The Years Before the Killing

January 30, 1933

January 30, 1933.

On January 30, 1933, Germany's elderly president, Paul von Hindenburg, named Adolf Hitler Chancellor, the head of the government. It was done by the rules of the Weimar Republic, the democratic system Germany had lived under since 1918, and which was still in force that morning. The advice came from a former chancellor, Franz von Papen. Papen had arranged a deal. Hitler's party, the Nazis (in German, the NSDAP), would hold the chancellorship. Conservative non-Nazis would hold most of the cabinet seats. The conservatives who set this up thought they could control him. Papen boasted that the conservatives had engaged Hitler and would keep him boxed in. They were wrong within weeks.

Germany in early 1933 was a country under heavy strain. The Great Depression began with the American stock-market crash of October 1929. It hit Germany harder than most of Western Europe, because German banks had leaned on short-term American loans that suddenly vanished. By early 1932 roughly 6 million Germans were out of work, about 30 percent of the workforce. The political system was breaking down with the economy. The Nazi Party rode that collapse upward: from 12 seats in 1928, to 107 in September 1930 (the second-largest party), to 230 in July 1932 (the largest). Their support dipped to 196 seats in November 1932. But the older mainstream parties had fallen apart so badly that the Nazis stayed the biggest party even as they slipped.

Germany's Jewish community at that moment numbered about 525,000 people, roughly three-quarters of one percent of a national population of about 65 million. It was a mostly city-dwelling community; about a third lived in Berlin. Jews were well represented in the professions: about 16 percent of Germany's lawyers and about 11 percent of its doctors were Jewish. So were many figures in the universities, the press, and business. They were woven into German civic life. About 100,000 German Jews had served in the Imperial German Army in the First World War. About 12,000 had been killed fighting for Germany. Victor Klemperer’s diaries and other contemporary and later accounts record what most assumed: the Nazi government was a real threat, but Germany's laws and constitution would hold it in check, or the weight of governing would calm it down. Both assumptions were wrong.

The first year

The legal machinery, built in eleven months.

The major steps of the first year of Nazi rule came fast, one after another:

