The Rest Is History - 409. The Nazis in Power: Hitler's War on the Jews

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

As Hitler ramps up the German war machine, he remains obsessed with one idea: uprooting Jews from the Reich. The Nazis embark on a campaign of totalitarian oppression against them, persecuting Jewish people in every aspect of life. They are excluded from most professions, forbidden from intermarrying, Jewish children are bullied and excluded from schools, all Jews have a “J” stamped in their passport, to name but a few measures. Worst of all, the brainwashing of the German people has become apparent, and many are willing participants in the various forms of persecution; plenty of German towns have put up signs by this point saying “Jews not wanted here”. Hitler may tone down the oppression to whitewash the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but this does not last. One terrifying truth is clear: he is fully set on the destruction of European Jewry. Join Tom and Dominic in the fifth part of our series on the Nazis in power, as they look at how the persecution of Jewish people in the Reich increased in the lead-up to the Second World War. *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London! Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishist be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example, as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately and they will remain hanging until they stink. They will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up and so on down the line until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit precisely in this fashion until all Germany

has been completely cleansed of Jews. That was Adolf Hitler talking to the journalist and retired army officer Josef Hell in 1922. And Dominic Hell, I mean, that's a very appropriate name, isn't it? It is. And 1922, Tom. So that is before the Beer Hall Putsch. It's before most people outside Germany have ever heard of Adolf Hitler. Even at that stage, he is talking of Germany's Jews again and again as a virus, as a plague, as a mortal threat to the health of the nation. And historians and people generally argue a lot about when the Nazis began the march towards the final solution. But I think there's no doubt that it was there implicitly or here explicitly in Hitler's rhetoric from the very beginning. Don't you agree?

I do. And in the previous episode, we talked about the idealism of Nazi racism, which might seem a kind of oxymoron. But I think in that passage, it's very evident that hatred fuses with idealism. It's a terrifying, terrifying sense of what is to come, isn't it? In the last episode, you talked a lot about why the Nazis, how the Nazis constructed this kind of moral universe in which they were the forces of light. They were on the side of the angels fighting for the health of their race in a world defined by struggle and by competition.

And there are all kinds of groups that they see as threats. So you mentioned gay men, the Roma and Sinti gypsy peoples, or people who are mentally ill, for example. And beyond the borders of Germany, the Slavs in particular. Exactly. But the Jews are different because the Jews are not just another minority. They're not just another burden on the race.

To the Nazis, as we described last time, they represent the sort of satanic forces of degeneracy in the world. And all world history is moving towards a gigantic apocalyptic kind of cosmic confrontation in their minds between the Aryans, the Nordic races, and between the Jews. And we talked last time as well, didn't we, about the legacy of the Great War and a sense of sort of urgency and crisis and victimhood, I suppose. And I think Hitler and the Nazis believe from the very beginning, from the moment they take power at the beginning of 1933, that there can be no successful Germany without a final confrontation with the Jews. And if they don't win it, then Germany is completely and utterly finished. And again, it's that strange fusion that we've talked about throughout the series of the supposedly rational, objective, scientific, and the atavistic, the millenarian, the apocalyptic. Because we've talked about how, in the previous episode, how the Nazis interpret

Christianity as an expression of the Jewish spirit and want to purge themselves of it. But in fact, this language of apocalyptic confrontation, this idea of a thousand-year reign, is being drawn from that biblical heritage. It's one of the examples of the way in which even the Nazis cannot purge themselves of that biblical heritage. It's one of the examples of the way in which even the Nazis cannot purge themselves of that Christian heritage. And I think that when you use the word satanic, again, you're right. The Nazis are casting the Jews simultaneously as a bacillus and as a satanic force. And there are kind of different shades of emphasis. Sometimes they will emphasize the fact that they are kind of cool rational scientists purging themselves of a disease and other times as in that opening statement by hitler they indulge themselves in

the rawest expressions of hatred and talking of sort of raw expressions of hatred i think it's important to say the germans are not alone in kind of east central europe in seeing this huge resurgence of anti-semitism between the wars so there's a very anti-semitic party in poland the nationalist index party of roman domovsky there's the arrow cross movement in hungary one of the most violent and horrific of all these groups the iron guard in romania who even the nazis used to say the iron guard are kind of a bit too violent and a bit too sadistic. So anti-Semitism is everywhere in Central Europe in these years. And I think a lot of that is because with the dissolution of empires and the forging of these new nation states, the existence of so many Jewish villages, Jewish communities and so on, is seen by nationalists as a kind of threat to the integrity of the nation.

In Germany, it is different. I mean, Richard Evans, in his brilliant book on the Third Reich in Power, he talks about what makes Germany different. Only in Germany, he says, are there strict laws under the Nazis about marriage and sexual relations. Only in Germany are the Jews robbed of their property. Only in Germany does the government itself organize national pogroms. And only in Germany does the state itself become, in the 1930s, the principal vehicle for anti-Semitism. And it's not just that the anti-Semitism is a kind of one policy among many, that anti-Semitism and the elimination of Jewish influence in the life of the nation is the absolute premise for everything else. I mean, that's what makes Germany, I think, unusual.

