Events Leading to Holocaust

APRIL 01, 1933

Anti-Jewish Boycott
Less than 3 months after coming to power in Germany, the Nazi leadership stages an
economic boycott targeting Jewish-owned businesses and the offices of Jewish
professionals.
The boycott was presented to the German people as both a reprisal and an act of
revenge for the bad international press against Germany since the appointment of
Hitler’s government in January, 1933. The Nazis claimed that German and foreign Jews
were spreading “atrocity stories” to damage Germany's reputation. Nazi Storm Troopers
stood menacingly in front of Jewish-owned department stores and retail establishments,
and outside the offices of Jewish professionals, holding signs and shouting slogans
such as "Don't Buy from Jews" and "The Jews Are Our Misfortune."
Although the national boycott campaign lasted only one day and was ignored by many
individual Germans who continued to shop in Jewish-owned stores and seek the
services of Jewish professionals, the boycott marked the beginning of a nationwide
campaign by the Nazi Party against Jews in Germany that would culminate in the
Holocaust.

ANTI-JEWISH LEGISLATION IN PREWAR GERMANY

In the first six years of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship, Jews felt the effects of more than 400
decrees and regulations on all aspects of their lives. The regulations gradually but
systematically took away their rights and property, transforming them from citizens into
outcasts. Many of the laws were national ones issued by the German administration,
affecting all Jews. State, regional, and municipal officials also issued many decrees in
their own communities. As Nazi leaders prepared for war in Europe, antisemitic
legislation in Germany and Austria paved the way for more radical persecution of Jews.
World War II and the Holocaust
The word „Holocaust‟ comes from the Greek words ‗holos‘ (whole) and ‗kaustos‘
(burned). Since 1945, the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the mass
murder of some 6 million European Jews (as well as members of some other
persecuted groups, such as Gypsies and homosexuals) by the German Nazi regime
during the Second World War.
To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat
to German racial purity and community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during
which Jews were consistently persecuted.
Hitler‘s ‗final solution‘– now known as the Holocaust – came to fruition with mass killing
centres constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland.
Like many anti-Semites in Germany, Hitler blamed the Jews for the country‘s defeat in
1918. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler
wrote the memoir and propaganda tract ―Mein Kampf‖ (My Struggle), in which he
predicted a general European war that would result in ‗the extermination of the Jewish
race in Germany‘. Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the pure
German race, which he called Aryan, and with ‗lebensraum‘, or living space, for that
race to expand.
The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933,
and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists. Like the network of
concentration camps that followed, they became the killing grounds of the Holocaust. By
July 1933, German concentration camps held some 27,000 people in protective
custody. Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books
belonging to Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired
message of party strength.