• February 27, 1933, The Reichstag Fire. The German parliament building burned. A young Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested at the scene and later executed. Historians still debate whether he acted alone or whether the Nazi regime had a hand in it. What is certain is what the regime did with it: used the fire as an excuse to suspend Germany's civil liberties overnight.
• February 28, 1933, The Reichstag Fire Decree. Signed by Hindenburg under the emergency powers of Article 48 of the constitution. It suspended the basic protections Germans had counted on: personal freedom, free speech, the right to assemble and organize, privacy of mail and telephone, protection from arbitrary search. And it let the regime take "all necessary measures" against anyone it called an enemy. This decree stayed in force the entire twelve years of Nazi rule. It was the legal ground on which the Gestapo, the secret police, could arrest and jail people without a trial.
• March 5, 1933, Reichstag elections. Held under heavy Nazi intimidation. The Communist Party's campaigning was shut down under the Fire Decree, and the SA, the Nazi paramilitary known as the brownshirts, attacked opposition candidates in the streets. The Nazis won about 43.9 percent of the vote: a large share, but not the majority they had wanted. A coalition with the conservative DNVP gave them a narrow parliamentary majority.
• March 22, 1933, The concentration camp at Dachau opens. Set up by Heinrich Himmler, then the police chief of Munich. Dozens of improvised camps run by the SA and police had already begun operating that spring; Dachau was the first under SS control and the only early camp that ran continuously to the end. Its first prisoners were mostly Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists: political opponents. Jews were among them from the first weeks, held as political prisoners and singled out for the worst treatment; the camp’s first four murdered prisoners, in April 1933, were Jews. Mass imprisonment of Jews as Jews came from 1938. Dachau ran until April 1945, twelve years, and became the model for the whole camp system that followed.
• March 23, 1933, The Enabling Act. Its formal name translates as the "Law for the Removal of the Distress of the People and the Reich." Parliament passed it with the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution. The vote came after Nazi intimidation of the deputies in the room, and after the Communist deputies had been removed. The act let Hitler's cabinet make laws on its own, without parliament, including laws that broke the constitution. This was the legal foundation everything else rested on. Only the 94 Social Democrats present voted no. The Catholic Center Party's yes vote has been argued over by historians ever since.
• April 1, 1933, The boycott of Jewish businesses. Organized by a Nazi Party committee chaired by Julius Streicher and carried out in the streets by the SA and SS. For one day across Germany, brownshirts stood at the doors of Jewish-owned shops, offices, and medical practices, with slogans painted on the windows. It was the regime's first nationwide action against Jews. Ordinary Germans' reactions were mixed: some joined in, some quietly ignored it, and some deliberately shopped at the targeted stores. It did not produce the wave of public agreement the regime had hoped for. It was called off after a single day. But the message had landed: Jews could no longer count on the ordinary protections of German life.
• April 7, 1933, The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. The regime's first major anti-Jewish law. Its "Aryan paragraph" pushed "non-Aryans" out of government jobs. The definition it used, people with at least one Jewish grandparent, set an early legal pattern. The later Nuremberg Laws would refine and expand it. At first there were exceptions for First World War veterans and for men whose fathers or sons had died in the war. President Hindenburg had pushed for them. He personally objected to firing Jewish veterans. Those exceptions were chipped away over 1934–35 and removed by the Nuremberg Laws.
• April 25, 1933, The Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities. Capped new admissions of Jewish students to German schools and universities at 1.5 percent, and total Jewish enrollment at 5 percent.
• May 10, 1933, The book burnings. Coordinated across about 34 German university towns by the Nazi Student Union, working with the Propaganda Ministry. About 25,000 books were burned on Berlin's Opernplatz (today the Bebelplatz) alone, with similar scenes across the country. The targets included Jewish authors (Freud, Einstein, Heine, Schnitzler, Werfel, Zweig, Toller, Tucholsky), Marxist and socialist writers, the pacifist Erich Maria Remarque, and anything the regime branded "un-German." Today the Bebelplatz holds a memorial by the Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman, dedicated in 1995: a glass plate set into the ground, looking down into an empty white library with room for all the burned books.
• July 14, 1933, The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. Authorized the forced sterilization of people the state labeled as carrying "hereditary" diseases. About 400,000 Germans were sterilized under it between 1934 and 1945. It was the opening move toward the later T-4 program, which murdered 70,273 people by its own records in 1940–41, and toward the wider Nazi medical machinery.
• October 4, 1933, The Editor's Law. Barred Jews, and people married to Jews, from German journalism. Within the first year, it ended a long and prominent Jewish presence in the German press.

Behind these laws and the first camps stood a new kind of organization. The SS: the Schutzstaffel, or “protection squad”, had begun in 1925 as a small bodyguard unit for Hitler. In 1929 Heinrich Himmler took it over. It had fewer than 300 men at the time. He began turning it into the core of the Nazi machinery of control: selected by race and loyalty, ranked, uniformed in black, and sworn by a personal oath to Hitler rather than to the German constitution. Its members wore the swastika of the wider Nazi movement and, on the collar, the SS’s own emblem: the doubled Sig rune, the twin angular lightning bolts that formed the “SS” itself. The Totenkopf, or death’s-head, marked the units that guarded the camps.

Over the next few years the SS absorbed the powers of the state itself. Hermann Göring created the Gestapo, the secret state police, in Prussia in 1933. By 1934 Himmler controlled it. In June 1936 he was named Chief of German Police, which placed the Gestapo, the criminal police, and the ordinary uniformed police all under his command alongside the SS. Party organization and state authority had fused into a single apparatus. A separate SS branch, the Death’s-Head units (SS-Totenkopfverbände), ran the concentration camps. From 1941 the SS would also carry out the mass shootings and operate the killing centers. By the late 1930s it was no longer an outlaw party militia but a salaried, uniformed, openly recognized branch of the German state, terror built into the ordinary machinery of government.

