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The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.
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Jewish-owned department store. The Nazis initiated a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses on April 1, 1933, across Germany. Many Germans continued to enter the Jewish stores despite the boycott, and it was called off after 24 hours. In the subsequent weeks and months more discriminatory measures against Jews followed and remained in effect.
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Among other things, the laws issued in September
1935 restricted future German citizenship to those
of “German or kindred blood,” and excluded those
deemed to be “racially” Jewish or Roma (Gypsy). -
Following the incorporation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938, and the unleashing of a wave of humiliation, terror, and confiscation, many Austrian Jews attempted to leave the country.
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On the night of November 9–10, 1938, the Nazi regime unleashed orchestrated anti-Jewish violence across greater Germany.Within 48 hours, synagogues were vandalized and burned, 7,500 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, 96 Jews were killed, and nearly 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
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Government policies in the 1930s made it difficult
for Jews seeking refuge to settle in the United States. In May 1939 the passenger ship St. Louis—seen here before departing Hamburg—sailed from Germany to Cuba carrying 937 passengers, most of them Jews. After the U.S. government denied permission for the passengers to enter the United States, the St. Louis returned to Europe. Some 250 of the refugees would later be killed in the Holocaust. -
Jews in the Warsaw ghetto wait in line for food at a soup kitchen. Ghettos were city districts, often enclosed, in which the Germans concentrated the municipal and some-times regional Jewish population to control and segregate it from the non-Jewish population. In November 1940, German authorities sealed the Warsaw ghetto, severely restricting supplies for the more than 300,000 Jews living there.
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The United Nations in 1948 voted to establish genocide as an international crime, calling it an “odious scourge” to be condemned by the civilized world. Despite this effort, genocide has continued, and it continues to threaten parts of the world even today. Refugees from the 2003–2005 genocide in Darfur, Sudan, above, struggle to survive after being displaced from their villages.
