blog post for Nov. 19th

Once the Nazis gained power in Germany in 1933, how did they move against the Jews? 

Before Hitler’s rise to power, he vowed to isolate the Jews and shun them away from the German public sphere. This later became the central idea for the Nazi party. In Hitler’s Twenty- five point program, he expresses their plans for the Jews of Germany: “Only a member of the [German] race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently no Jew can be a member of the race.” Because of the Nazi centralization and Hitler's rise to power, this ideal escalated to full enforcement against the Jews. People began to openly hate the Jewish people. For instance, on April 4, 1933, Bishop Otto Dibelius, the leading protestant clergyman in Germany, expressed his support for the Nazi party by stating, “I have always considered myself an anti-Semite.” As the societal structure in Germany began to accept widespread anti-Semitism, widening exclusion, public humiliation and physical terror were experienced everywhere. The German government sought to prosecute the Jews without harming Germany's international reputation and economic recovery. Thus the anti-Jewish campaign moved to berlin in Nazi Germany and began to create a rift in the Jewish economy. In 1934, 20 percent of the German Jewry did not have an income and slowly became impoverished. Nazi Germans began to Ayranize all Jewish businesses. They had single handedly forced this transfer and outright robbed Jewish property and their businesses. By 1938 between 60 and 70% of German Jewish businesses had shut down. In addition, on May 10 1933, universities all over Germany banded together to burn the books created by Jewish and anti-Nazi authors. By 1938 the decertification of all Jewish physicians was set in place and were now considered “sick-treaters”. Hitler became “…increasingly celebrated as a great conqueror. He had rearmed Germany, brought it international recognition, disenfranchisement and robbed the Jews in the absence of meaningful international protest and expanded the country’s territory, all without firing a shot.”