The pattern of that first year was the building of a legal machine of persecution through ordinary law-making. The Nazis did not need a secret parallel system. They worked through Germany's existing offices, with the cooperation of the civil service, the courts, the police, the universities, and the medical and legal professions. The machine would grow over the next six years. But its foundations were already in place by the end of 1933: named enemies, suspended liberties, exclusion from jobs and schools, a controlled press, and the power to jail without trial.

The Nuremberg Laws · 1935

The Nuremberg Laws, defining "Jew" in law.

On September 15, 1935, at the Nazi Party's yearly rally in the city of Nuremberg, Hitler announced the laws that turned the persecution into a fixed legal system. They had been building toward this for two and a half years; now it was written into the code:

• The Reich Citizenship Law. It split German residents into two classes: "Reich citizens," who held full rights, and "state subjects," who did not. Only "persons of German or related blood" could be Reich citizens. The effect was to strip German Jews of their citizenship. Later decrees spelled it out: Jews were state subjects, not citizens. That meant they lost the protections citizenship had given them.
• The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. It banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and "citizens of German or related blood." It barred Jews from employing German women under 45 as household servants. It forbade Jews to fly the German flag. Breaking these rules carried penitentiary sentences, and in practice, increasingly, concentration-camp imprisonment after the sentence was served.

The laws raised an obvious question: who counted, legally, as a Jew? A follow-up decree on November 14, 1935 answered it by counting grandparents:

• A person with three or four Jewish grandparents was a "full Jew."
• A person with two Jewish grandparents who practiced Judaism, was married to a Jew, or was born of a marriage to a Jew also counted as a Jew.
• A person with two Jewish grandparents and none of those ties was a "first-degree mixed-race" (in German, Mischling).
• A person with one Jewish grandparent was a "second-degree mixed-race."

With this, the regime had finished defining Jewishness as something inherited by blood. It made no difference whether a person or their family practiced the religion at all. Through ordinary German law-making, a whole category of Germans, identified by ancestry, had been placed outside the protections of citizenship. The world noticed. Western newspapers covered the laws. But no government took action. The same racial rules were soon applied to Roma and to Black Germans, through administrative rulings and the marriage-approval bureaucracy rather than new statutes. By the end of 1935 the racial definition on which everything later rested was fixed in law; the machinery of dispossession and exclusion was built mainly in 1938 and 1939. Historians like Saul Friedländer and Peter Longerich have traced it in detail.

1936

1936, The Olympic pause.

When Berlin hosted the Summer Olympics from August 1 to 16, 1936, the visible persecution went quiet. The regime knew the world's press would be watching, and that the Games would shape how other countries saw it. So it took down the anti-Jewish signs around Berlin for a time. It reined in much of the SA's street violence. It softened the public face of the persecution in the months before and during the Games.

The substance never paused. The Nuremberg Laws stayed in force. Jewish civil servants and professionals kept losing their jobs. The Gestapo kept operating under the Reichstag Fire Decree. What paused was only what visitors could see. Historians point to this as telling. The regime could turn the visibility of its persecution up or down depending on who was watching. That suggests it understood, and feared, what sustained international pressure might do. That pressure never came.

The Berlin Games are best remembered for the four gold medals won by the African-American athlete Jesse Owens, a public answer to Nazi racial theory delivered on the regime's own stage. But the Olympics also handed the regime a stamp of legitimacy in front of the many visitors and readers who took in the coverage. International business and diplomacy with Nazi Germany rolled on through 1936 and 1937, in full view of the persecution.

1937–1938

1937–1938, The pressure increases.

