Step by step: from loss of rights to genocide, 1935–1945

In “From prejudice to law: antisemitism and exclusion up to 1935”, you saw how exclusion began in 1933: boycotts, bans on practising professions and humiliation in the streets. There was not yet a law officially making Jewish people second-class citizens. That came in September 1935. From then on, a path led through violence, plunder, expulsion and compulsory identification to mass murder – not in a single leap, but step by step. This module follows that path.

One point before we begin: this module deals with persecution and genocide. We keep the account factual, avoid horrific images and tell at least one person's story in detail so that the numbers become faces. If anything upsets you, talk to your teacher about it – that is not a sign of weakness, but the right response.

You will need about two lessons for this module. A good stopping point is after the tasks on 1938.

In September 1935, the NSDAP held its party rally in Nürnberg. The Reichstag was also summoned there – the parliament whose members, since the election of November 1933, had almost all belonged to the NSDAP; the other parties had been banned or dissolved in 1933 (“From democracy to dictatorship: 1933/34”). On 15 September, it unanimously passed three laws that became known as the Nuremberg Laws:

1. The Reich Citizenship Law

It distinguished two classes of people: ‘state nationals’ and ‘Reich citizens’. Only Reich citizens were to have political rights – to vote and hold public office – and only people ‘of German or related blood’ could qualify:

‘Only a national of German or related blood who demonstrates through their conduct that they are willing and fit to serve the German people and Reich loyally is a Reich citizen.’

— Reichsbürgergesetz, 15. September 1935, § 2

‘Related’ is Nazi language from ‘racial doctrine’: it meant people the regime assigned to a ‘related race’, such as other Europeans – but not Jews. Jewish people were thus made second-class citizens: they remained nationals with duties, but without political rights.

2. The ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’

This law, known as the ‘Blood Protection Law’, interfered in private life:

‘§ 1 Marriages between Jews and nationals of German or related blood are prohibited. Marriages entered into despite this are void […].

§ 2 Extramarital relations between Jews and nationals of German or related blood are prohibited.’

— «Blutschutzgesetz», 15. September 1935

‘Void’ is a legal term: in law, the marriage counts as if it had never existed. § 3 prohibited Jews from employing non-Jewish female domestic workers under 45; § 4 prohibited them from flying the Reich flag; § 5 threatened penal servitude (a particularly harsh form of imprisonment) and prison sentences. Nazi propaganda called relationships between Jews and non-Jews ‘racial defilement’ – a perpetrators' term that turned love into a crime. Denunciations (reports from neighbours), trials and prison sentences followed, and during the war, death sentences too. Under § 2, only the man was punished; women were brought before the court as witnesses and publicly humiliated.

3. The Reich Flag Law

It declared the party's swastika flag to be the Reich and national flag. The NSDAP's symbol thus became the symbol of the state.

Why these laws mattered so much

Until then, exclusion had often come ‘from below’: SA guards, decisions by clubs and violence in the streets. Laws covered only particular areas, such as the civil service, schools and universities. Now the law affected every Jewish person in the Reich: they lost their political rights, and marriage and relationships with non-Jews were prohibited. Discrimination was now enshrined as a principle in the official law gazette. Persecution therefore appeared ‘legal’ and orderly – officials, judges and registrars (the officials who conduct marriages) were simply applying laws. These laws became the basis for everything that followed: anyone classified as a ‘Jew’ could later have their property confiscated, be forced to wear identifying marks and be deported.

Remember: The Nuremberg Laws made Jewish people second-class citizens (Reich Citizenship Law) and prohibited them from marrying or having relationships with non-Jews (‘Blood Protection Law’). Discrimination against all Jewish people became law – and therefore seemingly ‘normal’.

The laws referred to ‘blood’ – but how was an official supposed to check ‘blood’? There was no characteristic, no test, nothing. So the regime turned to the only thing recorded in official files: religion. The First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law of 14 November 1935 stipulated that the grandparents counted – specifically, whether they had belonged to a Jewish community.

• Three or four Jewish grandparents: the person was classified as a ‘Jew’ – regardless of whether they had been baptised, which religion they followed or whether they believed in anything at all.
• Two Jewish grandparents: ‘Mischling, 1st degree’ – with special rules, such as requiring permission to marry someone ‘of German blood’. However, anyone who belonged to a Jewish community themselves or was married to a Jewish person was classified as a ‘Geltungsjude’ and treated as a ‘Jew’.
• One Jewish grandparent: ‘Mischling, 2nd degree’ – disadvantaged, but not treated as a ‘Jew’.
• No Jewish grandparents: ‘of German blood’.

All these terms are the perpetrators' language – they belong in quotation marks. The diagram below gives an overview of the rule.

