Nazi Germany from 1934

By Ph0en1x

  • 516,000 marriages

  • NS-Volkswohlschaft is set up

    This was a welfare organisation set up to help women and children.
    This organisation helped to set up health offices in rural areas, improved sanitation and provided preventative medicine.
    It also arranged for 'genetic and racial' care, that likely related to sterilisation.

  • Marriage loans are introduced

    These were financial incentives for unemployed women to marry. Upon getting married they received a 600 mark loan that was repaid in increments based on the number of children she had.

  • All youth organisations, with the exception of Catholic ones, were taken over by the Hitler Youth.

    Catholic ones were protected by the concordat.

  • Introduction of NAPOLAS

    NAPOLAS = National Political Institutes of Education.
    In 1936 they were taken over by the SS.
    - For boys age 10-18
    - Aimed to train the Nazi elite.
    - Military style boarding education, with lots of PE, compulsory manual labour and political training.

  • The Nazis issue a 'Vagrants Registration Book' to every homeless person

    At this point in time it was 50,000

  • A this time there were 28,000 Sinta and Roma people living in Germany

  • Period: to

    350,000 - 400,000 people were sterilised.

  • Period: to

    Infant Mortality Drops

    1933 - 7.7%
    1936 - 6.6%
  • Period: to

    The Birth Rate initially rises and then slowly declines again.

    This increase could have been due to economic recovery as opposed to the Nazis policies.
    The Birth rate rose in comparison to what it had been in the depression, but not in comparison to Weimar.
    Nazi Eugenic Policies reduced population potential through their eugenic policies.
  • Period: to

    The Number of Students attending university decreases

    1933 = 113,000 students
    1939 = 57,000 students
  • Period: to

    The Treatment of Convicted Gay Men

    100,000 were sent to Prison.
    50,000 were sent to Concentration Camps. Gay men at Concentration Camps were beaten and humiliated by the SS, who considered them almost as bad as the Jewish. The SS also believed that they needed constant supervision to prevent rabid sex. At Buchenwald, Vaernet's experiments on Gay men only ended when there was an outbreak of yellow fever.

  • A Boycott of Jewish Shops and Business

    Hitler justified it as retaliation against an international Jewish conspiracy that followed a protests in New York on the 27th March, and a British news article entitled the 'Jews of the world unite in action' against Germany. Goebbels organised an intensive propaganda campaign to maximise its impact. The SA stood by Jewish shops to intimidate customers. This had mixed success and revealed the broad lack of support for violent anti-semitism.

  • The Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service

    This called for non-Aryans to be removed from positions in the civil service. Hindenburg ensured that there were some exceptions, including WW1 veterans or their families. 60% Jewish lawyers were able to continue practising. While there was some success in banning Jewish doctors from practice, many continued practising illegally, or for the Jewish Community.

  • The Law for the Overcrowding of Schools and Universities

    Limited the intake of Jewish students in state schools and universities. This was an attempt to divert more resources to 'German' children. From this point, Jewish children were increasingly sent to Private schools or Jewish schools.

  • The DAF is set up.

    This occured after independant trade unions were banned and it took over these union's assets. Membership included employers and employees.
    1933 = 5 million members in 1933
    1939 = 22 million members in 1939

  • Public Solicitation is made illegal

  • The Kripo rounds up 100,000 homeless people, but they're quickly released

  • The Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service

    • This led to women in top civil service and medical jobs being fired.
    • 1,200 University teachers (10%) were dismissed [33% for racial reasons. 56% for political reasons.]

  • The Official guidelines for recruiting Civil Servants and Teachers

    'In the event of males and females being equally qualified for employment in public service, the male applicant should be given preferential treatment'

  • All University lectures made to join the Nazi Lecturers association.

    All new members had to attend a 6 week ideological and physical training camp.
    They were also made to sign a 'Declaration in Support of Hitler and the National Socialist State'

  • Law against Dangerous Career Criminals

    This law allowed unlimited 'protective custody' for any person convicted of 2 or more offences.