After the Olympics, the persecution sped up again:

• Buchenwald concentration camp opens (July 1937), after Dachau (1933) and Sachsenhausen (1936), built on a hill outside the city of Weimar. It ran until April 1945.
• "Aryanization" of Jewish businesses accelerates. This was the process of forcing Jewish-owned businesses either to sell to "Aryan" buyers at far below their real value or to shut down. By the end of 1938, much of the Jewish economic presence in Germany had been wiped out this way.
• The Decree on the Registration of Jewish Property (April 26, 1938) ordered German Jews to register all property worth more than 5,000 Reichsmarks. The point was to make a list of Jewish wealth for the regime to seize later. It became the basis for the mass confiscations that followed Kristallnacht.
• The "Names Decree" (August 17, 1938) forced German Jews whose given names were not on an official list of “Jewish” names to add a middle name to their papers, "Israel" for men, "Sara" for women, so that any official document would mark them as Jewish.
• The "J" stamp on Jewish passports (October 5, 1938), added at the request of the Swiss government, which wanted to spot Jewish refugees at its border. The red "J" flagged German Jews to foreign immigration officers and made escape harder.
• The destruction of Munich's main synagogue (June 9, 1938), on Hitler's direct order, the first major synagogue the regime destroyed before the war, five months before Kristallnacht.

Austria · March 1938

The persecution reaches Austria.

On March 12, 1938, the German army marched into Austria. The next day Hitler declared the Anschluss, the union of Germany and Austria. About 192,000 Jews lived in Austria. Most, around 170,000, lived in Vienna, with smaller communities in Graz, Linz, and the provinces. Overnight, the German persecution applied to them too.

What happened in Austria was even more violent than the German pattern had been, with more open public participation. Within days, Austrian SA and SS men forced Vienna's Jews into public humiliation and looted Jewish businesses. The scenes are well documented: elderly Jews made to scrub the city's streets on their knees while crowds watched. Ordinary Austrians joined the violence in large numbers. The five years it had taken to build the machine in Germany were matched in Austria in a matter of months.

It was in Vienna, in those months, that Adolf Eichmann set up the new Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He would later organize much of the Nazi deportation system. His system funneled Austrian Jews through a single bureaucratic channel that forced them to emigrate while stripping away their property as they left. It worked faster than the German process, precisely because it was built on confiscation. It became the model for the wider emigration apparatus and, later, the deportation apparatus. About 117,000 Jews left annexed Austria between March 1938 and the outbreak of war in September 1939, most of them processed through Eichmann's office.

Évian · July 1938

Évian, the world declines to help.

In July 1938, prompted by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and by the refugee crisis the Anschluss had set off, representatives of 32 countries met at the resort town of Évian-les-Bains, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, to discuss what to do about Jewish refugees. They talked for nine days, from July 6 to 15. What the conference is remembered for is its failure.

Of the 32 countries, 31 declined to take in more Jewish refugees. The reasons differed but the result was the same. Australia's representative said his country had "no real racial problem" and did not wish "to import one." Britain refused to discuss immigration to Palestine, which it controlled. The United States would not raise its existing immigration quotas, quotas so tight under the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that they weren't even being filled, because officials were slow to grant visas to Jewish applicants. France said it had already taken in many refugees and could not manage more. Country after country said no.

The one real exception was the Dominican Republic, which offered to admit up to 100,000 Jewish refugees as farm settlers. The dictator Rafael Trujillo had his own tangled motives, but the offer was real. In the end several hundred refugees reached the Dominican Republic through a settlement at Sosúa; the rest of the capacity went unused, blocked by visa restrictions, the difficulty of moving refugees across oceans, and the sheer scale of the crisis.

For the Nazi regime, Évian confirmed something useful: the world was not going to take Germany's Jews off its hands. The Nazi press celebrated the failure and read it as a green light. Historians of American refugee policy, David Wyman's Paper Walls (1968) among the foundational accounts, have treated Évian as one of the turning points of these years.

The Polenaktion · October 1938

The expulsion of Polish-born Jews.

