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Sunday, July 21, 2024

After World War I With Reformed Judaism, Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                    

                                    The Fasanenstrasse Synagogue in Berlin, in Nazi Germany  which the included Austria and the Sudetenland                                         

The 19th century in Germany, there was the attempt to adjust religious forms to  German life which resulted  in the emergence of Reform Judaism.    The rapid progress stimulated  jealousy and resentment  that was seen in the new radical anti-Semitism.  Also what happened was the de facto exclusion of  professing Jews from political, military, and academic appointments.  

The downfall of the German Empire in 1918 and the establishment of The Republic led to real equality.  Under the Weimar Republic, the Jews of Germany attained great achievement in all spheresl.

Members of the SA picketing in front of a Jewish place of business with placards saying "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!" during the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, 1 April 1933

Anti-Semitism  of the most extreme type  had then become the most motive force of the Nazi movement under Adolf Hitler who came to power in 1933. The process of excluding Jews from German life and the organization of Concentration Camps began immediately resulting in a large scale emigration from the country, even a difficult process as the German authority put up a process to slow it down.  The Nazi Party was one of several far-right political parties active in Germany after the end of the First World War. The party platform included removal of the Weimar Republic, rejection of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, radical antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism. They promised a strong central government, increased Lebensraum (living space) for Germanic peoples, formation of a Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) based on race, and racial cleansing via the active suppression of Jews, who would be stripped of their citizenship and civil rights.

The SA had nearly three million members at the start of 1934.  The Sturmabteilung (German: [ˈʃtʊʁmʔapˌtaɪlʊŋ]; SA; literally "Storm Division" or Storm Troopers) was the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It played a significant role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1935, conditions were made even  more difficult by the NUREMBERG LAWS, but with admirable courage and resourcedfulness, The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. The 2) two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens. The remainder were classed as state subjects without any citizenship rights. A supplementary decree outlining the definition of who was Jewish was passed on 14 November, and the Reich Citizenship Law officially came into force on that date.

German Jewry began to adjust its life to the changed circumstances.  This is an admirable ability, but so much like the Jews living in Gaza's border today who quickly adjusted to the bombing into their neighborhoods, taking it in their stride when people have a right not to live in such circumstances.

Soon after liberation, a Soviet physician examines Auschwitz camp survivors. Poland, February 18, 1945.

This photograph is a still image from Soviet film of the liberation of Auschwitz.

 

By 1938 it was almost impossible for potential Jewish emigrants to find a country willing to take them. Mass deportation schemes such as the Madagascar Plan proved to be impossible for the Nazis to carry out, and starting in mid-1941, the German government started mass exterminations of European Jews.                                               

                     Hajj-Amin-al-Husayni-meets-Hitler in Berlin:  When Husseini eventually met with Hitler and Ribbentrop in 1941, he assured Hitler that "The Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies... namely the English, the Jews, and the Communists".Hitler was pleased with him, considering him "the principal actor in the Middle East" and an Aryan because of al-Hussaini's fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes.
Interior of a synagogue destroyed during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). Dortmund, Germany, November 1938.

There began riots on November 9, 1938;   Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom, was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938.  Almost all synagogues were destroyed in this rioting.  Wholesale arrests of Jews occurred for not reason other than being Jews.  

Werner Oster's father had been a soldier in WWI, but was a Jew.  He was forced to scrub the street with a toothbrush, an act to demean him, embarrass him, make fun of him before he was beaten up.  Jews suffered the imposition of a confiscatory levy which ended the possibility to maintain an organized Jewish life.  Emigration was limited by the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 when Germany entered


Poland.  

By 1941, the wearing of the star was enforced in Germany.  By , wholesale deportations to Poland started, where in the following year the policy of physical annihilation/murdering  began to be carried into effect.  

The Jewish population of Greater Germany in 1938 was about 540,000.  By September 1939, the number had been halved, and by 1942 almost none remained .  By 1990 when Germany reunited , there were 28,000 in the Federal Republic  (West Germany)  and 400  in the Democratic Republic  (East Germany) since many had returned.  Many of the returned Jews came from Eastern European countries after World War II.  Communities are to be found in Berlin, Frankfort, and Munich, and several other places with a center in Dusseldorf. 

In 1965, diplomatic relations were established between Israel and West Germany.  


 

Resource: 

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/film/hajj-amin-al-husayni-meets-hitler

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