Persecution of minorities

What was the percentage of Jewish believers among the total German population?

Less than 1%

How long had Jews been living in German land for?

1600 years, so they were integrated into the community

Where in society were most Jews?

Middle class

What jobs did many Jews have?

Doctors, lawyers, bankers etc

Were most Jews religious or secular?

Secular

What does secular mean?

Religious by culture rather than choice

What percentage of Jews living in Germany fled to other countries?

80%

What was Nazi racial belief?

The Aryan race was superior while all other groups were inferior and therefore a threat to the purity of the Aryan people

How did the Nazis persecute minorities?

They implemented laws and inhumanised Jews from 1933

What major plan was made in 1941?

The Final Solution

How did the Nazis spread antisemitic views across Germany?

Through the control of education and the media

What happened in 1933?

The Nazis ordered a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, books with Jewish authors were burned publicly, Jewish civil servants, lawyers and teachers were sacked, and race science lessons were introduced in schools to indoctrinate children, which taught that Jews were sub-human.

What were the Nuremberg Laws?

Introduced in 1935, they formalised anti-semitism into the Nazi state by stripping Jews of their German citizenship, outlawing marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans, and removing all civil and political rights from Jews

What laws were introduced in 1938?

Jews could not be doctors, Jews had to add the name Israel or Sarah to their name, Jewish children were forbidden to go to school

What was Kristallnacht?

Meaning ‘the night of broken glass’, it was the day that the SS organised attacks on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues due to the assassination of the German ambassador in France by a Jew

What laws were introduced in 1939?

Jews were forbidden to own a business or a radio

What were Jews left with by the outbreak of WW2?

They held no rights - they were stateless (since they weren’t citizens of Germany any longer despite living there still), their employment options were severely restricted (and the choices they still had were low-pay, degrading work unlike the educated, stimulating and challenging jobs such as lawyers that they had previously possessed), and they feared for their safety and their lives due to the horrors they had witnessed happening to their family members and their businesses.