Anti-Semitic persecution of the Jews

• From the beginning in 1933, a flood of propaganda described Jews as ‘vermin’ who were evil and scheming against Germany, despite there only being 437,000 of them in Germany, 0.6% of the population.
• On 1 April 1933, there was a one day boycott of all Jewish businesses where SA men stopped people going inside
• Jews were also banned in April 1934 from government jobs, the civil service and teaching.
• In 1934, Jews were banned from parks and swimming pools and some councils provided separate park benches for ‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’.
• In May 1935, Jews were banned from the army.
• In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws of September, denied Jews German citizenship, including the right to vote, have a passport etc. They were forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with non-Jewish German citizens and they had to wear a yellow star
• There was a brief lull in persecution on account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
• In March 1938, Jews had to register all their possessions (to make them easier to confiscate!)
• In July 1938 Jews were forced to carry separate identity cards.
• . On 7 November 1938, a 17 year old Polish Jew shot Ernst Von Rath, an official at the German embassy in Paris. Joseph Goebbels used the news of Von Rath’s death to stir up a nationwide campaign of destruction against the Jewish people, which led to…
• … on the night of 9-10 November 1938, a wave of violence was unleashed across Germany, mainly by SA and SS men dressed in plain clothes. Hundreds of synagogues, homes and businesses were destroyed, over one hundred Jews were killed, and 20,000 were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. This became known as Kristallnacht or ‘Night of Broken Glass’.
• By 1939, the Nazis had decided to remove the Jews from Germany altogether. In April, they were evicted from their homes and sent to overcrowded ghettoes, awaiting deportation, when World War II broke out in September.