Permanent exhibit - Room 4, part 2
Racist Policy and the persecution of Jews in Germany 1933-1939, part 2
4.5
Flight and Expulsion
NS government policy initially aimed to force the Jewish population to emigrate by excluding them from society and depriving them of rights. Yet at the same time increased poverty and innumerable regulations posed obstacles to emigration.
Directly after the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria in March 1938 all anti-Jewish provisions took effect there too. Terror and immense pressure were intended to force Austrian Jews to emigrate immediately. Fewer and fewer countries were willing to take in Jews. The refugee conference at Evian in July 1938 was unsuccessful.
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Adolf Eichmann in the courtyard of the Ministry of the Interior in Vienna, 18 March 1938
In August 1938 the Central Office for Jewish Emigration was set up in Vienna. As its director, Adolf Eichmann had the task of forcing and coordinating Jewish emigration. In January 1939 the Reich Office for Jewish Emigration, headed by Reinhard Heydrich, was established in Berlin and in July of the same year a Central office in Prague along the lines of the Viennese office. |
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Adolf Eichmann to the headquarters of the SD (SS Security Service) with reference to the expulsion of Jews from Austria, 21 October 1938
“Re: emigration of Jews from Austria You are hereby informed that the number of Jews whom the Central Office for Jewish Emigration has got to emigrate has increased to 350 per day. The exact number of persons of Jewish faith to have emigrated from Austria up to 30 September 1938 is 38,000. (…) Of these 38,000 Jews, around 15,000 are in European Countries, 2,103 have gone to Palestine, 3,220 to South America and 18,500 have emigrated to other overseas countries.
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“The emigration of Jews from Germany should be promoted with all means possible. A Reich Office for Jewish Emigration is being set up within the Ministry of the Interior, staffed by representatives of departments involved in this matter. The Reich Office shall assume the following responsibilities for the territory of the entire Reich: 1) to take all measures to promote increased Jewish emigration (…); 2) to coordinate emigration, which includes giving preference to the emigration of poorer Jews; 3) to speed up the emigration process in particular cases (…). The Reich Office shall he managed by the Head of the Security Police. (…) [signed] Göring” |
Hermann Göring to Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick with reference to the establishment of the Reich Office for Jewish Emigration, 24 January 1939
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Der Stürmer, special edition “Madagascar”, 1938
In the interwar period, the French, British and Polish governments toyed with the idea of settling European Jews on the island of Madagascar in south-east Africa. In 1937, Poland sent a team of experts there to investigate the possibility of moving Polish Jews to the island. These plans also provoked the interest of the NS-propaganda. |
4.6
The November Pogrom
At the end of October 1938 the Gestapo deported around 17,000 Jews of Polish citizenship to Germany’s eastern border. On 7 November 1938 Herschel Grynszpan, whose family were among the deported, attacked a German diplomat in Paris. Hitler and Minister for Propaganda Joseph Goebbels used the diplomat’s death as a pretext to launch a pogrom throughout the Reich. On the night of 9-10 November 1938, plain-clothed SA and SS men destroyed and devastated synagogues and shops. Around 100 Jews were killed and around 30,000 sent to concentration camps. The Jews were made to pay for the damage caused by the pogrom night themselves. In addition, an “atonement payment” of one billion Reichsmark was imposed on the Jewish population.
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Jewish men from Baden Baden are taken away to the concentration camp at Dachau, 10 November 1938
Directly after the November pogrom around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested by the police and Gestapo using prepared lists and transported to the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Only those who could prove that their emigration from the German Reich was imminent could hope for a speedy release. |
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Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 13. November 1938
“Göring decrees: atonement payment of one billion from Jews in Germany” |
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4.7
Exclusion from Professional and Economic Life
After the pogrom the process of “Aryanising” the remaining Jewish businesses in the German Reich was accelerated. The owners were forced to sell, generally for a fraction of the actual value. Jewish doctors and lawyers were banned from practising. Only in exceptional cases could they practise as Krankenbehandler (carers for the sick) and Konsulenten (legal advisers) for Jews. Countless regulations further restricted the opportunities for Jews to make a living. They were obliged to carry out forced labour in “Jewish work brigades”. The process of forcing families to live together in “Jewish houses” began at the start of 1939.
Signs on Jewish doctor´s surgeries with the text „Only authorised to treat Jews, no date
4.8 Racial Policy and Murder of the Disabled
National Socialist racial policy was also directed against other minorities. The “purity of the race” was to be maintained through targeted selection. Anthropologists and human geneticists compiled “racial biology files”. Pseudo-scientific calculations and investigations were carried out to prove alleged racial differences.
Preparations to compile a systematic list of all mentally and physically disabled persons and persons with psychological illnesses in mental hospitals and care homes began in 1938. After the invasion of Poland Hitler ordered their systematic murder.
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Front page of the Neues Volk journal, 1938 |
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Propaganda poster in preparation for the murder of the sick, around 1938
“This hereditarily sick person costs the Volksgemeinschaft 60,000 RM for life. Comrade, it’s your money too.” |
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“ 1. Secure the eternity of your people through having a large number of children. 2. German men, respect and preserve every woman as a potential mother of German children. 3. German women, never forget your ultimate task of preserving the German race. 4. Spare your children the fate of having mixed blood. 5. Keep German blood pure. 6. Anyone without German blood is a racial alien. 7. Uphold your honour and your race when encountering racial aliens (Volksfremde). 8.
German girls, your reservations towards racial aliens are not an
insult. 9. Protecting your own blood does not mean despising other peoples. 10. Keeping blood pure is in the interests of all worthy races. 11. Keeping blood pure is not a private matter but the natural duty of every German citizen to his people. 12. Be proud to be German!” |
Propaganda sheet on National Socialist racial theory, around 1935
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"Euthanasia” decree from Adolf Hitler, 1 September 1939 “Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr Brandt MD have the responsibility of increasing the authority of certain doctors to be designated by name so that persons who, according to human judgement, are incurably ill can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition, be granted a mercy death. A. Hitler”
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In November 1936 the “Racial Hygiene” Institute was set up within the Reich Health Ministry, headed by Robert Ritter, a paediatrician and neurologist from Tübingen. The Institute collected data on the approximately 30,000 Sinti and Roma living in Germany. These were to be isolated in work camps and sterilised so that they would die out.
Text: Dr. Thomas Rink