What the rule reveals

Think about it for a moment: the Nazis claimed that Jews were a ‘race’ with inherited characteristics (see “Worldview and persuasion: ideology and propaganda”). If this ‘race’ had existed, it would have had to be identifiable biologically. Instead, the authorities counted which religious community the grandparents were registered with – a faith that people can adopt or leave. The rule itself therefore shows that ‘racial doctrine’ measured nothing biological. It was a pretext.

This was no comfort to those affected. People who had thought of themselves as Christians, as Germans, as ordinary neighbours were declared ‘Jews’ by decree – including children who had joined in morning prayers at school, or soldiers with military decorations. The exemption for Jewish First World War front-line veterans (the ‘front-line veterans' privilege’, which had still been included in the ‘Aryan Paragraph’ in 1933) was abolished in 1935.

Remember: In the Nuremberg Laws, ‘Jew’ was an administrative category based on the grandparents' religious affiliation. With three or four Jewish grandparents, a person's own faith did not matter; only with two grandparents did their own membership of a Jewish community or marriage also count. This is precisely what exposes ‘racial doctrine’ as unscientific.

March: the ‘Anschluss’ of Österreich

On 12 March 1938, the Wehrmacht marched into Österreich. The country was forcibly incorporated into the German Reich (the technical term is annexed: absorbed into another state through pressure and violence). The Nazis called this the ‘Anschluss’ – a word suggesting a voluntary union, even though many people cheered the invasion. For the roughly 190 000 Austrian Jews, most of them in Wien, persecution began all at once rather than step by step. In the very first days, Nazis and jeering neighbours forced Jewish people to scrub the streets with brushes, looted homes and shops, and arrested thousands. Expulsion began immediately. From the bank of the Rhein in Vorarlberg, Switzerland was within easy reach – but in August 1938 it closed its border to refugees without a visa (permission to enter, applied for in advance). Liechtenstein was also very reluctant to admit refugees: after the ‘Anschluss’, it banned the admission of refugees from Österreich, and in 1938 it rejected more applications than it approved.

July: the Évian Conference

Where could those driven out go? In July 1938, representatives of 32 countries met in Évian, on the Genfersee, to discuss Jewish refugees from Germany and Österreich. Almost all expressed regret – and almost none were willing to admit more people. Nazi propaganda celebrated this: apparently, the world did not want ‘the Jews’ either.

October: the J stamp and the ‘Polenaktion’

From October 1938, German Jews' passports were stamped with a red ‘J’. Switzerland had previously wanted to require visas for all Germans; the German authorities instead proposed marking only Jews' passports. Switzerland agreed and used the ‘J’ to identify and turn away Jewish refugees at the border. In late October, in the ‘Polenaktion’, the regime deported around 17 000 Jews with Polish citizenship to the Polish border overnight. Some had lived in Germany for decades. Poland refused to let them enter; thousands were stranded in no-man's-land between the border posts, in the cold and without supplies.

November: the pretext

Among those deported was the family of Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old living in Paris. In despair and anger, on 7 November 1938 he shot the diplomat Ernst vom Rath at the German embassy. Vom Rath died on 9 November. The Nazi leadership used the act as a pretext: that very evening, on 9 November, it had a wave of violence against Jews organised across the Reich and disguised it as ‘spontaneous popular anger’. It had long pursued the aim of driving Jewish people out of economic and social life – now it advanced that aim through open violence.

On the evening of 9 November 1938, the Nazi leadership was gathered in München to commemorate Hitler's failed coup attempt of 9 November 1923. Joseph Goebbels delivered a hate-filled speech. Orders went out by telephone and teleprinter (a machine that sent typed messages over telephone lines) to every Gau (the party's regional districts): the SA, SS and party members, mostly in civilian clothes, were to ‘strike out’ against Jews. Afterwards, propaganda called this ‘spontaneous popular anger’. It was the opposite: an organised pogrom, set in motion by the state's leaders. Unlike the medieval pogroms in the previous module, here the state directed the ‘crowd’.

That night and the following day, across the Reich, in Österreich and in the Sudetenland (the border region of Tschechoslowakei occupied in October 1938):

• More than 1 400 synagogues and prayer rooms were set on fire or destroyed. Fire brigades had orders to protect only neighbouring houses.
• Around 7 500 shops were wrecked and looted, homes demolished and cemeteries desecrated.
• People were abused and murdered. The regime officially reported 91 deaths; counting those who died from their injuries, deaths in the camps and suicides out of despair brings the total to several hundred.
• Around 30 000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to the concentration camps Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, where they were abused. Many were released after weeks – on condition that they emigrate immediately and leave their property behind.