And again, Hitler's ultimate ambition is never in doubt. It said in 1919 in a letter, the ultimate goal must be the elimination of the Jews altogether. In 1922, he said in a public speech, there can be no compromise elimination of the Jews altogether. In 1922, he said in a public speech, there can be no compromise. There are only two possibilities, he says, the victory of the Aryans and the victory of the Jews. So when he takes power, you might expect that the first thing he does is to move towards the destruction of Germany's Jews. But actually he doesn't. And one of the interesting things about this story, one of the remarkable things, is how it proceeds by fits and starts. And the reason that so many

Jews don't actually flee Germany is partly because he proceeds kind of slowly. So people are able almost to persuade themselves, well, it's stopped now, it can't get worse. Maybe, you know, this is all a phase, all of this kind of thing. And that's one of the chilling things about it. And is that deliberate, do you think? Is it strategic? Does it reflect an anxiety about whether he can take people with him? What do you think the reason for it is? I think that's part of it. I think, as we described in the very first episode of this particular series, Hitler is not completely secure straight away. So he has to work with kind of the national conservative elites and so on.

The Nazis do not have the support when they come in in 1933 of, you know, a vast majority of the German people. Their vote's actually declining. But also, I think it's fair to say, although Hitler has set out the goal and the end points and the priorities, the means for achieving it are as yet unknown. And we'll see in this and the next episode how they talk about the removal of the Jews. It could mean forced immigration. Exactly. It could mean resettlement.

It could mean kicking Jews out. It could mean forcing them to emigrate. It doesn't necessarily mean, at this stage, murdering them. Although, I mean, that image of Munich being filled with gallows. Yes. And the bodies rotting. I mean... It's a very ominous one.

Put it mildly, yes. And there is violence straight away. There has been violence for years. Violence has always been part of the Nazi repertoire. When they come in in the early months of 1933, there is a lot of kind of slightly random... I don't want to say low level, because that makes it sound like I'm dismissing it or underplaying it, but it's sort of often improvised violence, shall we say. So Ian Kershaw in his brilliant biography of Hitler gives the example of the city of Breslau, now Wrocław in Poland.

And he says there, you know, he talks about a Jewish theatre director, for example, being beaten up in broad daylight, being stripped and whipped in public by stormtroopers, by SA men. He talks about SA men breaking into the houses of Jewish people and nothing being done to punish them. So from the beginning, there is a sort of sense that Germany's Jewish community are kind of fair game and that the legal authorities will not stop you if you want to take the law into your own hands against them and this provokes from the beginning all sorts of criticism abroad particularly in america where is obviously a large and very vocal and influential jewish community so in the end of march 1933 there are reports that the american jewish congress is going to organize a boycott of German goods. Yeah, because people are so shocked by this.

And then the Nazis organized their own boycott as a kind of reprisal. And this takes place on the 1st of April, 1933. And stormtroopers stand outside Jewish-owned shops. And this is the first, I suppose you would say it's the first really big step. It's the first time the state has backed an explicitly anti-Semitic demonstration, I guess. Because up to that point, as we said in the first episode, the violence of the SA can often be cast by the Nazi regime as nothing really to do with them. They can't control it. The excesses of people they can't control. Exactly. But actually that boycott, and this goes back to your point, Tom, about why Hitler

doesn't, why does Hitler not murder Germany's Jewish population straight away? I mean, one reason, obviously, is it's a large population. So there's between four... Although, I mean, it's only 1%, isn't it? It's only 1%, but that is still, what, 400,000 people? Of course. But just to emphasise, I mean, that's also one of the reasons why this ratcheting effect over the course of the 30s is so effective, is that actually there aren't that many Jews relative to the size of the rest of the population. So they can be isolated and actually pushed out of German life. I mean, that's ultimately what happens.

They become invisible quite easily. Exactly. But interestingly, you see, with this boycott at the beginning of April 1933, what happens is that an awful lot of Germans do not take any notice of the boycott whatsoever. The biggest Jewish firms are too economically important, so they're untouched by it. And lots of people just ignore the boycott. And actually, Joseph Goebbels, who is a fanatical anti-Semite, the propaganda minister, we talked about him in the episode we did about Nuremberg and the Nuremberg rallies. Goebbels called off the boycott after a few days because actually it wasn't very successful and it was a bit embarrassing that more Germans, most Germans, like people everywhere, are just going about their daily business. And if the local shop, which is the most convenient shop, happens to be Jewish owned, maybe they're not best pleased about it. But they're still going to shop there anyway, despite the fact that they're being told not to. So they call off the boycott. And Dominic, at that point, German people who are doing this presumably are not worried about the implications for them of being seen to support Jewish businesses. They don't feel that it's a danger to them personally. Not at this stage, I would say, but it will become in the next sort of three or four years. Absolutely. Now, local boycotts do continue. So all the way through the next few years,

at a sort of local level, in a given German city or town, the local authorities or the local stormtroopers or Nazi officials, party officials, might organize a boycott or they might organize intimidation, raids on Jewish-owned shops, demonstrations, and so on. And this wouldn't be directed from the top. It would come from below. So Ian Kershaw, in his biography of Hitler, talks again and again about this idea of working towards the Fuhrer. And the way that works is Hitler is a very lazy man. Hitler is not Stalin. Hitler gets up late and he doesn't do his paperwork. What he does is he rhetorically sets the tone

and he sets out the goal. And then people, as it were, further down the hierarchy, they work towards the Fuhrer. They compete in some ways to find the most radical solution to achieve what Hitler wants them to do. And that is the expression of two important ideological principles. The first is that Hitler is the embodiment of the will of the German people.

