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Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. He served as “Führer” from 1934 to 1945. His goal was to create a master race, and he began targeting any groups that did not fit into the image he had for it.
“When Hitler came to power he wanted to purify the German race and he instituted what he called the euthanasia program,” said survivor Steven Berger. “That meant that all those people who were not qualified to be a member of the special race had to be eliminated.”
Berger said that among those who were targeted were the physically handicapped, mentally disabled and unstable, those with anti-social tendencies, people who had been divorced too many times, people who drank too much, blacks, gypsies and the Jews. He said that Nazis had even created a color chart for skin, hair and eyes.
On April 1, 1933, the Nazi party enforced a boycott of all Jewish owned businesses. Hanne Liebmann, a survivor from Southwest Germany, said her family owned a photo studio. The day of the boycott, she saw party members in their brown shirts standing out front.
“Although the national boycott operation, organized by the Nazi party chiefs, lasted only one day and was ignored by many individual Germans who continued to shop in Jewish-owned stores, it marked the beginning of a nationwide campaign by the Nazi party against the entire German Jewish population,” according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s (USHMM) website.
As time went on, the Nazis continued to target the Jews through the Nuremberg Laws, which placed many limitations on them. They also defined Jews as “anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents as a Jew, regardless of whether that individual recognized himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community,” according to USHMM. Even those who were Christian converts could be considered Jews.
The first of these limiting laws came in 1933. They excluded Jewish people from public office and civil service. Additionally they were barred from working in journalism, radio, farming, teaching, theatre and film. That same year, limitations were placed on the amount of Jewish students who were allowed to attend schools and universities in Germany.
In September of 1935, Nuremberg Laws were enacted to revoke the citizenship of Jews. There were also laws barring them from intermarriage with Aryans and from having extramarital relationships with them.
Over the course of the next several years, the laws against the Jewish people continued to be put in place. Jews lost their businesses, which were “Aryanized,” and were forced out of other professions. They could not go to the movies, coffeehouses, restaurants, libraries, or use public transportation. They had to go to Jewish schools, which were given curfews.
“Before Hitler we had full citizenship, we had the same rights and privileges of any other citizen, and now, in ’35, we were essentially segregated out of society,” Liebmann said. “Everything was off limits for the Jews. Life became ever more restrictive.”