  • 'Strength through Joy' (KDF) is created by the DAF

    Provided workers with opportunities for leisure. Subsidied activities such as sport, theatre trips, hikes, cinema visits and holidays.
    1938 = 10 million took KDF holidays, the majority within Germany.

  • 740,000 marriages

  • Munich Upper-Bavaria: Beneficial Welfare Scheme example

    In 1 month, Nazi organisations distributed 25,800 litres of milk, 1500 grocery parcels and 172 sets of baby clothes and linen

  • All other Youth organisations, including Catholic ones, are banned

  • 'Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Progeny' was brought into effect

    This introduced compulsory sterilisation for those with mental or physical disabilities such as epilepsy, schizophrenia, deafness, blindness and more.
    60% of sterilisations were for 'feeble mindedness'
    5000 women died of post-operative complications.
    It was very rare for appeals against sterilisation to be successful.

  • Anyone classed as a repeat offender lost their right to release.

    By the 30th April 1938 - Only 701 Repeat Offenders had been released at all across Germany.
  • Period: to

    32,268 people were sterilised

    Out of 4000 appeals against it, only 441 were successful.
  • Period: to

    The number of women attending Nazi recuperation homes rose

    1934 = 40,340
    1937 = 77,723
  • Period: to

    Harvest Kindergartens increase in number

    These cared for young children while their mothers were working in the fields. (mostly found in rural areas)
    1934 = 600
    1941 = 8,700
  • Period: to

    1,808 prisoners are castrated

    70% of these were convicted paedophiles.

  • The Lebensborn program is created.

    This was essentially where women were sent to state organised brothels to get impregnated by SS officers.
    Around 7000 babies were born in such homes under Nazi rule.

  • Marriage Law

    This required women to have a certificate stating their 'fitness to marry' before their marriage license could be issued.

  • All textbooks had to be Nazi approved

    New textbooks were produced that upheld Nazi values.

  • University Curriculum changes

    Students were forced to join the Nazi controlled German Student's league, but 25% avoided this.
    Students had to attend 2x weekly fitness and ideology training. Students had to score points in sports, unless given a medical exemption.
    Racial and Eugenic ideas were inserted into medicine, law and politics.
    By 1941, some Nazi leaders had begun to realise the adverse affects of their education policy and began trying to reverse its anti-intelligence emphasis.

  • The Law making Homosexuality illegal is extended to cover anything 'unnatural'

    Between 1936 and 1939 there were 30,000 convictions of homosexuality.

  • The Nuremburg Laws

    Followed an incident in NYC where a Nazi flag was removed from a ship and thrown into the harbour. It was dealt with by a Jewish magistrate who didn't take it seriously.
    Sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews were banned. (Law for the protection of German blood and Honour)
    Jews were stripped of their citizenship (Reich Citizenship Law) and inter-racial marriage was banned.
    The Nazis redefined 'Jew' as having 3 Jewish grandparents or 2 Jewish Grandparents while being married to a Jew.

  • The Olympic Games

    This caused a temporary halt in anti-semitic policy in order to ensure the success of the games.
    Ironically, several of the races were won by Jesse Owens, an African American man, which undermined Hitler's ideology.

  • Law making RAD compulsory.

    This law made 6 months of service in the Reich Labour Service compulsory for all men between 19 and 25.
    In 1939 it was extended to women.
    Most members were employed in manual labour or agriculture.
    They lived in camps away from home with low pay and poor quality housing and food.

  • The Blood Protection Law is introduced

    This banned inter-racial marriages: marriage to Jews, marriage to Black people and marriage to Gypsies.

  • The DAF begins offering vocational training courses

    These were attended by 2.5 million workers

  • Women were banned from being judges and lawyers.