On the night of October 28–29, 1938, the Gestapo arrested about 17,000 Polish-born Jews living in Germany. Many had been in Germany for decades and had German-born children. The Gestapo pushed them across the Polish border at the town of Zbąszyń and other crossings. The trigger was a Polish decree of March 1938 that stripped citizenship from Poles who had been out of the country for more than five years. That described exactly these long-settled Polish Jews. Poland wanted to keep them from returning. Germany expelled them before the citizenship change took effect on October 31.

The expulsion was brutal. People were given about an hour to grab what they could carry. The rest was left behind. Polish border guards at first refused to let them in. Thousands were stranded at the frontier for weeks in miserable conditions. Zbąszyń, on the Polish side, took in about 8,000 of them and became a symbol of the whole episode.

Among those expelled were the parents, sister, and brother of Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris. In the first days of November a postcard from his sister reached him, describing the family's expulsion. On November 7, 1938, Grynszpan walked into the German Embassy in Paris and shot a diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. Vom Rath died of his wounds on November 9. The Nazi regime seized on the killing as its excuse for Kristallnacht.

November 9–10, 1938

Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

On the night of November 9–10, 1938, organized anti-Jewish violence swept across Germany, annexed Austria, and the recently annexed Sudetenland (the Czech border region Germany had taken under the Munich Agreement of September 1938, in which Britain and France agreed to let Germany annex it). Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, incited and unleashed it with Hitler’s approval, and the party’s regional machinery carried it into every town. The SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth, and parts of the Nazi apparatus carried it out, with documented participation by ordinary civilians. The name, Kristallnacht, "Crystal Night," or the Night of Broken Glass, comes from the shattered glass that covered the streets after Jewish shops, synagogues, and homes were destroyed.

What the night did:

• Killed. About 91 Jews were killed in the immediate violence, by the Nazi Party’s own internal count, which historians treat as an undercount. Counting deaths in the camp imprisonments that followed and suicides in the days after, the documented toll reaches several hundred; estimates vary among historians.
• Arrested. About 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, and a third camp, Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. Most were released over the following weeks, often only after proving they had a plan to emigrate. The point was to drive Jewish emigration faster.
• Synagogues destroyed. The party’s own report counted 267 synagogues across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland burned or wrecked; later research puts the number of synagogues and prayer rooms destroyed or damaged above a thousand. Much of the German Jewish community's religious life, built over centuries, was destroyed in a single night.
• Businesses destroyed or looted. About 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses were smashed or robbed. The forced-sale process of Aryanization sped up sharply afterward.
• Homes ransacked. Much of the urban Jewish community, especially in Berlin and Vienna, was hit by home invasions, looting, and assaults.

The aftermath turned the violence into outright robbery of the community. On November 12, 1938, the regime ordered German Jews to pay a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks, an "atonement payment" for the damage the regime itself had organized. A decree of December 3, 1938 completed the legal machinery for seizing Jewish businesses. Parallel rules on housing, work, and access to public spaces followed in the months after.

The world reacted more strongly than it had to the Nuremberg Laws, but still not enough. The U.S. ambassador to Germany, Hugh Wilson, was recalled to Washington on November 14, 1938. American and Western European newspapers covered the pogrom. There was public condemnation in democratic countries. Yet immigration policy barely moved. The United States did not raise its quotas. Britain did not widen Palestine immigration. It would restrict it further in the May 1939 White Paper. The Wagner-Rogers Bill would have let 20,000 German Jewish refugee children into the U.S. outside the quota. It died in a Senate committee in 1939, blocked by anti-immigrant and antisemitic opposition.

1939

1939, The doors close.

