Non-Jewish hostility towards Jews has its roots in antiquity: the monotheistic Jewish religion was incompatible not only with the predominant polytheistic religions of other Semitic peoples but also with Roman state doctrine. The problematic relationship between the Jews and the Roman imperial cult led to conflicts and uprisings that ended with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, the loss of sovereignty, and the expulsion of large parts of the Jewish population from Judea. The Jews scattered far and wide to many parts of the Roman empire (‘diaspora’). Jewish life also became established in the Roman territories of what was to become Germany.
In medieval times, the Jews in most European countries were forced to lead a marginalized existence. Religious rivalry, this time with monotheistic Christianity, meant that they were only permitted to live on the fringes of Christian society. Their lives in the medieval cities were made more difficult by all kinds of harassment: they usually lived in segregated residential areas, were often forced to practice professions denied to Christians (including money-lending), and were stigmatized by being made to wear identifying marks such as Jewish hats or patches of colored fabric. Permission just to take up residence in an area was granted entirely at the discretion of the territorial overlords or city fathers, and sometimes had to be bought with exorbitant sums of money. In times of crisis, this permission was often revoked with immediate effect; the Jews were made scapegoats for war, disease, conflagrations, crop failures and other hardships, and expelled from their homes or even murdered.
Until the 19th century, however, anti-Jewish hostility was motivated solely by religion. ‘The Jews’ were mainly accused of killing Jesus Christ and refusing to accept the new religion of Christianity. The restrictions imposed by society dominated the everyday lives of Jews in the German territories until well into the 19th century. Jewish life was always precarious: although synagogues and Jewish cemeteries were built in many places, the life of the Jewish community was repeatedly disrupted or completely destroyed by pogroms or expulsions. The lack of freedom and social recognition and the hope of a better life overseas drove many of them to emigrate to the United States or other parts of the world. A considerable number converted to Christianity to gain a foothold in German middle-class society.
It was not until more than two decades after the French Revolution of 1789 that the concept of emancipation found expression in the so-called ‘Jew edicts’ of individual German states, including Prussia (1812) and Bavaria (1813), which granted the Jews modern civic rights. However, Jewish people were still far from achieving full legal equality, let alone social recognition.
Only when the Reich was established in 1871 were German Jews and/or Germans of Jewish descent granted the same rights as all other German citizens. Nevertheless, certain professions, such as the officer corps or the civil service, were denied to them due to subtle discrimination. As a result, many of them switched to independent professions such as medicine and law. In 1871, around half a million of the 41 million citizens of the German Reich were Jewish. Despite making up such a small part of the population, their contribution to industrialization and economic growth was great, as were their cultural and social achievements, especially in the area of welfare. The German victory over France and the establishment of the Reich in 1871 encouraged an exaggerated form of nationalism among some parts of the population; this was based on the supposed superiority of German descent and an emphasis on the German community of blood. The modernization caused by industrialization and the rapid population growth led to fear of unemployment, overpopulation, and shortage of space, which in turn encouraged polemic against minorities and immigration.
Journalist Wilhelm Marr protested against the legal equality of Jews. In 1879, he published a pamphlet titled The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism – Viewed from a Non-Religious Perspective. In it, Marr replaced the traditional, religious justification of ‘enmity towards Jews’ with an etnhic-chauvinist and racially motivated ‘antisemitism’, a term that had already seen sporadic use but has long been attributed to Marr himself as a consequence of the widespread distribution of this text. Over the centuries, the Jews had always been accused of being ‘different’, whether in their faith, their traditions, or their culture, while the antisemites were suspicious and critical of their integration and adaptation to German society and the part they played in the country’s political, economic, and social life. Resentment against Jews was widespread in Wilhelmine society. Nationalist and liberal viewpoints clashed during the Berlin antisemitism controversy (1879–1881) ignited by conservative historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who opposed Jewish emancipation, held the Jews responsible for social and economic ills, and inveighed against Jewish immigration. Antisemites agitated for the revocation of equal rights for Jews. Although this did not lead to the curtailment of Jewish rights, the German authorities expelled East European Jews and imposed much tighter restrictions on the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. Antisemitic parties such as Adolf Stoecker’s Christian Social Party and German Conservative Party achieved victory in individual Reichstag constituencies for the first time.
Jewish soldiers fought in German combat formations during the First World War; approx. 12,000 of them fell in the service of the Wilhelmine Empire. Jews also managed to rise through the officers’ hierarchy with increasing success, while the political truce initially appeared to deter even antisemites from criticizing the concept of Jewish equality. Yet the accusation of ‘shirking’ soon reared its head. The ‘census of Jews’ in the army showed that the accusation was completely unfounded, since the proportion of Jewish soldiers among the troops matched the proportion of Jews among the population; however, the non-publication of the results fueled rumors that the Jews were entirely to blame for the war and consequently for Germany’s military defeat and economic misery. ‘War profiteers’, ‘racketeers’, ‘usurers’ and ‘inflation profiteers‘ were among the antisemitic epithets most commonly applied to Jews during the Weimar Republic, leading to a large number of radical and violent attacks on Jews as early as the 1920s. The first calls to boycott Jewish businesses dated from those years. Antisemitic, ethnic-chauvinist newspapers such as the Völkische Beobachter published by the Nazi Party began agitating for boycotts of Jewish businesses from 1927 on. The Depression of 1929 was grist to the mill of the antisemites, who used the simplest explanatory models to pin all the blame on the Jews.
