THE JEWS IN GERMANY

Despite being part of German life for centuries, the Nazis considered Jews to be a foreign race that should be excluded from the German racial community. Anti-Semitic attacks were not new, but, if the State had defended them from aggressions, since 1933 the Nazi government power also turned against the Jews by directing the harassment of this community.

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Some Germans did their best to help their Jewish friends. But many others took advantage of the situation by obtaining promotions in the positions of civil servants, lawyers, doctors and teachers when Jews were dismissed from their jobs; taking over the businesses, shops and homes of Jewish families who had been forced to sell their belongings, enriching themselves in various ways at the expense of their neighbours.

Nazi ideology sought to unite Germans around a single racial community in which each member's position was determined by the purity of his or her "Aryan" lineage. Among the most relevant means used to achieve the desired transformation, were concentration camps, which allowed victims to be confined outside the justice system. If, at first, these camps were intended to "re-educate" the political opposition, represented by communists, social democrats, pacifists and a modest minority of religious leaders, they eventually became dumping grounds for what they considered "undesirable" such as homosexuals, people of antisocial behaviour or the Roma.

Jews, who in 1933 numbered less than one percent of Germany's population, had no place in the Nazi State. Through economic boycotts, mass dismissals, legal restrictions, and acts of violence expressly directed against them such as the Kristalnacht, the government began to expel them from society as early as 1933, de facto with the tacit support of the general population.