That is why he is the Führer. But also the fact that there is a common German sense of what is correct. So that these spontaneous expressions of anti-Semitism are framed as being a manifestation of this common German sense of identity. Yeah. What you'll see, particularly in rural areas, is that people will take it upon themselves to realise what they imagine to be, correctly, the Führer's ambitions. Richard Evans gives an example in the spring of 1934 in Franconia. So Franconia in the kind of north of Bavaria, Julius Streicher is the local

bigwig, a horrendous man, the guy who edits Gestirme, a man who is the sort of walking embodiment of kind of furious, violent, sort of demonic anti-Semitism. And it gives the example of this town called Gunzenhausen, which had about 5,000 to 6,000 people in it. And in that town, 1,500 of those people, so more than a fifth, turn out for a massive anti-Semitic demonstration at the behest of a local party leader. And then they just go berserk. They

rampage through this little town. They're dragging out Jewish people, ransacking their houses. They drag about 35 people off to the local prison, and one of them is hanged. And this is something that's not been necessarily directed from Berlin, but it's a local Nazi leader taking the initiative and then the local people kind of responding to him. So that fear, if you're Jewish, is omnipresent in 1933-34. And villages start to kind of, and settlement towns start to boast of it, don't they? So a bit like, you know, you'd go into a village in England today and it would be, you know, winner of regional village in bloom contest or something. They boast about it and be very proud of it.

Yeah, absolutely. So you start getting signs saying you know we have no jews yes you'll see that particularly in 1935 the most common sign is jews not wanted here but you would people would sometimes make jokes they would say our demand for jews has been sufficiently supplied or there would be threats they would say if you're jew, you enter this town at your own risk. Or we often talked about the Nazis as anti-religious, but they would attempt to tap people's religious sensibilities. They would say, the Jew is the son of the devil or something like that. There'll be a whole variety of these signs. And towns, as you say, be like these kind of Britain in bloom signs.

They would pride themselves on putting up an imaginative sign. From the top, what you actually have at this point is discrimination laws. So Nazi activists have always been pushing for the exclusion of Jews from the economic and kind of institutional life of Germany. And in April 1933, so just a couple of months really, two or three months after Hitler's come to power, there is the law for the restoration of the professional civil service, where Jews, as well as communists and social democrats and so on, are dismissed from the civil service. Also in April, there are laws discriminating against Jews entering the legal profession, so Jews training to become lawyers. Well, there would be, wouldn't there? Because in the previous

episode, we talked about how the Nazis cast the legal system in Germany as being Jewish. So if they're going to, as they see it, purge Germany of this Jewish inheritance, you can't have Jews in the legal system. Exactly. And ditto with medicine. So Jewish doctors are excluded from treating non-Jewish patients under the national insurance kind of healthcare scheme. And then the other thing, we'll talk about this later as well, even at this point, there are quotas placed on the number of Jewish school children in schools. So Jews are slowly beginning to be pushed out of the school system.

And this is framed as clearing up space, as easing overcrowding. And again, it's a bit like the measures that are introduced to keep girls out of grammar schools. Right. Yeah. You know, we alluded to that sense in which women relative to men kind of play a role analogous to the role of non-Aryans to Aryans. On which topic, Dominic? Yes. It's non-Aryans, isn't it? And the definition of a Jew is not racially based.

It's based on, at this point, whether you are practicing it. Well, we'll come to this when we come to the Nuremberg Laws after the break. But the problem that the Nazis have, right, is that they believe in races. I mean, we don't believe in races now, but they believed in races then. So they believe there is a kind of biological definition of a Jew. But actually, when they come to it, they find it very difficult to decide who is a Jew and who isn't. Because for example, if one of your parents is Jewish and the other isn't, are you Jewish? If one of your grandparents is Jewish and the rest aren't, are you Jewish? Now, you might not be an observant Jew, but if the Nazis' thinking is correct and

that it's all about the blood and heredity, then you are, in their view, tainted by having one Jewish grandparent, or indeed, would you be tainted by having a great grandparent? So they start to tie themselves in knots about all this. But at this point in 1933, am I right that the definition is a kind of religious one? Yes. Whether you go to synagogue, whether you're observant as a Jew, not whether you are, as the Nazis would frame it, racially Jewish. And part of that is because they know that to widen the definition, A, it includes far more people, hundreds of thousands of people, so it becomes more contentious. But also there's a risk of upsetting, let's say, the army.

