1940-41 - The Spreading War and Development of Anti-Semitic Policy

The Nazi-Soviet Pact

• August 1939

• Concluded by Hitler and Stalin - leader of the communist USSR

• Guaranteed that the USSR would not intervene when Germany invaded Poland

• The Pact was only ever intended to be temporary

Operation Barbarossa

• The Nazi-Soviet Pact was only ever intended to be a temporary truce

• In October 1940, Hitler started detailed planning for the conquest of the USSR

• Launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941

• German armies swept across USSR

• Occupied territories in eastern Poland, the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), western Russia and Ukraine

• Made complete victor seem certain

Impact of German invasion of the USSR on Jewish policy

• The German invasion of western USSR in 1941 brought more than 3 million Soviet Jews under German control

• Before the invasion even launched, Hitler issued the ‘elimination’ of the ‘Bolshevik-Jewish intelligentsia’

• This made it clear that in numerous directives that the war was to be one of ‘extermination’ of Germany’s racial enemies

• There was no explicit Hitler order in June 1941 to kill all Soviet Jews - however there was an atmosphere in which troops saw this as the overall mission

• July 1941 - Goering issued an order to kill communist commissars and Jewish sympathisers

Isolating the Jews from German society by late 1941

• Radio sets confiscated from Jews - banned from buying radios in November 1939

• Banned from buying chocolate in December 1939

• 1940, Jews were excluded from wartime rationing of clothing and shoes

• July - order limited them to entering shops at restricted times only (in Berlin was 4pm-5pm)

• 1941 - regulations tightened to require Jews to have a police permit to travel

• December 1941 - compelled Jews in Germany to wear the yellow Star of David - already the case with Jews in occupied territories