Section D: the persecution of minorities 

Nazi racial beliefs 

1. The Nazis believed that the German state would be stronger if it had a stronger, more racially pure population. This was based on the ideas of eugenics and racial hygiene. 

2. Eugenics is the mistaken science of selective breeding which was an 1880s development of Darwin’s theories of evolution applied to producing ‘better’ human beings. 

3. The Nazis developed by encouraging the ‘best’ parents to breed and sterilising those deemed ‘unsuitable’ to prevent them having children. 

4. The Nazis believed the Aryan race was superior to all others. 

5. Racial hygiene was taught in schools to encourage Aryan Germans only to reproduce with other ‘Aryans’ to create ‘pure’ offspring. Mixed-race marriages were banned in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. 

6. Hitler was a passionate believer in the hierarchy of races and, in Mein Kampf, set out his belief that Aryans were the master race, other races such as the Slavs of Eastern Europe were sub-human (Untermenschen) with gypsies and Jewish people at the bottom of the hierarchy and so therefore ‘Lebensunwertes’ (unworthy of life). 

Anti-Semitism 

1. Anti-Semitism (hatred of Jewish people) had been common in Europe for many centuries.  

2. Nazi ideas to existing anti-Semitism that was largely based on their different religious beliefs and customs, accusations they were to blame for Christ’s death and jealousy of some Jewish people’ success in banking and big business. 

3. Anti-Semitism was already strong in Germany because when Germany had united as a country in 1871, there had been a focus on promoting German nationalism to unite the country against its supposed ‘enemies’ who included Jewish people. 

4. This became worse after World War 1, when Nationalist politicians, including the Nazis, promoted the myth that Jewish people and Communists were responsible for the ‘stab in the back’.  

5. Some anti-Semitic ideas were contradictory. They were accused by of promoting communism across the world, but also of being part of a global capitalist conspiracy to exploit ordinary people.   

6. These ideas became particularly prominent during the Great Depression, when the Jewish people became scapegoats for the economic problems in Germany.  

Treatment of minorities 

Slavic people:  

1. Slavs originally came from Eastern Europe.  

2. Nazi propaganda stressed that Slavs were Untermenschen and that the German people deserved to take their land for Lebensraum (living space). 

Sinti and Roma communities:  

1. The Sinti and Roma communities were known as ‘gypsies’ by the Nazis.  

2. They lived a nomadic lifestyle, travelling from place to place and were seen as a threat to racial purity who did not contribute taxes.  

3. There were 26,000 gypsies in Germany in 1933 and many were sent to concentration camps. 

4. From 1938, they were put on a register and tested for racial purity.  

5. From 1939, orders were given for their removal from Germany by deportation. 

Homosexuals: 

1. The Nazis believed gay people lowered moral standards and racial purity.  

2. Laws were strengthened in 1935, with those imprisoned for homosexuality rising from 766 in 1934 to 8000 by 1938.  

3. They were also sent to concentration camps, where 5000 homosexuals died. 

People with disabilities:  

1. The Nazis saw people with disabilities as a burden on society who weakened the purity of the race.  

2. In 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, led to the compulsory sterilisation of 400,000 people who were mentally ill, alcoholic, epileptic, deaf or blind. 

• In 1939, the Nazis ordered a secret programme, known as the T4 programme, to euthanise (murder) children with physical or mental disabilities that led to over 5000 deaths. 

Anti-Semitic persecution of the Jewish people 

1. From the beginning in 1933, a flood of propaganda described Jewish people as ‘vermin’ who were evil and scheming against Germany, despite there only being 437,000 of them in Germany, 0.6% of the population. 

2. On 1 April 1933, there was a one day boycott of all Jewish businesses where SA men stopped people going inside.  

3. Jewish people were also banned in April 1934 from government jobs, the civil service and teaching. 

4. In 1934, Jewish people were banned from parks and swimming pools and some councils provided separate park benches for ‘Germans’ and ‘Jewish people’. 

5. In May 1935, Jewish people were banned from the army. 

6. In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws of September, denied Jewish people German citizenship, including the right to vote, have a passport etc. They were forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with non-Jewish German citizens and they had to wear a yellow star. 

7. There was a brief lull in persecution on account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. 

8. In March 1938, Jewish people had to register all their possessions (to make them easier to confiscate!) 

9. In July 1938 Jewish people were forced to carry separate identity cards. 

10. On 7 November 1938, a 17 year old Polish Jew shot Ernst Von Rath, an official at the German embassy in Paris. Joseph Goebbels used the news of Von Rath’s death to stir up a nationwide campaign of destruction against the Jewish people, which led to… 

11. … on the night of 9-10 November 1938, a wave of violence was unleashed across Germany, mainly by SA and SS men dressed in plain clothes. Hundreds of synagogues, homes and businesses were destroyed, over one hundred Jewish people were killed, and 20,000 were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. This became known as Kristallnacht or ‘Night of Broken Glass’. 

12. By 1939, the Nazis had decided to remove the Jewish people from Germany altogether. In April, they were evicted from their homes and sent to overcrowded ghettoes, awaiting deportation, when World War II broke out in September.