In the first eight months of 1939, the ways out of Germany shut one by one:

• The January 30, 1939 Reichstag speech. On the sixth anniversary of becoming Chancellor, Hitler made a speech containing what he later called his "prophecy": that if "international Jewish financiers" plunged the world into another war, the result would be "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." It was the regime's anti-Jewish aim stated openly as national policy. Hitler pointed back to this speech again and again during the war to justify the killings.
• The occupation of the Czech lands (March 15, 1939). After the Munich Agreement broke Czechoslovakia apart, the German army occupied the remaining Czech lands, with Slovakia split off as a German satellite state. It created the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and brought about 118,000 more Jews under Nazi rule.
• The May 1939 White Paper. Britain capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at about 75,000 over the next five years. That closed off the escape route at the very moment German Jews most needed it. Historians still debate how much British policy was driven by Arab political concerns, imperial calculation, or antisemitism within parts of the establishment.
• The Reich Association of Jews in Germany (July 4, 1939). A compulsory organization every German Jew had to join, replacing the community's own voluntary institutions. The regime used it as the administrative channel for managing emigration, welfare, and the ongoing dispossession.
• The Hitler-Stalin Pact (August 23, 1939). The non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Its secret clauses divided Poland and Eastern Europe between them, and left Poland diplomatically isolated as the German invasion loomed.
• September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland. The start of the Second World War. German forces crossed the border around 4:45 a.m. Poland held roughly 3.3 million Jews. About 2 million of them, in the west and center, came under Nazi control over the following weeks. The 1.3 million in the east fell under Soviet rule, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and seized them too. The killing operations covered in the Einsatzgruppen Chapter began here. Security Police task forces (Einsatzgruppen) and ethnic-German militias followed the army into Poland, murdering roughly 60,000 Polish civilians by the end of 1939, chiefly the Polish educated classes, and several thousand Jews among them. The far larger killings began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

May 1939

The voyage of the St. Louis.

On May 13, 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis left Hamburg carrying 937 passengers, most of them Jewish refugees fleeing Germany after Kristallnacht. Most held Cuban landing papers they believed would let them off the ship in Havana, with the hope of eventually entering the United States. When the ship reached Havana on May 27, the Cuban government, citing landing certificates it had invalidated by decree on May 5, before the ship ever sailed, let only 28 passengers ashore.

The ship then sailed north along the Florida coast in early June, close enough to see the U.S. shore, while the captain and Jewish refugee organizations pleaded with Washington to admit the passengers outside the quota. The U.S. government refused. The ship turned back for Europe on June 6 and reached Antwerp on June 17.

Four European countries took the passengers in: the United Kingdom (288), France (224), the Netherlands (181), and Belgium (214). Of the 619 who returned to the European continent, about 254 were later killed in the Holocaust, mostly those admitted to the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, all of which Germany would soon occupy. Nearly all of the 288 who reached Britain survived the war.

The St. Louis is remembered as it is because it played out in full view of the American press, because the U.S. refusal happened in the open, and because the passengers' later fates could be traced. It became the emblem of a wider refusal, the failure of the United States and other countries to open their doors in 1938 and 1939, the window when doing so would have changed how many of Europe's Jews survived.

Who got out

Who got out, and who could not.

The record of German Jewish emigration, year by year:

• 1933 (the first year of Nazi rule): about 37,000, driven by the shock of the regime taking power.
• 1934 and 1935: about 25,000 in each year, lower, as the first shock faded and many held onto the hope that the regime would soften.
• 1936: about 25,000, during the Olympic-pause year.
• 1937: about 23,000.
• 1938: about 40,000, pushed up by the Anschluss, the speed-up of Aryanization, and Kristallnacht.
• 1939 (through September): about 78,000, the rush to leave after Kristallnacht, before the war closed the routes.

By the count of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), roughly 282,000 people emigrated from Germany between 1933 and September 1939, more than half of Germany’s 1933 Jewish population. Another 117,000 left annexed Austria. About 202,000 Jews were still in Germany at the end of 1939. Most were later deported and killed between 1941 and 1944. Historians have argued at length over whether a wider opening of refugee doors in 1938–39 would have lowered the death toll. Most historians hold that more open doors would have saved lives; how many, and which policies were politically possible at the time, remain debated.

