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Click on an image to see a larger, more detailed picture.
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| 1938: The End of Illusions |
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pg. 124 |
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With the Star of David at its center, this official Jüdische Winterhilfe (Jewish Winter Aid) symbol urges Jews to remember the needy during the cold winter months. As the Nazis pressured Jews to leave Germany, even those Jews in cosmopolitan Berlin experienced growing isolation and need. Berlin Jews established a model for welfare services, running everything from soup kitchens to orphanages.
Photo: Bildarchiv Abraham Pisarek/ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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General Werner von Blomberg (left) resigned when his wife was exposed as a registered prostitute. Because Hitler did not wish to deal with Blomberg's logical successor, the independent General Werner von Fritsch, Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring produced fake police reports suggesting that Fritsch had homosexual inclinations. These scandals allowed Hitler to name himself supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, and to create a new High Command structure that he controlled completely.
Photo: William Gallagher/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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Teaching Antisemitism
According to children's textbooks in Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler had been a great Nordic warrior. Jews couldn't be trusted. And non-Nordic people were something less than human. The nazification of the German school system began soon after Hitler's seizure of power. Schools were centralized and purged of Jewish teachers, while indoctrination courses retrained the rest. Reshaped school curricula underscored race theory, discouraged analytical thinking, and overemphasized physical training. Textbooks and children's literature reflected this nazification of academic subjects. War stories replaced fairy tales. Nordic legends and sagas of heroic personalities became reading staples. A typical kindergarten primer depicted a caricature of a "dishonest Jew" on its cover; inside, it would feature pictures of soldiers. Elementary readers fictionalized the Führer's childhood. More ominous was the introduction of pseudoscientific racial biology. Hermann Gauch's textbook on race taught that humankind could be divided into Nordic people and non-Nordic people--or, as he called the latter, subhumans. In classrooms, students measured each other's skulls and classified their racial types. Teachers singled out Jewish children to demonstrate and test racial hypotheses. Though they were already limited to 1.5 percent of the student body, a 1938 law banned Jewish pupils altogether from German public schools.
Photo: National Archives/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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1938: Of Germany's 500,000 Jews in 1933, about 200,000 emigrate by the end of 1938.
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1938: The first issue of Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt (Jewish Newsletter), a Nazi-controlled publication, keeps German citizens abreast of Nazi regulations regarding Jews.
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1938: Ludwig Schemann, a leading German advocate of racism, dies.
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1938: In Romania, a Fascist and antisemitic government, established in December 1937 and headed by Octavian Goga, falls early in 1938.
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1938: Right-wing Catholic priest Jozef Tiso becomes prime minister of Slovakia and establishes ties to Nazi Germany.
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1938: Adolf Hitler tells Minister of Justice Hans Frank that he has come to fulfill the curse imposed by the Jews themselves in the New Testament: "His [Jesus's] blood be upon us and upon our children." Hitler, born and raised as a Roman Catholic, observes that had Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, been fully aware of the Jewish threat, he would not have criticized Catholicism; instead, he would have put all of his energy into attacking the Jews.
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| 1938: The End of Illusions |
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pg. 124 |
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The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.
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