And the neighbours? Many watched, some joined in or helped loot, some felt ashamed – and a few helped, took in persecuted people or hid them. For Jewish people, the message was clear: there was no protection left in this country.

A word that lies

The name ‘Reichskristallnacht’ was already being used for the night in 1938, referring to the shattered glass of shop windows. The word comes from the perpetrators' era and plays down the violence: it reduces murder, arson and deportation to the sound of glass. That is why historians today use the term November pogroms (you know the word pogrom from the previous module).

Remember: The November pogroms of 1938 were not ‘popular anger’ but violence organised by the regime: synagogues destroyed, shops wrecked, hundreds dead and 30 000 men sent to concentration camps. The term ‘Reichskristallnacht’ plays this down.

The victims are made to pay

The regime turned the situation on its head: the victims, rather than the perpetrators, had to pay for the damage. On 12 November 1938, a decree imposed an ‘atonement payment’ of one billion Reichsmarks on German Jews. The regime justified it as ‘punishment’ for vom Rath's death; in reality, it was robbery. Insurance companies had to pay out for the damage, but the state confiscated the money. A decree issued on the same day prohibited Jews from running shops and craft businesses from 1 January 1939: they were ‘eliminated’ from economic life. Whatever had not yet been sold was now forcibly ‘Aryanised’ (from ‘Aryan’, the Nazi word for supposedly ‘of German blood’): businesses, houses and professional practices went to non-Jewish buyers for far less than their value (“From prejudice to law: antisemitism and exclusion up to 1935” explains the term).

On 15 November 1938, Jewish children were excluded from all state schools. Bans on cinemas, theatres, concerts and swimming pools followed, along with the withdrawal of driving licences and restrictions on going out. Step by step, public life was closed to Jewish people.

Escape

Anyone who could now tried to escape – with a ‘J’ in their passport, often without money, into a world that was closing its borders. By the outbreak of war, more than half of Germany's Jews had left the country. The Kindertransporte are particularly well known: between December 1938 and September 1939, Britain admitted around 10 000 Jewish children from Germany, Österreich and Tschechoslowakei – without their parents. Many of these children never saw their parents again. Liechtenstein also imposed a ban on refugees entering in December 1938.

A rescuer at the border: Paul Grüninger

Switzerland had closed its border to refugees. Paul Grüninger, police commander of the canton of St. Gallen, did not comply. In 1938, he allowed several hundred Jewish refugees – according to some estimates, as many as over 3 000 – to enter at the border near Diepoldsau by backdating their papers to before the border closure. In 1939 he was dismissed and later convicted of breaching his official duties; he lived in poverty until his death in 1972. Only in 1995 did a court overturn the conviction and clear his name. Grüninger shows that even in 1938, it was possible to act differently – and that it came at a cost.

Remember: After the pogrom came plunder (‘atonement payment’, ‘Aryanisation’) and exclusion from school and everyday life. Escape became the only way to safety: the Kindertransporte saved around 10 000 children, and individuals such as Paul Grüninger saved people by breaking their state's rules.

The invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the start of the Second World War – and a new stage for Jewish people. In the Reich, curfews now applied, radios had to be handed over, food rations were cut, and men and women were made to perform forced labour. Jewish families were crammed into ‘Judenhäuser’ – the authorities' term for houses where they forced Jewish people to live in extremely cramped conditions.

In occupied Poland, home to more than three million Jews, events moved faster and more brutally. From December 1939, Jews there had to wear a white armband with a blue star. In 1940, the occupying forces confined them in ghettos – sealed-off city districts, for example in Łódź and Warschau, where almost half a million people lived in extremely cramped conditions. Hunger and disease killed tens of thousands there, long before the extermination camps were built.

The yellow star

On 1 September 1941, the regime issued a police decree: from 19 September, almost all Jewish people in the Reich aged six and over had to wear a palm-sized yellow star bearing the word ‘Jude’ visibly on their clothing in public – the ‘Judenstern’, or Jewish star badge. Do you remember the year 1215? What a medieval council had begun with hats and patches returned more than 700 years later: people were marked out so that everyone could avoid, report and despise them. Children were insulted on their way to school; adults were thrown out of shops.

The trap closes

On 23 October 1941, the regime prohibited Jewish people from emigrating. Anyone who had not yet left could no longer get out. At the same time, deportations from the Reich began: from mid-October 1941, trains left Berlin, Wien and many other cities for ghettos and camps in the occupied east – Łódź, Riga and Minsk, and later directly for the extermination camps. Those affected were told they were being ‘resettled’ – a term the authorities used to conceal the real purpose. They were allowed one suitcase; their homes and possessions went to the state, and neighbours bought their furniture at auctions.