Where the emigrants went. The figures below cover the whole German Reich, Austria included, which is why they exceed the German total alone:

• The United States: about 100,000, within the existing quotas, and often only after long waits and heavy paperwork.
• Palestine (then under British control): about 60,000, under the Mandate's restricted certificate system. The count includes those who left through the Ha'avara Agreement, a contested 1933 arrangement that let German Jewish emigrants move part of their assets to Palestine through German export goods.
• The United Kingdom: about 40,000, including the roughly 10,000 children of the Kindertransport, brought over between December 1938 and September 1939.
• South America: about 50,000, mostly to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, with smaller numbers elsewhere.
• Western Europe: about 30,000 to France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland, often only a temporary refuge, since German occupation would soon follow.
• Asia: about 18,000 to Shanghai, which uniquely required no visa to enter between 1938 and 1941, plus smaller numbers elsewhere.

The honest accounting

The honest accounting.

Several questions about these years are still debated by historians, and it is worth naming them honestly:

• Did Hitler plan the killing from the start? Scholars divide between "intentionalists," who see the murder of Europe's Jews as Hitler's aim from early on, and "functionalists," who see the killing project emerging through escalation between 1933 and 1941. Most historians now land between the two: Hitler's hatred was fixed from the 1920s, but the specific decision that produced the killing of 1941 took shape through the radicalization of these years.
• How much did ordinary Germans take part? The record shows active participation by much of the civil service, the courts, the doctors, the universities, and the police, alongside passive acceptance by much of the wider public. It also shows the smaller number who resisted, who hid Jews or defied the regime. They are honored today through Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations program.
• How badly did the world fail? The failure of other countries to take in Jewish refugees is clear. What is debated is which alternative policies were actually possible at the time, and exactly how many more lives a wider opening would have saved. The consensus is that the failure was real and costly. The argument is over the size of it.
• The Ha'avara Agreement. The 1933 deal between the German government and the Zionist Federation of Germany let emigrants to Palestine move some of their wealth out through German export goods. Jewish opinion at the time was split. Some saw it as a rescue line for German Jews, others as collaboration with the Nazi regime. Historians generally view it as a hard response to a desperate crisis, with real costs and real benefits.
• Why did the rush to leave come so late? Emigration spiked only after the Anschluss (March 1938) and Kristallnacht (November 1938), rather than in 1933–37 when escape was easier. The explanations include the widespread hope that the regime would moderate, the heavy financial cost of leaving (the Reich Flight Tax and other barriers), the bureaucratic tangle of getting out, and the tightening limits of the countries that might have received them.

Key takeaways

The record in brief.

• On January 30, 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor by legal means. The conservative politicians who arranged it believed they could control him.
• Within eleven months the regime built its legal machinery: the Reichstag Fire Decree, the Enabling Act, Dachau, and the first anti-Jewish laws.
• The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 reduced German Jews to second-class subjects, stripped of political citizenship, and defined Jewishness by ancestry, through ordinary law-making.
• The persecution escalated step by step: the Olympic pause of 1936, Aryanization, the Anschluss, and Kristallnacht in November 1938.
• The world’s doors stayed largely closed. The Évian Conference of 1938 produced almost nothing, and the St. Louis was turned away.
• About 282,000 Jews escaped Germany by September 1939, more than half the community. About 202,000 remained, and most were later deported and killed.
• By September 1, 1939, no mass murder had yet begun. The machinery of exclusion and dispossession was complete; the machinery of killing was built in the years that followed.

Object Spotlight

The letter “J.”

A German passport of the 1930s was a small green booklet with an eagle on the cover, and for its holder it was the way out. On October 5, 1938, a decree ordered every passport held by a German Jew handed in, to be returned with one addition: a red letter “J,” about an inch tall, stamped beside the photograph.

