World War II

The Development of the Persecution

This persecution made an upward trajectory. The first thing that happened was the one day boycotting of the Jewish shops in 1933; this was where they would get the SS to stand outside of the shops and not let anyone go into those Jewish shops. The next thing that happened was the Nuremburg Laws which happened in 1935. These laws were where no Jewish man was allowed to marry a German or no Jewish woman was allowed to marry a German man. This meant that the Jews weren’t German anymore; they lost their citizenships so they lost the right to be German. The next thing that happened was Kristal-Natch in 1938. This is where the SA went around smashing all of the glass in the shops, houses, etc.   It happened only because a Jew killed a German in Paris.

Following this was Ghettolisation,  which was where Hitler rounded up all of the Jews and put them into one place. In 1942, the Einsatzgruppen were formed. The Einsatzgruppen were voluntary groups of soldiers acting as a mobile death squad.  These groups were sent to areas in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Germany where Jewish people lived.  To begin with, they had large vans which were converted into mobile gas chambers.  The Jews were taken from their homes and forced into the vans where they were gassed.  The generals and other people in charge of the groups felt that this method of extermination was too slow and eventually they just took the Jews away and shot them outside of their villages. In the same year, the Wannsee conference was held. This was where high ranking officers came to discuss the Final Solution of the Jews. Once they had agreed how the elimination was to happen they put it into place.  The Mass Extermination was the event were Hitler sent all of the Jews that were in the Ghettos to concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belsan, Dachau  and Treblinka, which are the well known camps but there were many more than those. By the end of the Second World War, the total amount of Jewish people killed was 6.2 million from Europe and there were 12 million Jews before the War. Over half of the Jewish population was wiped out.