There have been a lot of Jewish officers or half Jewish officers or a quarter of Jewish officers who have served a great distinction in the Great War. And some of the army commanders may be a little bit anxious about the idea of alienating all of these former veterans. But this doesn't stop the army, does it? Yeah. On the 28th of February, 1934, the Aryan restrictions are introduced to the army. Yeah. And they lose quite a lot of very good soldiers as a result.

They do indeed. As of course, they've lost a lot of good lawyers, good doctors, good civil servants, good teachers. I mean, that is a problem. And also the other problem is that these kind of non-Aryan provisions, this idea that not to be an Aryan is to be inferior. I mean, it's very offensive, say, to the Japanese. And so the German embassy in Tokyo has to try and explain it. It doesn't really work.

So there is a sense that they haven't quite succeeded in pinning down exactly what they mean by a Jew and that it's insufficiently targeted, presumably is hanging over the Nazi apparatus in the early years of their period in power. Absolutely it is. And remember that the Nazis, they're not entirely secure for the first couple of years. I mean, if you go back to that Night of the Long Knives episode, Hitler, for the first two years or so, is very anxious about being challenged either by the army or by sort of conservative business elites, or indeed by elements within his own party, by the stormtroopers and so on. So that perhaps helps to explain why he doesn't move more radically straight away. Because let's

imagine you are a Jewish family. In Germany, you've been there for many generations and you're there in 1933 or 1934. Why don't you immediately leave? Well, one reason is you may well say there's anti-Semitism in a lot of our neighbours, in a lot of our neighbouring countries. So the Nazi anti Nazi antisemitism, it's very distressing, but hopefully it's just a phase and it's not something totally out of the ordinary. We'll just have to live with it for a little bit and eventually they'll be gone. Or you might well say, we haven't been dragged off to concentration camps. The people in our town have not conducted a pogrom. My neighbors still talk to me. All of this stuff is terrible,

but we haven't been forcibly sterilised. We haven't been imprisoned. Maybe this is just the Nazis venting their violent rage for a couple of years, and then things will calm down. And actually, you know what? We'll be able to get on with our lives as we always have. And actually, you know what? We'll be able to get on with our lives as we always have. And actually in 1934 or so, let's say, that would not necessarily, if you haven't studied Mein Kampf and all Hitler's speeches, so you don't know what's coming, that's not necessarily a ludicrous thing to think because you might well say, do you know what? After that first wave, after the business about the boycotts, after the first wave of discriminatory legislation, yes, there is a lot of intimidation. Yes, there is a lot of bullying. Yes, Jewish-owned businesses are being put under enormous pressure and they're being hit with big tax bills and they're being kind of alienized.

But you know what? There is a kind of stability. And actually, interestingly, there's a lot of emigration in 1933, something like 30,000 people or 40,000 people. But in 1934, it slows down. Because clearly a lot of Jewish people think, I hate it, but I'm German and I can live with it. So lots of Jews are taking Hitler seriously, but not literally. Yeah. I mean, your instinct would be not to uproot yourself from your home country. Of course. You know, I mean, you risk losing everything.

You know, which country do you go to? There are immigration restrictions imposed by other countries. And they win, right? The bad guys win if you do that. Because you would say to yourself, I may be not Jewish first and foremost. I mean, I am Jewish, but I am German. This is my country. Yeah, you might have an iron cross right i fought for this country yeah my family have been here for generations why should i leave and as you say i would lose everything so that is why most people stay and i think towards the end of 1934 a lot of german jews think do you know what it could have been worse i mean it's been terrible but it could have been worse and maybe the worst of it is over and the tragedy of course tom is it isn't is that even in the short term, they are completely wrong.

Okay, well, I think we should take a break there. And when we come back, we will continue this terrible story. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, a splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes,

and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. And Dominic, we are looking at how the Nazis in power are slowly ratcheting up their targeting and persecution of German Jews. And we left it with the Jewish population in Germany kind of able to think that perhaps they've seen the worst. But you said that obviously they haven't. So what happens next? Well, let's get to 1935 so if you remember our episodes about hitler's road to war the beginning of 1935 he had a huge sort of foreign policy boost because the people of the czar land voted for integration with germany after the czar

had been detached from germany and became a kind of league of nations and protectorate basically exploited by the french once hitler's got the czar back there's a kind of League of Nations protectorate, basically exploited by the French. Once Hitler's got the Tsar back, there's a sense of, brilliant, we've had this little coup, we're a bit more secure, popularity assured, now we can take the brakes off a bit. And so in 1935, when you get to the summer of 1935, there is a kind of ratcheting up of tension. Now, part of this, I think, is because the regime is also under economic pressure.

We were talking before about how there's this constant business of fats. The fats. And the sort of cues for butter and all this stuff, because of course they're pumping all this money into rearmament.

