Nazi Germany and the Jews: 1933-1945

The Jews reacted to growing persecution and segregation by intensifying all possible aspects of internal Jewish life, which explains both the number and the diversity of meetings, lectures, dances, and so on; these offered some measure of sanity and dignity, but meant more trouble for the Gestapo.

There was a measure of similarity in the way average Germans and average Jews reacted.

The ultrareligious part of the community even greeted the new situation. On September 19, 1935, Der Israelit, the organ of Orthodox German Jewry, after expressing its support for the idea of cultural autonomy and separate education, explicitly welcomed the interdiction of mixed marriages.

“They can condemn us to hunger but they cannot condemn us to starvation.”26

Between the summer of 1936 and the spring of 1939, the battle lines drawn in Spain were the explicit and tacit points of reference for the ideological confrontations of the time.

Even the president of the United States was deceived. In October of that year, Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress, was invited to meet with Roosevelt at Hyde Park. When the conversation turned to Germany, the president cited two people who had recently “toured” Germany and reported to him that “the synagogues were crowded an

The presence of Jews in public swimming pools was a major theme, second only to outright race defilement, in the Nazis’ pornographic imagination: It expressed a “healthy” Aryan revulsion at the sight of the Jewish body, the fear of possible contamination resulting from sharing the water or mingling in the pool area and, most explicitly, the sexual

‘I will never agree,’ he shouted, as if he were addressing an open-air meeting, ‘to the existence of two kinds of law for German nationals. There is an immense amount of unemployment in Germany, and I have, for instance, to turn away youths of pure German stock from higher education. There are not enough posts for the pure-bred Germans, and the Jew

Hitler informed the cabinet of the planned boycott of Jewish-owned businesses on March 29, telling the ministers that he himself had called for it. He described the alternative as spontaneous popular violence.