The Treatment of Jews Before and After World War I

The treatment of Jews before and after World War 1
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The treatment of Jews before and after World War 1
The Jewish populations in Germany and other parts of Europe were victims of Nazism and nearly 13 million civilians were murdered by this racist and murderous regime. This paper seeks to convey an image with regard to how Jews were treated prior to and following the First World War as well as the political state at that time. The paper also highlights the obstacles that Jews faced in their daily life. This will help to understand how the Jews lived during these times. This paper is based on both primary and secondary sources. Thesis statement: Before and after World War 1, Jews in Germany encountered anti-Semitic discrimination and prejudice. They lost various rights after a number of anti-Jewish decrees were put in place. As violence toward the Jews intensified, some had to depart their homes in Germany to move to England and other countries.
The Nazis utilized propaganda campaigns in promoting the party’s virulent abhorrence of the Jewish people. This attitude toward the Jewish people is referred to as anti-Semitism and could take various forms for instance verbal, physical or institutional. The Nazi adherents portrayed the Jews as inferior and sub-human beings who were only interested in communism or in their own financial gain. In essence, the Nazi followers built on the negative myths regarding the Jews which had been in existence for centuries.
Following its defeat in the First World War, Germany felt disgraced by the Versailles Treaty that decreased its army very much, significantly decreased its pre-war territory, required Germany to pay damages to the allied powers, and required Germany to recognize that it was guilty for the war. The German Empire was ruined and a different parliamentary government was created. In 1933 January, the Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler was appointed by Germany’s President Paul von Hindenburg as the country’s Chancellor after the win of Nazi Party in the 1932 general elections. The Nazi Party had exploited the political unrest in the country to achieve an electoral foothold in Germany. It is worth mentioning that members of the Nazi Part provoked clashes with communist adherents and carried out a nasty propaganda campaign against those who opposed them. The Nazis partly blamed the Jews for the problems that Germany faced.
Amongst the stereotypes with regard to the behaviours of the Jewish people which were common during the wake of the First World War and which were intentionally propagated along with other prejudices included the following myths: the Jewish people had initiated the war with the aim of bringing Europe politically and economically into ruin and make Europe vulnerable to control by Jews. Nazi Germans also asserted that the Jewish people took advantage of the misery of the World War I to enrich themselves and they prolonged the war so that the Bolshevik Revolution can further the goal of world revolution, and that the Jewish people controlled the finances of the reparations system after the First World War for their own benefit and profit. Nazi Germans also believed that the Jews, with their instinctive treachery and inborn cowardice disposing them against defending Germany during WWI, they were to blame for the destructive malaise behind the front and stabbed the German soldiers in the back which caused the socialist/democratic revolution and the military defeat. The other stereotype is that after the Jews had established constitutional democracy, they utilized it in weakening Germany’s political will to oppose their influence and to destroy the foundation of superior Aryan/German blood by encouraging miscegenation, sexual freedom and intermarriage. Nazi Germans also believed that foreign Jewish people controlled the peace negotiations and were successful in dividing the people of Hungary and Germany using artificial country borders, whereas their co-conspirators, the Jews in Germany, misinformed Germany into surrender and permanent enslavement.
A key tool the Nazis used to spread their propaganda was Der Sturmer, a Nazi newspaper which was published every week. This newspaper declared that the Jews are Germany’s misfortune at the front page of every issue and it frequently featured cartoons of Jewish people depicted as apelike and hooked-nosed. By December 1934, Adolf Hitler had total control of Germany and his campaign against the Jewish people was well underway and at top gear. In essence, the Nazis maintained that the Jewish people with their mongrel and foreign influence corrupted pure German culture. The Jews were portrayed by the Nazis as cowardly and evil, and the German people as honest, courageous and hardworking. In addition, the Nazis asserted that the Jews, who had very high representation in the arts, literature, commerce, theatre, the press and finance, had weakened the culture and economy of Germany. This propaganda created a racial anti-Semitism. The German race was regarded as superior to the Jewish race.
The Nazi followers combined their racial presumptions with Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution to defend and give reason for their treatment of the Jewish people. The German people, as the fittest and strongest race, were predestined to rule, whereas the racially adulterated and weak Jewish people were destined to become extinct. Adolf Hitler started restricting the Jewish people using terror and legislation, which involved prohibiting the Jews from public events, confiscating their property and business, removing them from their public schools and professions, as well as burning books that Jewish people had written. The famous anti-Jewish legislation included the Nuremberg Laws which were passed in the year 1935 and created the official base for the barring of Jewish people from the German society and the ever more restrictive Jewish policies of the German people. The Jews in Germany, under the Nuremberg Laws, lost their rights of citizens and were essentially reduced to subject status. Germany effectively turned into an apartheid nation. Nonetheless, the Jewish people in Germany who had fought during the First World War were exempted from the discriminatory measures for as long as Paul von Hindenburg was the country’s President. It is notable that Hindenburg had led the country during the 1914-1918 First World War and he actually felt some sense of obligation to the Jews who had fought for Germany during this war. Following his death in the year 1934 and the rise of Hitler as Germany’s chancellor, this restraint was removed.
Most Jewish people tried to run away Germany, and thousands of them successfully immigrated to places like Netherlands, France, Belgium and England. Getting out of Europe was much harder. The Jewish people faced strict immigration laws in many nations around the globe. Even though a Jew got the required documents, he or she would have to wait for many months if not years before he or she can leave. Most Jewish families sent their children first due to desperation. The attacks against the Jewish people become violent in November of the year 1938. A seventeen-year old Jewish boy named Hershel Grynszpan, who was distressed at his family’s deportation, shot dead the 3rd secretary in Germany’s Paris embassy. This killing was utilized by Nazi hooligans as the alleged reason for initiating a night of destruction commonly referred to as Kristallnacht. These Nazi hooligans destroyed and looted Jewish businesses and homes, and they even burnt Jewish synagogues. A lot of Jewish people were hit and murdered; an estimated 30,002 Jewish people were taken into custody and sent to concentration camps.
In the year 1939, Poland was invaded by Germany thereby starting the Second World War. Later on, in the year 1940, the Nazis started to establish ghettos for the Jewish people in Poland. Over 3 million people in Poland were Jews. The Nazis removed them from their homes by force to live in ghettos, which were crowded and cut off from the rest of the society. It is worth mentioning that this concentration of the Jews later on assisted the Germans in t...