Lesson 10
• 142
TheNazisinPower:Discrimination,Obedience,andOpportunism
?
WHY
teach this material?
Rationale
In this lesson, students will continue to explore the concept of obedience through thelens of the laws passed during Hitler’s first years in power. The suggested activities focusstudents’ attention on how these laws might have influenced the attitudes and actions of individuals living in Germany during the 1930s. Later in this unit, students will be ableto trace how laws which gradually stripped Jews of their rights as citizens laid the ground- work for their deportation and extermination during the Holocaust. In this lesson, as stu-dents consider why people chose to follow unjust laws in Nazi Germany, they also havethe opportunity to reflect on discrimination in their communities today, especially the ways that it might be possible to confront unjust laws within a democratic society.
LEARNING GOALS
The purpose of this lesson is to help students:
• Reflect on these
guiding questions
:
•What laws were passed once Hitler gained power? How do you think these laws might have shaped the attitudes and actions of individuals living in Germany in the 1930s? •What is discrimination? Who benefits from discrimination? Who suffers? •Why might Germans have followed these laws, even though many of them discrim- inated against their Jewish neighbors? Under the Nazi dictatorship, what options might have been available to Germans who did not agree with these laws? •Why are individuals more vulnerable to being discriminated against under a dic- tatorship than a democratic system of government? How might democratic institu- tions (elections, freedom of press, courts) help groups and individuals combat dis- crimination in communities today?
• Practice these
interdisciplinary skills
:
•Paraphrasing primary source documents •Drawing conclusions from evidence in primary source documents •Presenting information to peers
• Deepen understanding of these
key terms
:
•Dictatorship •Nuremberg laws •Discrimination •Opportunism •Fear
To deepen your understanding of the ideas in this lesson, read Chapter Four in
FacingHistory and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior.
Lesson 10
• Obedience • Resistance (dissent)
(See the main glossary in the unit’s “Introduction” for definitions of these key terms.)
?
WHAT
is this lesson about?
When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he was finally in a position where he could usethe power of law to control German society. His ability to pass laws continued to getstronger, culminating in 1934 when the German electorate approved the decree that gaveHitler dictatorial power. Once Hitler established a dictatorship, any vestiges of demo-cratic institutions were destroyed. Without a parliament, courts, or elections to stop him,Hitler had the power to make all of the rules. There was no system of checks and bal-ances; institutions paid homage not to a constitution (i.e., “the rule of law”) but to adesire to please the Führer.*This attitude is exemplified by the first law Hitler passed afterbecoming Führer. On August 20, 1934, Hitler declared that all soldiers and governmentofficials were obliged to recite an oath not to German law or nation, but to Hitler him-self.The timeline in Lesson 8 demonstrates how even before he became Führer, Hitler usedlaws to further the goals of the Nazi Party at the expense of civil liberties and democraticinstitutions. The Nazi Party platform clearly articulated these goals which included strip-ping Jews of citizenship and their right to vote. Hitler did not attempt to realize thesegoals overnight. Rather, he took a gradual approach, eliminating the rights of Jews onestep at a time. Beginning in 1933, only a few months after he became Chancellor, Hitlerproposed the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” which made itillegal for communists, Jews, and other individuals deemed “unfit” to work in the civilservice as doctors, teachers, police, judges, or other state employees. This law was Hitler’sfirst step in using laws to define who is a Jew and who is not a Jew, an important stage inthe Nazis’ ultimate goal to remove all Jews from Germany. It identified Jews as someone with at least three Jewish grandparents, and it provided more specifications to help deter-mine how to evaluate the status of individuals who may be from one Jewish parent andone Aryan parent or whose parents may have converted and “do not belong to the Jewishcommunity at this time.” Yet, it was not until 1935 that Hitler and the Nazis finally achieved their goal of stripping Jews of citizenship, creating a legal distinction between Germans and their Jewish neigh-bors. At a Nazi Party conference in the town of Nuremberg, Hitler announced three new laws, thereafter referred to as the Nuremberg laws. (See handout 2, documents 1 and 2for an excerpt of the Nuremberg Laws.) These laws redefined what it meant to beGerman. Until this point, Jews living in Germany considered themselves to be Germancitizens, and were often treated accordingly. Many Jews spoke German, attended Germanschools, and voted in national and regional elections. The Nuremberg laws, however,explicitly stated that a Jew could no longer be a German citizen protected by Germanlaws. Because the Nazis were preoccupied with protecting Aryan blood from contamina-tion with Jewish blood, these laws also made it illegal for Jews and Aryans to share sexual
Lesson 10
• 143
* Führer had been used for centuries as a title for German rulers. It means “leader” in German. When Hitler assumed thistitle for himself in 1934, he was connecting his rule to that of German kings and emperors that had come before him.
