Jews, persecution of

Organized racial hatred directed against Jews and Judaism. As the physical enactment of anti-Semitism, persecution of Jews has been present in European Christian societies for two thousand years. It was at its most widespread and systematic in Germany and occupied Europe during the Third Reich, (1933-45); in the Holocaust (Hebrew Shoah), the Nazis and their confederates murdered some 6 million Jewish people, around two-thirds of the entire Jewish population of Europe at that time.

Persecution of the Jewish community was a prominent feature of the Nazi rise to power in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Hitler aired his prejudices against Jews in Mein Kampf (1925-27), and the Nazis spread the myth that they were capitalist profiteers who had benefited from the German defeat in World War I (in fact, many thousands of German Jews had fought and died for their country in the conflict). Nazi stormtroops enforced boycotts of Jewish shops and businesses, and brutally attacked individuals. When Hitler came to power, the persecution became more organized, in line with Nazi pseudo-scientific theories of the racial superiority of ‘Aryan’ Germans over Jewish ‘subhumans’. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 deprived all Jews of German citizenship, and banned citizens from marrying or having any sexual relations with Jews. In November 1938 an official pogrom (Kristallnacht) was orchestrated against Jewish homes, businesses, schools, and synagogues and 30,000 Jews were taken away to concentration camps to prevent them emigrating. Following the German occupation of most of mainland Europe in the early years of World War II, Jewish communities in other countries were forced into ghettos or murdered by special units of the SS. In January 1942 Nazi leaders held a conference at Wannsee, Berlin, to discuss the Final Solution; this meeting set up specific extermination centres throughout the occupied territories. In such camps as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, and Treblinka, inmates were worked to death making munitions or other war materials, while young children, the old, and the sick were summarily gassed before being incinerated in huge crematoria. The genocide was on a vast scale, and was carried out with industrial efficiency.