So there's a discontent among the kind of the low-level Nazi supporters. And the Nazi bigwigs think we need to give them something. And whenever they think that... Throw them fresh meat. Yeah. It's either a foreign policy achievement, or it's more anti-Semitism. In this case, it's more anti-Semitism. And in the summer of 1935,

two of the most virulent and outspoken anti-Semites in the Nazi party, Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher, they start giving these incredibly inflammatory speeches. So Goebbels and Julius Streicher, they start giving these incredibly inflammatory speeches. So Goebbels tells a rally in Berlin in June. The Jews are trying to spread themselves over our streets. Basically, we've taken our eye off the ball with the Jews. They've come back out of their dens and we need to crack down on them again. Streicher in Hamburg, he has this massive rally, tens of thousands of people. He's sort of screaming at the crowd and he says, you know, we will do whatever we want with the Jews in

Germany. They're sort of goading people. And this is the way the regime works, that people will give speeches to goad the people below them in the hierarchy. And they then respond with kind of improvised actions at a kind of local level. At this point, you have a resurgence of boycotts. This is actually the point when a lot of those sort of village signs that you talked about were going up in the summer of 1935. And to give you an example of how it will work in different kind of towns and cities, Richard Evans has this list. So he says, you know, Weimar.

In Weimar, Jews are banned from going to the cinema. In Magdeburg, all the trams have signs that say, Jews not wanted on the tram. In Stralsund, which is on the Baltic, the inns and restaurants in this town, which is a kind of holiday resort, all say, we're closing our doors to Jewish customers, no Jewish customers. And there's a sort of real sense of an incipient pogrom, actually, in the summer of 1935. How do people know that people are Jewish? So if you're turning up to this restaurant and you say, well, I'm not Jewish, how is this tested? This is the interesting thing, isn't it, Tom?

I mean, it goes back to what we were saying in the first half, and this is an issue that runs through this whole story. Now, there are some Nazis who say, well, get out the calipers. You know, it's all about the shape of the skull and all this sort of business. I mean, obviously, an innkeeper is not going to keep a kind of quack medical kit. And even if he did, it wouldn't. I mean, it's all nonsense anyway.

Exactly. As you say, people don't tend to, I mean, there are some people, the Ostjuden, who are perhaps more, they speak Yiddish, let's say. But there are an awful lot of people who aren't. How do you identify them? I mean, this is the issue. If you're not getting people to wear a badge, which at this point they're not, they don't do that until the war starts. Later on, they get people to rename themselves,

don't they? So you have to call yourself Israel or Sarah. But at this point, how do you know? So it comes down to sort of physical prejudice, I suppose, if you happen to know somebody is Jewish. But yeah, as you say, there's that complete ambiguity because, of course, all this is based on nonsensical science, in inverted commas. And actually, that upsurge of violence in 1935, again, there is a bit of a backlash, not necessarily about the antisemitism of it. It's about the sense of disorder and hooliganism. So the sort of middle classes, I mean, the lower middle classes always been the great backbone of the Nazi party. They actually don't really like people rampaging around the streets,

beating people up and ransacking their shops and smashing windows. Because it's reminiscent of the stormtroopers' behaviour in 1933 and 34, and we know where that led. Exactly. Or the street fighting between communists and Nazis before the elections, which the Nazis, they claimed they were going to restore order.

So there is a big backlash. At the end of August 1935, actually in Breslau, which we talked about before, the city now in Poland, the brown shirts actually beat up by accident the Swedish consul,

which provokes great sort of diplomatic protests. I mean, you don't get more Nordic than the Swedish consul. That's true, you don't and actually some nazis then nazi officials having encouraged the violence initially start to make statements saying oh people should calm down a bit the police should try to restore order and hitler is put under pressure so hitler is always torn between radicalism and conservatism. Particularly, he needs business leaders and industrialists and generals and kind of aristocratic or well-heeled people. He needs this. He always

needs the support of the elites. It's kind of like having a very violent dog on a leash and you let out the leash and then the dog, I don't know, chews someone up and then you have to kind of haul it back in a bit. That's the process. But gradually over the course of time, that leash gets longer and longer and longer. That's exactly it, Tom. So the way that it works is not the swinging of a pendulum, you know, radicalism and then back to conservatism again. The way that it works is with each outburst of violence and aggression and antisemitism, you move further and further down the line. So you kind of go a bit forward and then you put the brakes on and retreat a little bit.

