The History of Anti-Semitism

STAGE 1: WWI Repercussions

❖ Myths
➢ Dulchstoss: stab in the back myth blaming Jews & Communists for Germany’s
defeat
■ Helped discredit German socialist & liberal circles
➢ Judeo-Bolshevism: a common myth that communism was a Jewish-inspired &
Jewish-led movement seeking world domination from its origin
❖ Germany loses WWI & territory gains in the east (Treaty of Versailles) -1919
➢ 1917- Russians leave the war & signs Treaty of Brest-Litvosk (Germany gains)
➢ Catherine the Great pushes Jews from Russia into this area (Poland)
➢ Hitler vows to regain territory in the east & eradicate the Slavic populations &
Jews
➢ 1933- 6,760,000 Jews in the east (majority of Jews in Europe)
❖ Redemptive Anti-Semitism: the only way Germany can regain its global position is to
“redeem” itself → the only way to do that is to eliminate the internal enemy (The Jews)
➢ Hitler blamed the Jews & Marxists for the loss of WWI
➢ The Aryan race (pure Germans) = superior
➢ Struggle for world domination
➢ History & biology changed to match anti-semitic views → racial anti-semitism
❖ Social & economic upheaval in Weimar Germany → radical right wing parties
STAGE 2: Hitler takes power (3rd Reich)
❖ Est. 1st concentration camps, imprisoning political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, & other dangers
❖ Extensive propaganda symbolically represents many arguments against the Jews
➢ Purpose -- to project powerful images of internal & external foes
➢ Helped maintain the illusion of national unity
➢ Helped keep people committed to war effort
❖ Boycott of Jewish Business (1933) -- discrimination (taking away livelihoods)
➢ Germany sets up the idea that Jews are not Germans & isolates them
❖ Nuremberg Blood Laws (1935) -- marks period of persecution
➢ Defined who a Jew was
➢ Deprived Jews of political rights
➢ Race laws -- institutionalized the racial theories in Nazi ideology
➢ Laws for the Protection of German Blood & Honor
■ No marriage/sex between Jews & Germans
■ No employment of German females in Jewish households
➢ Reich Citizenship Law -- only Germans eligible to be citizens
■ The rest were state subjects w/o citizenship rights
❖ Kristallnacht (1938) -- “Night of the Broken Glass”
➢ Organized violence (series of pogroms) against the Jews throughout Germany
& Austria
 ■ Synagogues, Jewish businesses, & homes
■ 100s of lives taken
■ 1st time Nazi officials made massive arrests of Jews specifically
because they were Jews
● 30,000 males taken to concentration camps
STAGE 3: WWII
❖ Invasion of Poland (1939)
❖ Ghettos established in Eastern Europe (POLAND ONLY-- effective because more cities
located here than in areas like Russia) -- General Government
➢ Small areas of major cities where Jews were isolated
➢ Place to set up camps to liquidate ghettos
➢ Hoped starvation/disease would kill them off
❖ 1939-1945 German occupied territories throughout Europe
STAGE 4: Operation Barbarossa (June 1941) -- Germany invaded Russia (5 mil Jews)
1) Einsatzgroupen: mobile killing units; systematic murder of Soviet Jews (by 1943,1 mil)
in mass shooting operations on Soviet territory (also 10s of 1000s of Soviet political
commissars, partisans, Roma, & institutionalized disabled persons)
■ Pale of Settlement: Western region of imperial Russia in which permanent
residency was allowed (Jews) & beyond which was generally prohibited
■ Followed German army
■ At first, only shooting men then later turned into families and communities
■ 4 groups from North to South
A) Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia toward Leningrad
○ Lithuania (Ejszyszki) -- entire Jewish community obliterated in 2
days
B) Warsaw (German-occupied Poland), Belorussia
○ 100s of Jewish Families
C) Began in Krakow (German-occupied Poland) → Western Ukraine
○ Along with other killing units
○ Babi Yar (near Kiev)-- in just 2 days (late Sept 1941), 33,000 Jews
(thought they were being gathered & sent to labor camps, but
were shot in a ravine)
D) Romania → Ukraine → Crimea
■ Effective because more rural (less cities compared to Poland)
A) But so concern because it was resource intensive, shooting inefficiency &
psych impact → carbon monoxide vans
B) Losing in Moscow & Stalingrad → need more dramatic way of killing
2) Final Solution = deportations + extermination camps
■ Jan 1942; Himmler decided to change tactics once again & called a special
Conference at Wannsee → existing methods inefficient & final solution is
necessary
● Not the beginning of the FS; just coordinated & revealed
● Puts Heydrich in charge of the conference
 ■ List of countries w/# of Jews (total = 11 mil) residing who were to be deported
■ PLAN: to remove ALL European Jews (not just eastern this time) & liquidation
of all ghettos
1. Deportations: Jews board a deportation train at the railroad station in
Wurzburg (late Nov 1941/1st transport of German Jews to the east)
○ (1942-44): most western Jews → Auschwitz // eastern jews
(ghetto liquidation) → smaller, newer, solely made to be
extermination camps
2. Extermination camps
○ The Evolution of Death (Browning): In mid-March 1942, 75-80% of
all victims were still alive while 20-25% had perished → by
mid-Feb 1943, the %s were reversed
○ Types of Concentration Camps
(a) Labor
(b) POW
(c) Transit (more in west because they were moving them
east)
(d) Extermination camps (more east) -- strictly for the Jews
coming in
○ Operation Reinhardt: secretive plan to exterminate Poland’s
Jews that were located in the general government
■ DEADLIEST PHASE of the Holocaust -- marked by intro
of extermination camps
■ Belzac, Sobibor, & Treblinka (ran by Globocnik)
○ By Winter 1941, only 1.5 mil Jews are dead, but 11 mil are
targeted (importance of having elaborate train system)
○ Auschwitz, Chelmno, Majdanek -- rest of Europe’s Jews
○ Sonderkommando: specially selected Jews that were used to
remove gold fillings & hair of gassed people; forced to feed dead
bodies into crematorium

The Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933. The Nazis believed that Germans were
members of a biologically "superior" race threatened with extinction through the struggle for
survival with "inferior" races. They saw Jews, especially, as a biological threat to the "German
(Aryan) Race."

Adolf Hitler moved to extend German power in central Europe, annexing Austria and destroying
Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939.
In the aftermath of the violence of the Kristallnacht pogroms, the Nazis instituted the first
systematic roundups of German and Austrian Jews. They deported approximately 30,000
Jewish men to Dachau and other concentration camps after Kristallnacht.

Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, beginning World War II. Within weeks, the Polish
army was defeated. Britain and France declared war on Germany in support of Poland. Under a
secret pact with Germany, Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland in 1939, but remained
officially neutral in the war until 1941.
The Germans killed or resettled hundreds of thousands of Poles in an effort to create new living
space for the "superior Germanic race." German families settled on the vacant properties.
German authorities forced the Jewish population into ghettos, areas of cities where the Jews
lived in horrendous squalor under German supervision.
During the next two years German forces were victorious, invading Denmark and Norway, the
Low Countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) and France. As German troops
neared Paris in June 1940, Italy - Germany's Axis partner - declared war on Britain and France.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union attacked Finland, annexed two eastern border provinces from
Romania, and occupied the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia). Slovakia, Hungary,
Romania, and Bulgaria and, later, Finland and Croatia, allied with Germany. In Spring 1941, the
Axis allies dismembered Yugoslavia and occupied Greece.

In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. German forces advanced deep into Soviet
territory. This battle was also an ideological battle. Following German combat units, Mobile
Killing Squads (Einsatzgruppen), German Order Police Battalions, and other SS units,
supported by units of the German army, slaughtered Jews and other victims in mass shootings.
They killed more than 1.5 million Jewish men, women, and children, in mass shootings. German
police and military authorities also killed Jews in mass shootings operations in occupied
Yugoslavia and Eastern Poland.
Increasing Soviet resistance halted the German advance, preventing the Germans from
capturing the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow. A second German offensive in the summer
1942 brought German forces deeper into Soviet territory to the southeast, to the Volga River
and into the north Caucasus region.
As the German advance stalled in the east, Germany moved to consolidate its dominance in
Europe. They also extended in 1942 the systematic killing of Jews to other territories they
controlled or occupied. German SS and police officials established killing centers in
German-occupied Poland, where the Jewish population was both relatively numerous and
densely settled. They deported Jews there, primarily by rail, from all over German-occupied
Europe. Carbon monoxide gas or Zyklon B gas (hydrogen cyanide) were the primary methods
of murder.
In late 1942 and early 1943, Soviet forces counterattacked and began liberating territory from
German domination. In the west, Allied forces invaded Sicily and the Italian mainland that
summer. In June 1944, Allied forces landed in northern France, beginning the liberation of
Western Europe. Meanwhile, from the east, Soviet forces reached Germany's eastern borders.
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Before World War II, more than half of the world's Jewish population lived in Europe. Most Jews
lived in eastern Europe, primarily in the Soviet Union and Poland.
The Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933. The Germans moved to extend their power
in central Europe, annexing Austria and destroying Czechoslovakia.
Germany invaded Poland in 1939, beginning World War II. Over the next two years, German
forces conquered most of Europe. The Germans established ghettos in occupied eastern
territories, isolating and persecuting the Jewish population.
Nazi anti-Jewish policy expanded with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Mobile killing
units murdered Jews, Roma (also called Gypsies), Soviet political commissars, and others.
The Germans and their collaborators deported Jews to killing centers in occupied Poland. At the
largest killing center, Auschwitz-Birkenau, transports arrived almost daily from across Europe.
By war's end, almost six million Jews and millions of others had perished in the Holocaust.
Postwar Jewish Population, ca. 1950: 3.5 million