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Nazi Policies Towards Jews Were Brutal but Erratic Essay

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Nazi Policies Towards Jews Were Brutal but Erratic

In the years after the Machtergreifung in 1933, German Jews were subject to fluctuation levels of violence and intimidation at the hands of the Nazi Party and its supporters. The variations in intensity were the result of a number of factors including the occasion of the Berlin Olympics, and internal rivalries in the Nazi party about the best way to proceed with Anti-Semitic policy.

‘Brutal’ is defined in the Oxford dictionary as Cruel, harsh or savage,’ and in consideration of this, Nazi treatment of Jews between 1933 and 1939 was certainly brutal. The earliest example of this brutality comes during the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, when Nazi …show more content…

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A Jewish man clearing broken glass after Reichkristallnacht

Whilst this physical brutality is certainly horrific, it is on a much smaller scale than other terror regimes of the era, such as Stalin’s Russia, where hundreds of thousands of innocent soviet citizens were sent to work camps and worked to death. Due to this, it could be argued that Nazi policy towards Jews was not remarkably brutal however the brutality of Nazi Germany also took on a much more extreme psychological dimension against Jewish citizens.

These incidents of ‘legal anti-Semitism’ were common in Nazi Germany, an example of which being the 1933 book burning, where, in a state organised affair thousands of Jewish-authored books were burned in public. This was immensely psychologically cruel, as firstly it served to oppress and destroy Jewish culture by burning sacred texts such as the Talmud. The book burning also created an immense atmosphere of fear in the German-Jewish community best surmised by German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine when he said:

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."

The Shops boycott, organised by Julius Streicher had a similarly intimidating effect on Jews in Germany, who

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