Right from his first public appearances as a political agitator, Adolf Hitler realized that antisemitic polemic was an effective way to gain supporters and mobilize the masses. Both verbal threats of violence and violent action were hallmarks of Nazi policy from the early 1920s on.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the floodgates opened. Negative demographic developments (‘mixed marriages’, conversions to Christianity, low birth rates, emigration) caused the number of Jewish Community members in the Reich to stagnate at approximately half a million, while their percentage of the population as a whole, which by now had risen to 60 million, continued to shrink. The first victims of Nazi violence invariably included Jews, who—like Felix Fechenbach—were also political opponents and were murdered on their way to prison or in prison. The boycott of April 1, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, and the Nuremberg laws of September 1935 deprived the Jews of their hard-won civil rights, despoiled them, isolated them socially, and sanctioned discrimination against them. Marriages with ‘Aryan’ Germans were forbidden, membership of the ‘people’s community’ made impossible. Jewish physicians and attorneys were only permitted to treat Jewish patients and accept Jewish clients, while Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend ‘German’ schools. Signs banning Jews from entry were posted in towns, inns, parks, and public baths.
The November pogrom marked the transition from discrimination to unbridled violence all over the Reich. There had been numerous outbreaks of antisemitic violence throughout 1938. Political events such as the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland had triggered waves of nationalist enthusiasm while fueling fears of war, thus inciting local acts of antisemitic violence in many places. 1938 saw many Jewish houses defaced with graffiti and many synagogues and cemeteries demolished. The pogrom started in Kurhessen and Saxony-Anhalt on November 7, 1938 and—fueled by Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and numerous Nazi Party functionaries—spread throughout the Reich on November 9, 1938. Hundreds of synagogues and some 7500 Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed in many places all over the Reich. Even Nazi sources spoke of more than 90 fatalities in the Reich, although the actual number of murders was probably around 400.
The ghettoization of Jews in so-called ‘Jew houses’ throughout the Reich, the wearing of the yellow star of David from September 1941, and the ban on Jewish emigration from the Reich were all further steps towards the complete, systematic annihilation of Jewry. Mass shootings of Jews had been taking place on Soviet territory since the summer of 1941. The systematic mass extermination of the Jewish population of the Third Reich got under way with the deportations, which began in the fall of 1941 and—with a very few exceptions who managed to remain hidden—carried off all German, Austrian, and Czech Jews who were not protected from deportation by ‘mixed marriages’. The deportees were either shot immediately, as with the first transport of Munich’s Jews to Kaunas, Lithuania, in November 1941, or sent to ghettos in the Baltic, the Warthegau region, Poland and Belarus, which were usually already overcrowded with Jews local to those areas. The Jews deported from central Europe usually succumbed to the utterly intolerable living conditions within a few weeks, while the survivors were gassed to death at extermination camps. The first of these extermination camps was built in Chelmno (Warthegau) at the end of 1941; others followed from the spring of 1942. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were built from the ground up in the General Governorate, while Maidanek (also in the General Governorate) and Auschwitz (in annexed Polish Upper Silesia) were expanded to become extermination camps. The Theresienstadt ghetto (and concentration camp) in the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia served the Nazi rulers as an ‘anteroom’ to Auschwitz.
From the spring of 1942, most of the trains carrying deportees from central Europe went straight to the extermination camps, while the systematic murders gradually spread throughout the German-occupied territories. In the summer of 1944, the last remaining ghettos—including Litzmannstadt in the Warthegau region and Kauen (Kaunas) in Lithuania—were liquidated. Women, children, and elderly people who until this time had survived the various Nazi extermination campaigns in hiding or by good fortune were deported to the extermination camps. Only men and women who were capable of work and had no children survived the selection process in concentration and extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Stutthof. During the final phase of the war in 1944/1945, the Jews in concentration camps and external work details were forced to perform the heaviest manual labor. The death toll in these last few months was higher than average: intolerable conditions in the overcrowded concentration camps, hopelessly inadequate food supplies, unimaginably arduous work duty in entrenchment and bomb disposal commandos or for the Nazis’ futile armament efforts, rampant disease, the unchecked whims of the SS guards, the chaos and violence during the evacuation of the camps from the fall of 1944 and the winter of 1944/1945, and the death marches to the west all lessened their chances of survival. The Jewish inmates at the very bottom of the ‘camp hierarchy’ of the concentration camps were least likely to survive. In all, around 6 million Jews had been murdered by the Nazi regime by the end of the Second World War.