But at the end of the process, you've always moved further towards your goal. And that's how this works. So in August 1935, the 8th of August, Hitler orders a halt to all the, what he calls the individual actions. So the kind of local pogroms and the local initiatives. Now he doesn't want to disappoint his activists because they don't want the Fuhrer to be putting a brake on things. They want him to encourage them. They think they are working towards him. The conservatives, on the other hand, they say, listen, if you're going to move against the Jews, it has to be legal. There has to be order. There has to be a proper framework for it. There's actually,

in the film about the Wonsay Conference conspiracy with Kenneth Branagh as a hydric, there's a speech, you can see it on YouTube, it's given by Colin Firth, who's playing a lawyer. He gives this great rant in the conference, this is 1942, in which he says, if we lower ourselves to pogroms and violence and smashing windows, then we're just as bad as they are. We should actually proceed in an orderly, serious, methodical way, because that is the only way to win. The banality of evil. Yeah. And there are lots of people in the Nazi high command who believe that, who believe that

we miss the scale of the Jewish threat if we think it can be solved with punch-ups in the street. But this has always been the way, hasn't it? You have street fights and you win power through the ballot box. It's a combination of the two. It's not either or, it's both. So this is how Hitler resolves this particular dilemma. The party rally, as in the last two years, is going to be held in Nuremberg in 1935. So it's the scene that you described so brilliantly in your episode on that, Tom. The great medieval city hung with swastikas,

great mobs of the Hitler youth and stormtroopers and all this. Parade ground, all that. Exactly. And the Reichstag is going to assemble in Nuremberg on the last day to show the subordination of traditional politics to the Nazi movement. And in this final session of the rally, Hitler gets the Reichstag to pass three new laws. The first

is the flag law that decrees that the swastika will be the flag of Germany, replacing the old flag of the German state. So that party, Nazism, and Germany are now formally identified in the flag. And partly this is driven, again, by antisemitism because workers in New York, Jewish workers in New york have torn down a nazi swastika and there'd been a kind of legal argument from the americans that it wasn't a national flag exactly so yeah exactly now the second law is the citizenship law this basically says citizens of the reich have to be people of german or kindred blood and all other people are not citizens they are subjects.

So it basically deprives Jews, German Jews, of their citizenship. This is the Spartan model, that you have the Spartan citizens and then you have the helots, and this is basically where it's heading. Interesting comparison. And then the third thing, which goes back to all the things you were talking about in your episode about Nazi ideology and their obsession with race. The most important is the law to protect German blood. This is introduced by Hermann Goering.

He's the president of the Reichstag. And I'm just going to read you what Goering says. Goering says, we know that to sin against the blood is to sin against the inheritance of a people. We ourselves, the German people, have had to suffer greatly because of this hereditary sin. We know the final root of all Germany's decomposition, he obviously means his defeat in the Great War, came in the last analysis from these sinners against heredity. So he says it's the duty of Germans and of the Nazis in future to ensure this purity of the race can never again be made sick or filled with rottenness. I mean, it's so interesting because again, you have that fusion of the language of science. So it's about stopping the race from being sick.

It's medicalized and the language of theology, it's sin. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So it's those two things, isn't it? It's the sort of the theological, the inheritance of centuries of Christian antisemitism. Yeah. It is the scientific obsessions of the late 19th century.

And it's the sense of victimhood that comes out of the Great War. We lost because of this issue of tainted blood. We must make sure it never happens again. Because, of course, Goering, Hitler, and all these characters are even at this point thinking they're going to have to have a second world war. And if they don't get rid of the Jews before that, then they will lose again because they will be undermined. I mean, that sense of urgency, I think, underlies this whole business. Yeah. I mean, it's like kind of treatment for cancer. You need to get rid of the cancerous cells. The Nazis would be delighted with that analogy, Tom. I mean, that's exactly the analogy they would use.

They would use a medical analogy, wouldn't they? A medical metaphor. Yeah. So under the law to protect German blood, marriage between Jews and Germans is prohibited. Sexual relations outside marriage between Jews and Germans are outlawed as well. And a sort of bizarre side note to it, Jews are not allowed to employ young German women

as servants because it is believed that they will kind of debauch them. But isn't it also because the idea of a Jew giving orders to an Aryan is very offensive? Yes, exactly. But Dominic, also, just to ask you, the implication of this is that people in their most intimate moments are potentially behaving as criminals. Yes. So sexual activity can become criminal.

Yeah. This is the moment when the SS start to be drawn into the persecution of the Jews, isn't it? Because Himmler has control of the police. The SS you close the door of your family home, you don't keep politics at bay. No. That the politics now comes with you. And that absolutely, there is no private space. There is no personal life. This is an existential apocalyptic struggle and it seeps into every conceivable aspect of human relations.

Absolutely. And judges, doctors, civil servants, local councillors, local council employees, all of these people will be drawn into this great national effort to remove what the Nazis would describe as the taint of Jewish blood from German life. But specifically the SS, because of course we know where the SS targeting of the Jews will ultimately lead. Yes. So just on the Nuremberg laws, in the short term they work exactly as Hitler wanted, which is there's an end to the disorder, the activists are happy, the conservatives are happy, and there's a new status quo. So the process of working towards the Fuhrer, of the radicalisation and then putting on the brakes and then finding a new status quo, that has worked as far as they're concerned.

