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The Persecution Begins
On April 7, 1933, shortly after Hitler took power in Germany, he ordered all "non-Aryans" to be removed from government jobs. This order was one of the first moves in the campaign for racial purity that eventually led to the Holocaust. -
Nazis Take Control
The Nazis concentrated on silencing their political opponents- communists, socialists, liberals, and anyone else who spoke out against the government. Once those groups were eliminated they turned against Jews, Gypsies, Freemasons, and Jehovahs Witnesses. They also turned against Germans who found unfit to be part of the "Master Race." -
Jews Targeted
In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship, jobs, and property. To make it easier for the Natzis to identify them, Jews had to wear a bright yellow Star of David attached to their clothing. -
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Kristallnacht
November 9-10, 1938, became known as Kristallnacht, or "Night of Broken Glass." Natzi storm troopers attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogous across Germany. An American who witnessed the violence wrote, "Jewish shop windows by the hundred were systematically and wantonly smashed..... The main streets of the city were positive litter of shattered glass." -
The Plight of the St. Louis
Official indifference to the plight of Germany's Jews was in evidence in the case of the ship St. Louis. This German ocean liner passed Miami in 1939. Although 740 of the liner's 943 passengers has U.S immigartion papers, the Coast Gaurd followed the ship to prevent anyone from disembarking in American. The ship was forced to retun to Europe. -
Final Solution
By 1939 only about a quarter million Jews remained in Germany. But other nations that Hitler occupied had millions more. Obsessed with a desire to rid Europe of its Jews, Hitler imposed what he called the "Final Solution", a policy of genocide, the deliberate and systematic killing of an enitre population. Gypsies, Freemasons, Jehovahs Witnesses, communists, and more were targeted. Concentration camps were labor camps. -
Death Camps
The first Chelmno began operating in 1941, before meeting Wannsee. Each had several huge gas chambers in which as many as 12,000 people killed a day. When they got to Auschwitz they were separated to those who were strong enough to work and those who would die that day. -
The Final Stage
The Final Solution reached its final stage in early 1942. At a meeting held in Wannsee, a lakeside suburb near Berlin, Hitler's top officials agreed to begin a new phase of the mass muder of Jews. To mass slaughter and starvation they would add a third method of killing, muder by poison gas.