relations, and even made it illegal for youngGerman women to work in a Jewish home.The Nuremberg laws went on to define who was a Jew, continuing the work which beganin 1933. Being a Jew was no longer a matterof self-definition or self-identification. Now a person was considered a Jew because of what his or her parents or grandparents hadchosen to believe.The Nuremberg laws were crucial to theprocess of dehumanization that the Nazisinstitutionalized once they took power, andthe laws helped set the stage for the organ-ized violence and mass murder that wouldcome later in the regime. While theNuremberg laws explicitly mentioned Jews,the interpretation of these laws also accusedGypsies* and blacks as having “alienblood.”
1
And dozens of laws passed by theNazis targeted other groups deemed unde-sirable, including communists, homosexuals,and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Accordingly, thepolicies established by Hitler, supported by the Nazis and followed by most Germans,reveal how rampant discrimination—the useof laws, policies, and practices to treat indi-viduals differently based on their member-ship in a specific group—became a corner-stone of Hitler’s governing strategy.The majority of Germans reacted to these laws with enthusiasm, or at least passivity. Within Germany explicit resistance to the Nuremberg Laws, and other discriminatory policies instituted by the Nazis, was virtually unheard of. Why was this the case whensurely many Germans had Jewish neighbors? In many German towns and cities, Jews andGermans had lived together in relative peace. Germans had Jewish teachers and Jewishdoctors. They attended schools with Jews and had served in the military with them.Because of intermarriage, some German families had members who identified as Jews or were now being identified as Jewish by the Nazis. There is no simple answer to the ques-tion of why Germans did not resist these unjust laws, including laws aimed at vulnerablegroups other than Jews. As described in the previous lesson, obedience is one factor that
Lesson 10
• 144
The Nuremberg laws were the first step in legally defining Jews as sep-arate from the German people. Samuel Bak’s painting,
Signal of Identity
, emphasizes the yellow stars Jews were later forced to wear asan outward symbol of their status as noncitizens.
* At the time of the Holocaust, Germans and other Europeans used the name “Gypsies” when referring to an ethnic groupof people whose origins can be traced to South Asia. (The name actually stems from the word
Egyptian
because Europeansoriginally believed that they came from Egypt.) Over time, the label “Gypsy” was conferred on any nomadic group withsimilar physical appearance (i.e., darker skin and hair), lifestyle, and customs. Most of the individuals labeled as Gypsies areactually members of the Romani or Sinti community. Recently, in recognition of the inaccurate and derogatory qualities of the label “Gypsy,” the international community has adopted the more respectful Roma, Romani, or Sinti. However, toavoid historical anachronism, in the lesson plans we use the word
Gypsies
when identifying the groups of people who weretargeted for segregation and annihilation by the Nazis, since this is what the Nazis called them at the time. Refer to the fol-lowing websites for more information about the Roma people and their history:
http://www.romani.org, http://www .religioustolerance.org/roma.htm
, and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Roma_history
.
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Decision-Making in Times of Injustice Lesson 10
In this lesson, students will continue to explore the concept of obedience through the lens of the laws passed during Hitler’s first years in power.
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