Remember: From 1939 to 1941, persecution became visible and inescapable: armbands and the Jewish star badge marked people out, ghettos confined them, and the emigration ban of October 1941 removed their last way out – and deportations began.

Mass shootings

On 22 June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Behind the front came Einsatzgruppen – mobile SS and police units ordered to murder Jews, communists, Sinti and Roma. Together with Wehrmacht units and local collaborators (local people who worked with the occupying forces), they killed between 1.5 and 2 million people in mass shootings by 1944, most of them Jews. In the Babyn Jar ravine near Kiew, at least 33 771 people were shot over two days in late September 1941 – according to the perpetrators' own report. We give these figures because behind each one was a person – and we do not describe how it happened.

Organising the murder

In December 1941, the first extermination camp began operating in Chełmno: people, mainly Jews, were murdered here in gas vans. On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior officials and SS leaders met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee for the Wannsee Conference. They did not decide on the murder – it was already happening – but coordinated its implementation across Europe: who was responsible, and how would eleven million people be registered and transported? In the files, this was called the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ – the perpetrators' term to conceal genocide; even ‘Jewish Question’ suggests that Jewish people were a problem. It is precisely the cold language you know from the letter of 1919 (“From prejudice to law: antisemitism and exclusion up to 1935”).

Further extermination camps followed: Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all in occupied Poland. Their purpose was to murder people brought there by train from across Europe as quickly as possible. At Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, this was the only purpose; Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau were also concentration camps where prisoners had to perform forced labour. At Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, around 1.1 million people were murdered, including around one million Jews. On 27 January 1945, the Red Army liberated the camp – today, this date is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Remember – concentration camps and extermination camps are not the same: A concentration camp (KZ) was a detention camp where people were held without trial, used for terror, forced labour and intimidation, and where people also died in huge numbers (the first concentration camps were established as early as March 1933; see “From democracy to dictatorship: 1933/34”). A camp used solely for extermination, such as Treblinka, had just one purpose: the deliberate, factory-like killing of those arriving. Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek were both – concentration camps with forced labour and extermination camps.

The toll

By 1945, the Nazis and their accomplices had murdered around six million Jewish people, including around 1.5 million children. This crime is called the Holocaust (from the Greek, ‘completely burnt’) or Shoah (Hebrew for ‘catastrophe’). Jews were not the only victims: up to 500 000 Sinti and Roma were murdered (this genocide is also called Porajmos, ‘the devouring’ – a term contested among Sinti and Roma; ‘genocide of the Sinti and Roma’ is also commonly used); around 200 000 or more disabled people were murdered in ‘euthanasia’ (the perpetrators' name for murdering sick and disabled people; more in “Worldview and persuasion: ideology and propaganda”); millions of Soviet prisoners of war died through starvation and shooting; homosexuals, political opponents, Jehovah's Witnesses and forced labourers from across Europe were also victims.

Remember: The Holocaust was not a lapse or a secret kept by a few men. It was planned, administered and carried out by hundreds of thousands – officials, railway workers, police officers, soldiers and neighbours. And it did not begin at Auschwitz: it developed step by step.

Six million is a number that is hard to feel. So we tell one story – one among millions.

Anne Frank was born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, the second daughter of Otto and Edith Frank; her sister Margot was three years older. The family was Jewish and German, and Otto Frank had served as an officer in the First World War. After the Nazis took power, the Franks emigrated to Amsterdam in 1933/34. Otto set up a small business there; Anne went to nursery school and learnt Dutch. For a few years, their escape seemed to have succeeded.

In May 1940, Germany occupied the Netherlands. The exclusion you know from this module and the previous one unfolded there within months: Jewish schools, the Jewish star badge, curfews. In July 1942, Margot received a call-up for ‘labour service’ in Germany – the regime was deporting Dutch Jews. The family went into hiding: in the annex behind Otto's business on the Prinsengracht, eight people lived hidden for more than two years, supplied by employees who risked their lives. Anne, aged thirteen, kept her diary there.

On 4 August 1944, the hiding place was discovered – it is still uncertain whether through betrayal or chance. The eight were deported to Auschwitz via the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands. In autumn 1944, Anne and Margot were taken to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where both died of hunger and typhus (a disease that spread through the overcrowded camps) in February or March 1945, a few weeks before liberation. Anne was 15. Of the eight people in hiding, only Otto Frank survived. A helper had saved Anne's diary; Otto published it in 1947. It was translated into more than 70 languages – and gave a face to a number.

Look at the staircase in the next block: you can trace Anne Frank's journey along it, although the family did not experience the stages in this order: exclusion in Germany, early escape, then compulsory identification and loss of rights in the occupied Netherlands, hiding, deportation and death in a camp.