One letter turned a travel document into a marker. Border officials anywhere could now sort Jewish Germans from other Germans at a glance. Countries that did not want Jewish refugees could refuse them without reading past the first page. The stamp did not take away the right to leave; it told every other country who was asking to come in.

Stamped passports of this kind survive in museum and family collections around the world, each one recording a person who needed a door to open in the years this Chapter documents, while the doors were closing.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

The disciplines and courses this Chapter naturally supports, for any educator, anywhere.

• World History. This Chapter examines the rise of Nazi Germany, the legal dismantling of civil rights, antisemitic legislation, refugee policy, and the progression from discrimination to systematic persecution before mass murder.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • trace the escalation from discrimination to persecution over time;
  • distinguish persecution from genocide;
  • analyze laws, speeches, and photographs as primary sources;
  • evaluate refugee policy and the international response (the Évian Conference);
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments from primary and secondary sources.
• International Classroom Relevance. Supports Holocaust education, genocide studies, human-rights education, and source-based history instruction internationally.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Grade 8 (United States History) 8.6 and NY Global History 10.5 (World War II and the Holocaust).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction by documenting how propaganda, law, bureaucracy, and state institutions gradually isolated and persecuted Jewish citizens before genocide began.
• Common Core, Reading in History/Social Studies (grades 6–12). Students assess an author’s purpose and point of view (RH.6–8.6, RH.9–10.6, RH.11–12.6) and compare and corroborate multiple sources (RH.6–8.9, RH.9–10.9, RH.11–12.9), working from laws, speeches, photographs, memoirs, newspapers, and refugee records.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 and D2.His.14 (grades 6–8 and 9–12). Students investigate chronology, historical causation, continuity and change, and evidence-based historical interpretation.

Sources and citations.

Primary sources

A primary source is a record from the time. It was made by people who were there. Examples: letters, diaries, photos, decrees, trial records, and newspapers.

• Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. April 7, 1933. The first major anti-Jewish law of the regime. English translation at USHMM.
• The Nuremberg Laws: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. September 15, 1935. English translation at USHMM.
• Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life. November 12, 1938 (issued days after Kristallnacht).
• Klemperer, Victor. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1941. New York: Random House, 1998.
• The Reichsgesetzblatt, the German legal gazette where every Nazi law was published, is preserved in the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv). bundesarchiv.de →
• Proceedings of the Évian Conference on the refugee crisis, Évian-les-Bains, July 6–15, 1938.

Secondary sources

A secondary source was written later. It is a book or article by a historian who studied those records and explains what they mean.

• Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
• Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume II: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
• Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 3rd ed. 2003.
• Longerich, Peter. Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Browning, Christopher R. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
• Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich Trilogy: The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), The Third Reich in Power (2005), and The Third Reich at War (2008). New York: Penguin Press.
• Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.
• Kershaw, Ian. Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
• Kershaw, Ian. Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.
• Barkai, Avraham. From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933–1943. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989.
• Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Wyman, David S. Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968.
• Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
• Breitman, Richard, and Alan M. Kraut. American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
• Ogilvie, Sarah A., and Scott Miller. Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
• Bajohr, Frank. "Aryanisation" in Hamburg: The Economic Exclusion of Jews and the Confiscation of Their Property in Nazi Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002.
• Steinweis, Alan E. Kristallnacht 1938. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
• Gilbert, Martin. Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
• Schleunes, Karl A. The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970.
• Stoltzfus, Nathan. Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia · encyclopedia.ushmm.org →
• Yad Vashem · yadvashem.org →
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “European Jewish population distribution, ca. 1933,” map, Holocaust Encyclopedia. encyclopedia.ushmm.org. The map in this Chapter.

Finding these documents: many primary sources are free online. Good places to start are the Fordham Internet Jewish History Sourcebook, Yale’s Avalon Project (law and diplomacy), German History in Documents, the collections of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, the National Library of Israel, and Sefaria (for Jewish texts). Search the document’s name and date.