There is, of course, a massive ambiguity that undermines the whole enterprise, because what is a Jew? The law doesn't really define it. They spend enormous amounts of time squabbling. If you're three quarters Jewish, you're Jewish. If you're half Jewish, you're only Jewish. If you're practicing the Jewish faith, which introduces a religious dimension, which kind of shouldn't be there if you're a strict scientific Nazi. Anyway, go on, Tom, you've got a question. Just this issue, again, going back to the SS, it sharpens Himmler's desire, doesn't it,

to construct a racial aristocracy because he has this feeling that Jewish blood is kind of everywhere. Yes. And that therefore there is a need to construct an elite who you can absolutely guarantee have nothing to do with, you know, are not corrupted by Jewish blood in any way. And so he demands kind of increasing, you know, you have to go back generations and generations and generations with birth certificates and everything to get into the SS. Yeah, because all of this stuff, the Nuremberg laws, the growing fixations of the SS, all of this is a godsend for the genealogical industry.

Because people are desperately now looking for birth certificates or indeed employing genealogists to show that they're not in fact Jewish. Or that their ancestors were Jewish but maybe weren't practicing Jews or whatever it might be. So there is now this sort of weird obsession with kind of turning up documents from the, you know, the 1800s or the 1700s or something. What this has done now, as you said, they've gone into the home and that the party, the SS, the Gestapo and so on, are now kind of penetrating, as it were, into your bedroom. What this means is that anti-Semitism has seeped into German life more than ever before because all kinds of people are complicit with it now. doctors who are producing certificates and things the people who run you know you run a swimming pool and your local town has banned jews from coming so you're the person who has to turn them away maybe you're not especially anti-semitic yourself you're not even a nazi party member

but you are becoming complicit and the more complicit that people are the more that people start to believe it so there's a brilliant source during all this period of the letters sent by Social Democratic Party agents to their kind of, you know, they're reporting to their exiled leadership and what's going on. And this is one from Berlin, January 1936. And the Social Democratic agent writes, The campaign against the Jews is not without influence on people's opinions. Very slowly, views are being filtered into it that they used to reject first people read their sturm out of curiosity but in the end something from it sticks and i think there is a sense at the beginning of 1936 or so that things are sticking richard evans is the example of a woman called umita Mashman. We've talked about her a few times. She was a bright young

woman who ended up becoming a very keen Nazi and wrote her memoirs very late in life, looking back with great guilt. She talks about how there were Jewish girls in her class at school, but very gradually, those Jewish girls are pushed the margins, and the other girls, they cut off relationships with them. And more and more, she and her classmates just start to believe. They're being told it so often about the Jews being a threat and all this sort of thing, that they come to believe it, and they come to accept the new dispensation. And I think that's how it works for most ordinary Germans. So you have the thing with marriages and people are being denounced. I mean, you have hundreds of denunciations every year, about 420 a year, I think it is.

You will be denounced for marriage or for having a relationship. So it's race defilement, isn't it? Race defilement, exactly. And often people's own families, Tom, will inform upon them because they're so shocked and they don't want to get into trouble. Yeah, exactly. So they're nervous. And people also start to be reported just for socialising with their Jewish fellow citizens, don't they? In a way that wouldn't have happened in 1933, but is happening in 1936, I think. And that's the consequence of this ratcheting up. I mean, it's still not a criminal offence to be kind to a Jewish fellow German. No. But it's kind of seen as expressing insufficient enthusiasm for the new National Socialist dispensation. And therefore you risk being put on a kind of red list. You could be reported for shaking hands with a Jewish neighbour or a Jewish former colleague

or acquaintance in the street. I mean, imagine, Tom, you could be somebody who'd served in the Great War and you bump into a Jewish comrade from the trenches. And you can't shake his hand. You shake his hand and the next thing you know, you've been reported to the local authorities. Now, if you explained this to the local officials, the chances are that if they hold you in reasonably high regard, they would say, you shouldn't have done it.

We understand why you did it. Don't do it again. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah. It's not like you're going to be executed or something, but there is a climate of intimidation and there's a definite sense that Germany's Jewish population, because they are being squeezed out of the professions and of economic life and of, you and of the sort of public sphere, the swimming pools and the restaurants at a sort of local level, that they are being pushed to the margins, isolated,

and perhaps slightly forgotten by their neighbours. I think that's the slightly chilling thing. Is there a kind of generational difference in this? So the older you are, the likely you are to have served, say, if you're a man, to have served with Jewish colleagues in the trenches. Are you therefore less amenable to this kind of propaganda? And the younger you are, the more you're getting it in the education system, you're getting it at school,

you're getting it in the Hitler Youth or whatever, the more likely you are to imbibe the kind of anti-Semitism. Yeah, I think you're right, Tom. I think your instinct is right. So what's happening in antisemitism. Yeah, I think you're right, Tom. I think your instinct is right. So what's happening in the schools? Well, I think the younger you are, I think that the scary thing about Nazism,

as we've said many times in this series, is how much it appeals to young people and how so many young people are swept up by it. So in the schools, in 1933, there had been about 60,000 Jewish children in German schools. There were quotas, as we said, from 1933 onwards. And every year, more and more people basically leave the school system or are pushed out of the school system.

