapegoat who must fit every problem. Remember this contradiction – you will need it shortly in the matching exercise, the self-check and the further study section.

For those in power: one enemy creates unity

The enemy image was more than a worldview: it was useful for holding on to power:

• Unity: A shared enemy binds people together. The ‘national community’ (“Worldview and persuasion: ideology and propaganda”) also defined itself through who did not belong.
• Distraction: Those who blame ‘the Jews’ for unemployment and crisis do not have to discuss the real causes – or their own mistakes.
• Enrichment: Those who deny Jews the right to own property can take it for themselves. ‘Aryanisation’ was the Nazi state's term for the forced sale of Jewish shops, businesses and houses to ‘Aryan’ buyers at far below their value. ‘Aryan’ was the Nazi term for people supposedly ‘of German blood’, meaning non-Jewish; it drew on the invented notion of ‘Aryans’ in ‘racial doctrine’. Many Germans benefited: competitors, neighbours and employees who moved up.
• Infallibility: If something went wrong, an enemy was to blame. This meant the ‘Führer’ was always right.

Remember: The Nazis did not invent hatred of Jews. They radicalised centuries-old prejudices and made them state policy – and many people joined in, benefited or remained silent.

As soon as they came to power, the Nazis began excluding Jewish people – not at some later date, but in the very first weeks, alongside the dismantling of democracy (“From democracy to dictatorship: 1933/34”).

1 April 1933: the boycott

On Saturday, 1 April 1933, SA men stationed themselves outside Jewish shops, doctors' surgeries and law firms across the country. They held signs with slogans such as ‘Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!’, painted messages on shop windows and photographed anyone who went in anyway. The party called the boycott a ‘defence’ against alleged ‘atrocity propaganda’ from abroad. It used this Nazi term to dismiss foreign newspaper reports about SA violence in Germany as lies and to blame Jewish Germans for them. This was a pretext: the boycott was intended to exclude Jewish people in their own country. Officially, it lasted one day, and some customers made a point of continuing to shop there. But the message had got through: the government backed the party's action, the police did not intervene – the state let it happen.

7 April 1933: the ‘Aryan Paragraph’

Six days later came the first anti-Jewish law: the ‘Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums’ (Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service). Its § 3, the so-called ‘Aryan Paragraph’, stipulated that civil servants ‘of non-Aryan descent’ were to be retired. Jewish teachers, judges, professors and administrative officials lost their jobs. At Reich President Hindenburg's insistence, there were initially exceptions for First World War front-line veterans, civil servants who had been in service since August 1914, and those whose fathers or sons had been killed in the war – these exceptions, too, were abolished in 1935.

The ‘Aryan Paragraph’ became a model: similar rules soon applied to doctors (approval to treat patients covered by health insurance funds), lawyers, journalists and artists. A law of 25 April 1933 limited the number of Jewish pupils and students in schools and universities. Associations, sports clubs and professional organisations excluded Jewish members. On 10 May 1933, students in many university towns burnt books by Jewish, left-wing and pacifist authors. Those who stayed were watched, shunned and insulted. Around 37 000 Jewish people left Germany in 1933 alone.

Humiliation in the streets

There was also violence that went unpunished. SA and SS men drove people through the streets with signs hung around their necks, cut off their hair and forced them into degrading acts – often because of a relationship between Jews and non-Jews, which was even banned from 1935. One example of such humiliation was the lawyer Michael Siegel from München. On 10 March 1933, he went to the police to speak up for a client who had been arrested. Uniformed men serving as auxiliary police officers – SS men, according to current research – beat him, cut off his trouser legs, hung a sign around his neck and drove him barefoot through the city centre. A photographer captured the scene, and the picture went around the world. Siegel remained in Germany for several more years; in 1940, he managed to escape to Peru, where he died in 1979.

How did those affected respond?

Many hoped the nightmare would pass – after all, they were German and had fought for their country. The Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten publicly recalled the 12 000 who had fallen. Others recognised early on that there was no going back and emigrated, often losing almost everything they owned. And the non-Jewish majority? Some helped, continued to shop at Jewish businesses and kept in touch. Most looked away and grew used to what was happening – or took advantage of the jobs, practices and shops that had become available.

In the following years, pressure became part of everyday life: signs such as ‘Jews not welcome’ appeared at the entrances to many towns and villages, the hate-filled newspaper ‘Der Stürmer’ was displayed in public noticeboards, and swimming pools and clubs excluded Jewish people. In the summer of 1935, the incitement intensified again – a prelude to the laws of September.

Remember: From 1933 to 1935, exclusion became normal: boycotts, bans on practising professions, exclusion from clubs and humiliation in the streets. This was state-led discrimination: people were treated worse because they belonged to a particular group, and the state took back the civil rights they had held since 1871 – an attack on the principle of equal rights for all people, and therefore on human rights. There was not yet a ‘racial law’ legally reducing Jewish people to second-class citizens – that came in September 1935 with the Nuremberg Laws, the subject of the next module.