It initially started with the dehumanization of the Jews,
who were increasingly classified in German society as humans with no rights – they were
to be demarcated as a separate community with identifying marks. This was enforced
through the Nuremberg Laws. Driven by anti-Semitic sentiments within the party, the laws
sought to effectively eliminate the so-called race threat that the Nazis had identified
within the Jewish population. It redefined ethnicity (Jews were no longer viewed as a
religious group but were instead recognised by one’s parentage - anyone who had three or
more Jewish grandparents was identified as a Jew) and made it impossible for the Jews to
do anything in Germany. As a minority group that had been financially successful and
disproportionately well-represented, the Jews now found themselves degraded to
second-class citizens in their own country. They were excluded from German citizenship
and increasingly forced to cede their ownership rights of businesses to German
subordinates or colleagues. In an humiliating gesture, the Jews were also forced to bear
identifying marks that demarcated their Jewish status in public. Similarly, anti-Semitic
attacks against the Jewish population were not only tolerated but encouraged by the
party. The laws, by banning mixed marriages and procreation between the “race enemy” and
the pure Aryan, too sought to prevent the Jews from contaminating the German ethnic
race. In doing so, the Nuremberg Laws essentially served as a means to keep the
financial and political power of the Jews in check, and to, in the long run, eliminate
them from all forms of German life. This was followed by ghettoization as Jewish
citizens were forcibly moved to older and poorer neighborhoods and literally fenced in
or confined there by the German police, as well as the
military.
Such policies were stepped up with the launching
of Operation Barbarossa – the war was to be treated as a war of imperial encroachment.
The Nazi state drew a heavy and close relationship between their aims of destroying the
communist state and obliterating the Jews, who formed the principal targets. Orders were
issued via the army in March, April and May 1941 and mobile killing was carried out by
the Einsatzgruppen, which were heavily armed mobile killing squads that were used to
eliminate all the undesirables in German-occupied
territories.
However, there were simply too many of them to
be killed. The tactic of using the Einsatzgruppen was failing since there were too many
race enemies for the squads to deal with. It was extremely inefficient to continually
increase the number of Einsatzgruppen to be used as that would only strain Germany’s
military capability. As a result, the Germans had to turn to mass extermination and
industrial killing through the establishment of death camps to get rid of the Jews since
there were no other options available. The policy they adopted grew very naturally out
of what they had already been doing and did not divert significantly from the Nazi
worldview.
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