Nazi Racial Policy and World War II

I. "Race" the core of Nazi ideology and politics.

A. Broad character of racial policy designed to create the "pure" and "healthy" racial community (Volksgemeinschaft).

1. Pronatalist measures like marriage loans and honoring mothers. All sorts of other social benefits available only to those who were "Aryans."
2. But also antinatalist measures in the 1930s:

a. Compulsory sterilization of mentally and physically handicapped and Afro-Germans.
b. Round-ups and internments of "asocials": homosexuals, vagrants, alcoholics, promiscuous women, prostitutes, work-shy, Roma and Sinti, and so on.
c. "Euthanasia" of the mentally and physically handicapped beginning in 1939.

B. But Jews play a special role in the Nazi world-view. The Nazis advocated "redemptive antisemitism," as the historian Saul Friedländer has called it, meaning that only through the destruction of Jews would the path be opened for the efflorescence of the German people.

II. Through the 1930s antisemitic measures become increasingly severe.

A. Anti-Jewish boycott April 1933.
B. Ban of Jews from civil service 1933.
C. All sorts of discriminatory measures by localities as well as the central government that ultimately ban Jews from the public sphere.
D. Nuremberg laws 1935.
E. Reichkristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) 1938.

III. But it is only with the onset of World War II, and particularly with the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, that the Nazis move to a policy of active extermination of Jews.

A. Occupation policies 1939-41. Intertwining of in-migration of ethnic Germans and deportations and ghettoization of Jews. Various plans for ethnic cleansing of Jews.
B. Invasion of Soviet Union and massacres by Einsatzgruppen.
C. Intensification of massacres summer 1941.
D. First experiments with gas against Jews and Soviet POWs autumn 1941.
E. Wannsee conference January 1942--the systematization of the extermination of Jews.

IV. Conclusion--the complex steps from discrimination to extermination.