Essential Questions:

In what ways did Germany persecute Jews in the 1930s?

How did Germany's policies toward Jews develop from murder into genocide?

Directions:

Read the lesson text.
Watch the video about Kristallnacht -- it provides a good summary of some of the main points of the text if you are confused!
Take the quiz -- be sure to answer the short answer question.

The Nazi Campaign Against the Jews

Hitler came to power in the midst of the Great Depression, promising to end reparations, create jobs, and defy the hated Versailles treaty by rearming Germany. Hitler also played on anti-Semitism, which had existed for centuries in Europe. Hitler saw Jews as a separate, inferior race whom he blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I. He launched a campaign against the Jews, which began with persecution and escalated to mass murder.

Early Persecution

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 put Nazi racist ideology into practice. They removed citizenship from German Jews and banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews. Before long, the Nazis imposed other restrictions that forced Jews from their jobs and homes and embarked on escalating violence and terror against Jews. Schools and the Hitler Youth Movement taught children that Jews were “polluting” German society and culture.

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Anti-Semitic propaganda triggered one of the most violent early attacks on Jews. In November 1938, Nazi-led mobs smashed windows, looted, and destroyed Jewish homes, businesses, and places of worship. This wave of violence in Germany and Austria became known as Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass.

WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW: It provides an excellent summary of increasing Nazi persecution of the Jews, and describes the "Night of Broken Glass" -- when the Nazi’s carefully organized the destruction of thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, while police and fire brigades stood by and did nothing.

Nazi Concentration Camps

After gaining power in 1933, the Nazis began rounding up political opponents and placing them in concentration camps, detention centers for civilians who were considered enemies of the state. Before long, they were sending Jews, communists, and others they despised to these camps. By 1934, Hitler had given Heinrich Himmler the power to take full control of the concentration camps throughout Germany.

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Weeks after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the first concentration camps were opened. Originally, the labor camps were created as a place to detain real and perceived political opponents of Nazi policy.

After World War II began, the Nazis built many more camps for Jews from Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe as well as resistance fighters, Roma (Gypsies), Slavs, and other “racially undesirable elements.” The physically and mentally disabled, homosexuals, and ordinary criminals were also sent to the camps. So, too, were political and religious leaders who spoke out against the Nazis.

During the war, Nazis used people in the camps as forced laborers, who had to produce weapons and other goods for the German war effort. They faced brutal mistreatment, hunger, disease, and execution. Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered.

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Brutal Medical Experiments

In some camps, Nazi doctors conducted painful and deadly medical experiments on prisoners. They tested dangerous new drugs on prisoners and tried out treatments designed to help Axis forces survive injuries. They also ran experiments to try to prove Nazi racial ideas.

Josef Mengele, a physician at the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, conducted experiments to see how different ethnic groups responded to contagious diseases such as malaria or yellow fever. Still other experiments were linked to the Nazi goal of sterilizing people they claimed were “inferior races.”

Hitler’s “Final Solution”

As Nazi troops advanced into Eastern Europe, they forced Jews in Poland and elsewhere to live in ghettos, or restricted areas where they were sealed off from the surrounding city. By 1941, however, Hitler and other Nazi had devised what they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish question.” Their goal was the extermination of all European Jews. This campaign of genocide eventually became known as the Holocaust.

Hitler took steps to carry out his Final Solution. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, mobile killing units followed the German army and murdered over a million Jewish men, women, and children in Eastern Europe.

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Hitler then had six “death camps” built in Poland. There, the Nazis shipped Jews and others marked for extermination from all over occupied Europe. Nazi engineers designed efficient means of killing millions of men, women, and children.

As the prisoners reached the camps, they were stripped of their clothes and valuables. Their heads were shaved. Guards separated men from women, and children from their parents. The young, elderly, and sick were murdered immediately. Falsely told they were to be disinfected, they were herded into fake “shower rooms” and gassed. Then their bodies were burned in specially designed crematoriums. The Nazis worked younger, healthier prisoners to death or used them for their inhumane “medical” experiments.

By June 1945, the Nazis had massacred more than six million Jews. Almost as many other “undesirable” people were killed as well.

Use the blue bars at the bottom of the slides to click through the presentation below to get a preview of what life was like inside a Nazi Concentration Camp.