1: Beginnings

When Hitler began preaching anti-Semitism, he might have taken his text from 16th century German theologian Martin Luther, who in railing against many groups that opposed his new church declared that the Jews were "like a plague, pestilence, pure misfortune." Luther charged: "They let us work in the sweat of our noses, to earn money and property for them, while they sit behind the oven, lazy, let off gas, bake pears, eat, drink, live softly and well from our wealth."

Actually, Martin Luther's anti-Semitism -- and German anti-Semitism for generations after him -- differed little in kind from anti-Semitism anywhere else in Europe. But the ancient prejudice seemed to grow stronger in Germany in the early 19th century with the rise of nationalism; in fact, in Germany the two often inter-meshed.

The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte was perhaps the first to link the two ideas. In the face of Napoleon's devastating occupation, which began in 1805, Fichte solaced his countrymen with a messianic vision of the German mission on earth: "It is you in whom the seed of human perfection most decidedly lies. If you perish in this your essential nature, then there perishes every hope of the whole human race for salvation." To Fichte, the Jews were the primal enemies of the German nation. Before he would grant rights to Jews, he would have "to cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea."

Following the withdrawal of the French in 1813, the civil rights of Jews were severely restricted in many German duchies. Peasants and burghers in Bavaria, Wurrtemberg and elsewhere rioted against the Jews and scourged them with pogroms. Out of Wurzburg spread the nationalist Hep! Hep! movement, named for its battle cry: "Hep! Hep! Hep! Death and destruction to all the Jews!" Respected academicians such as J. F. Fries and Friedrich Ruhs argued that Jews could never be a full-fledged part of the German nation.

In the 1840s, a new German constitution proposed expanded rights for all, including Jews. After it was drafted, peasants in the Rhineland rioted and looted Jewish properties, and in Bavaria anti-Semites collected 80,000 signitures on petitions opposing Jewish rights. The constitution was roundly rejected.

In the 1850s, scientists lent another rationale to anti-Semitism. Some scientists advanced new anthropological theories that classed Jews -- who merely practiced at religion -- as a "race apart." Christian Lassen, a respected professor at the University of Bonn, asserted that "Semites do not possess the harmony of phychic forces that distinguishes the Aryans." Semites instead were "selfish and exclusive." Many German anti-Semites embraced the tenets of a widely published French count, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who made a cult of racial purity and anathemized any dillution of the Aryan stock by Jews or anyone else.

Everywhere in Germany, Gobineau societies were organized, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and eccentric Englishman who had settled in Germany and married composer Richard Wagner's daughter, expanded upon the French count's ideas. The Jews, according to Chamberlain, were a "negative" race, a "bastardy." Nordic peoples, on the other hand, especially the Germans, were the "Master Race," responsible for everything that was great and good in history.

With the unification of Germany in 1871, the Jews made some gains. Otto von Bismarck, in his drive to form the Second Reich, conceded full civil and political rights to the Jews and everyone else. But the worldwide economic crisis of 1873 plunged Germany into a six-year depression, and Jewish bankers and financiers, who had played a major role in amassing the investment capital needed by the new nation, bore the brunt of the blame, with many people embracing the stereotype of the Jew as a manipulator of international finance. The Reichstag passed a "law against the pernicious pursuits of Social Democracy"; the law abolished freedom of the press, speech and assembly.

The appeal of anti-Semitism was convincingly demonstrated in 1892 when an obscure schoolteacher named Hermann Ahlwardt, running for the Reichstag without any party endorsement or funds, won an easy victory over the Conservative opponent by his shrill baiting of the Jews. Partly as a result of Ahlwardt's victory, conservatives all over Germany noted that anti-Semitism was now too powerful a political weapon to be left to splinter groups. One of the nation's most prestigious parties -- the Conservative Party -- adopted it as a platform plank.

For two decades thereafter, power seesawed between the liberal and conservatives; the Jews, for a time, were largely left alone. The Great War came and passed with little effect on the status of Jews.

But after World War I and the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919, anti-Semitic orators again took to the hustings. During the early 1920s, Adolf Hilter and other Nazis blamed Jewish bankers and industrialists for Germany's humiliating defeat. In the winter of 1916-17, Hitler later charged, "nearly the whole production was under the control of Jewish finance. The spider was slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the people's pores."

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Campaigning on anti-Semitism and a host of populist causes, the Nazis in 1923 garnered nearly one million votes. Hard times and the Weimar Republic's unpopularity added to their appeal. In the 1930 elections, 6.4 million Germans voted Nazi, and two years later, in the last free election of the Republic, the total was 13.7 million. The noose around the neck of European Jewry began to tighten.

In April 1933, just one month after the Reichstag voted Hitler unlimited executive powers, the Nazis began translating their campaign promises into practical action against the Jews. Julius Streicher, Gauleiter of Franconia, and a 13-member Nazi Party committee organized a boycott of Jewish retail businesses and shops to take place during the first days of April. Nazi Brownshirts and black-clad SS men marched back and forth in front of stores warning Germans not to buy from Jews. Windows were smeared with epithets such as "Jew Pig." Jews were dragged off the streets and beaten up in the Brownshirts' barracks.

All Nazis and members of the government were ordered to obey the boycott, and it took only a small offense to draw stiff punishment. A Nazi named Kurt Prelle was expelled from the party and forbidden to practice his profession as a notary after his wife purchased 10 reichspfennigs' worth of picture postcards from a Jewish shop.

The three-day boycott frightened many Jewish businessmen, and their fears were increased by subsequent government restrictions on the raw materials they needed to stay in business. More and more Jewish entrepreneurs elected to sell their holdings, usually at severely depressed prices. Many fled the country.

On April 7, Hitler issued a decree that prohibited Jews from holding civil-service positions. Soon similar decrees were applied to other career fields. Jewish teachers lost their jobs at universities and technical schools. Jewish artists, musicians and actors were forbidden to appear before German audiences. Jews were banned from the field of journalism. Yet another decree solved the legal problem of defining a Jew. A Jew was anyone who had adhered to the Jewish religion or had one Jewish grandparent.

The Nazis accelerated their anti-Semitic campaign by passing the Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race on September 15, 1935. The laws revoked the Jew's citizenship in the Reich. Jews could not vote, or marry Aryans or employ "in domestic service female subjects of German or kindred blood who are under the age of 45 years." Jews found themselves excluded from schools, libraries, theaters and public transportation facilities. Passports were stamped with the word "Jew." Name changes were disallowed, but Jewish men had to add the middle name "Israel," Jewish women the name "Sarah." Jewish wills that offended the "sound judgement of the people" could be legally voided.

In spite of all the repressive decrees, only about 30 percent of Germany's Jews had emigrated by 1938. Many could not obtain visas from foreign countries, which were maintaining normal quota systems. Many feared losing their remaining property if they departed. Still others were unwilling to learn a new language and to adjust to a foreign culture. Besides, the onerous laws against them seemed to taper off after 1936. The remaining German Jews persuaded themselves that the worst had passed, that they might settle down once again as second-class citizens.