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RACIAL ANTISEMITISM
belief in the superiority of the "white race" was both inspired and reinforced by the contact of European colonist-conquerors with native populations in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and buttressed as pseudo-science by a perversion of evolutionary theory known as "social Darwinism." -
ANTISEMITISM
The word antisemitism means prejudice against or hatred of Jews. The Holocaust, the state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945, is history’s most extreme example of antisemitism. -
Killing Centers
In late 1941, the Nazi regime began building specially designed, stationary killing centers in German-occupied Poland. These camps were purposely built just to kill Jews. These Jews were put into these rooms with no clothes on and poisonous gas was released into the air and slowly killed the Jews. -
The Ghettos
The ghettos were cities/ towns that the germans made to make the Jews live. The Ghettos were crowded and very unsanitary, which made a lot of people die because it was dirty and nasty. -
ANTISEMITIC LEGISLATION
The first major law to curtail the rights of Jewish citizens was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of April 7, 1933, which excluded Jews and the “politically unreliable” from civil service. The new law was the German authorities' first formulation of the so-called Aryan Paragraph, a regulation used to exclude Jews (and often, by extension, other “non-Aryans”) from organizations, professions, and other aspects of public life. -
NUREMBERG RACE LAWS
This chart was used to aid Germans in understanding the laws. White circles represent "Aryan" Germans, black circles represent Jews, and partially shaded circles represent “mixed-raced” individuals. -
COMMUNISM
Communism was antithetical to Nazism because communism prioritized class above nation and race. However, in the Nazi imagination, communism was recast as Judeo-Bolshevism. Judeo-Bolshevism claims that communism was a Jewish plot designed at German expense. Judeo-Bolshevism’s threat was emphasized by Germany’s proximity to the Soviet Union and competing Nazi-Soviet territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe. -
MASS SHOOTINGS
Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators perpetrated mass shootings of Jews in territory seized from Soviet forces. This is sometimes known as the Holocaust by bullets. As many as 2 million Jews were murdered in these mass shootings and associated massacres.