And it's not just because of the quotas. It is because, terrifyingly, two of the groups where Nazism is most popular are among school teachers and school children. So teachers, we mentioned that before, it's academics and students who lead the book burnings in 1933, and it's teachers who often lead the anti-Semitic bullying in schools. I mean, Richard Evans has some absolutely horrible, horrible details. Any parent will find this.

I mean, you don't have to be a parent, but I think if you are a parent, you find it even more terrifying. Your children would be made to sit on a special Jewish bench. They would not be allowed to go to certain lessons. They would have to sit there and listen in silence while their teachers told the class that it was the Jews who had betrayed them in the First World War, that Jews were hereditary criminals and traitors and so on. Your children would not be allowed to take part

in the school play, in the school concert, in these kinds of activities, outings and things like that. Many teachers would humiliate your children and give them deliberately, unfairly bad marks and so on. By 1935, as early as 1935, probably about half, more than half, of Jewish primary school children are no longer going to the schools that other children go to. They're going to improvised Jewish-only schools. So there again, you've got an example of how Jewish Germans are being pushed out, are being ghettoized already. And that, of course, will make it easier for their German Aryan, I hate to use the word Aryan, but let's say non-Jewish, neighbours to forget about them or to turn a blind eye later on when things get really, really nasty. Now, the question I suppose you might say is, why not get out? Because we've talked about that in the first episode.

And of course, some people do get out. And by 1935, the SS are kind of actively encouraging this, aren't they? So this is, we've talked about Eichmann. This is where he comes in. So he is recruited as an assistant to an SS officer who's been mandated by Heydrich to encourage emigration. And Eichmann is, I mean, he's meeting with Jewish paramilitary officials from Palestine. He actually goes on an abortive trip to Palestine

to try and kind of facilitate it. So there is a sense, isn't there, that the interests of Jews who want to leave Germany and the SS apparatus that want to see them leave are starting to dovetail. So is there an increase in immigration at this point? Not much. That's the extraordinary thing. That is weird then, isn't it? So the number of immigrants, just to give you a sense, 1933, about 37,000 people. 1934, 23,000. 1935, 21,000. 1936, 25,000. 1937, 23,000. So the biggest group left in 1933, but then it's a fair bit smaller. Why? Well, you're German, as we said in the first half. So it's the same as before.

Yeah. But at this point, you haven't got a sense that it is actually getting worse. Are you like a frog in a kind of slowly boiling pot of water? Yeah. I think that analogy is probably the right one. That you just think with each new thing, maybe this is the last, you know, we'll put up with it. We put up with so much. And it's defeat to leave. Evans quotes a middle-aged German Jew in 1937. He says, why should I emigrate? What can happen to me? I'm an old soldier. I fought for four years for my fatherland on the Western front. I was an NCO and I was awarded the Iron Cross first class. Why would such a man leave Tom? The very famous example, isn't there, of Victor Klemperer,

who stays in Germany right the way up to the firebombing of Dresden. I mean, he's an incredible eyewitness to that. And he is Jewish. And so his diaries are an invaluable account of what very, very intelligent, because he's an academic. He's a very, very kind of astute analyst of what is happening. Yeah. And his diaries, for those people who haven't read them, they are an

extraordinary resource and a very, very moving and riveting read. Victor Klemperer, I mean, he again is a war veteran. He's a professor of French at the University of Dresden. He has a terrible time. He's basically kicked out of his job. His books aren't published.

He loses lots of his friends. You books aren't published. He loses lots of his friends. There's some talk, could he go to Palestine? But he despises Zionism, doesn't he? He's not a Zionist. He thinks Zionism is another form of nationalism. And he doesn't like nationalism because he doesn't like the Nazis. And he is isolated. He's depressed. His wife is ill. Obviously, she's not Jewish, his wife A ava but she is crippled by anxiety as well and he just sits there at home writing his history of 18th century french literature but he is determined not to go i mean klempere writes no one can take my germanness away from me uh he says he says my nationalism and my patriotism are gone forever but he can never lose his germaness

and he never wants to so this is the situation at the end of 1935, beginning of 1936, after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws. And then what happens, Tom, is we have a pause because the Olympics are coming to Germany. And Hitler is very conscious of the PR issue. So actually, extraordinarily, what happens for about the next six to 12 months or so is things actually get a little bit better for Germany's Jews. So the signs come down in public. The signs come down. The more virulent expressions of anti-Semitism are dampened down. There are three people with Jewish ancestry in the German Olympic team, most famously the FENSA, Helena Meyer. When foreign dignitaries arrive in Germany for first the Winter Olympics in Garmisch

and then the Summer Olympics in Berlin, all sense of anti-Semitism is kind of downplayed. People leave Germany saying, well, you know what, it's not quite so bad. Die Stürmer is withdrawn from the newsstands in Berlin. And so for a time, Germanist Jews can reasonably say to themselves, thank goodness, the worst is over. We were right not to leave. We can just about get on with our lives. But Dominic, of course, the worst is not over. The worst is very much yet to come and i think we should stop this episode here and in our final episode of this series we will look at what happens in the wake of the olympics moving towards the terrible expression of anti-semitic violence that is

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