  • The Hitler Youth became compulsory

    However, Up to 25% of youth avoided joining it.
    As membership became more widespread, the HY became less successful because:
    there were less committed members,
    there was an increasing focus on military preparation instead of popular activities.

  • 30% of Teachers have joined the Nazi party at this point.

  • Curriculum Changes

    • By 1936 PE takes up 2 hours a day
    • Nazi ideas were particuarly integrated into History and Biology
    • Religious education was continually sidelined or replaced
    • Girls began to be taught different lesson content: music, needlework, language and homecraft.

  • A Reich Office for the 'fight against the Gypsy Nuisance' is established.

  • Period: to

    Dr Robert Ritter studied the Sinta and Roma people living in Germany

    He concluded that only 'half-breed gypsies' living in cities were a threat to volksmeigenschaft

  • The Reich central office for combating Homosexuality and Abortion is set up

  • Teachers are pressured into joining the National Socialist Teacher's League

    By 1937, 97% of Teachers had done so.
    All members had to attend a 1 month Nazi training course. By 1938 2/3rds of teachers had attended one.

  • Schirach and Ley set up the 'Adolf Hitler' schools.

    Only 11 were ever created.
    Free boarding schools for 12-18 year old's based on leadership potential and physical appearance.
    Many normal features of schools were abandoned to focus on Nazi training.
    Tellingly, Nazi leaders did not send their children to these.

  • The Criteria for sterilisation became more elastic

    Occupation, where you lived, 'test of life' and intelligence could all play a factor in deciding whether or not someone could be sterilised.
    This increased elasticity meant most beggars were classed under 'feeble minded'.

  • 37000 Jews leave Germany voluntary

  • Period: to

    In 1937 there were 444,036 prisoners, by 1940 this had increased to 266,223 prisoners.

  • Preventative Crime Fighting Decree

    This extended the no release rule to all offenders 'endangering' the public repeatedly.

  • The Volkswagen car scheme

    Workers could subscribe 5 marks a week to a fund that would eventually allow them to aquire a car.
    The scheme's chief impact was to reduce danger of inflation and cut domestic expenditure and no worker ever actually received a car.

  • Marriage Law extends the grounds for Divorce

    • Infertility and inter-racial marriage were now grounds for divorce.
    • Following this, the number of Divorces increased.

  • The Decree for the Registration of Jewish Property

    • This enabled the Nazis to confiscate all Jewish Property worth more than 5000 marks.
    • It restricted Jews from working as travelling salesmen, security guards and estate agents.
    • All Jews lost their public welfare.
    • All Jewish Men had to take the first name of Israel and Women the first name of Sarah.
    • All Jews had their passports stamped with a J.

  • Himmler informs the Kripo and Gestapo of Operation 'Work-Shy'

    This was a plan to round up anyone that had quit their job 2 or more times for no apparent reason.
    It happened because Himmler wanted to get more labour for the factories that were attached to some concentration camps.
    Importantly, only those 'willing to work' were planned to be seized - crucially excepting Alcholics, the elderly, Vagrants, habitual criminals and the Sinta and Roma populations.

  • Anschluss with Austria

    • In Vienna alone there were 200,000 Jews.
    • By the end of the month they were being sacked and discharged from the army.
    • For the first time Jewish Prisoners were sent on mass to Concentration Camps.
    • Triggered the set up of the Forced Migration scheme - within 6 months of Anschluss, Eichmann had forced 45,000 Jews to emigrate.

  • Operation Work Shy begins

    1500 'a-socials' are sent to concentration camps.

  • The Kripo heads set a target for each district to arrest 200 individuals.

    Between the 13th and 18th, 8000 were arrested.
    All were taken to the new camps of Flossenburg, Mathausen and Neugenam.

  • Kristalnacht

    'Revenge' for the assassination of Formert by a Jewish man
    - 28,000 adult men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
    - 91 people die as a result of the chaos
    - 275 Synagogues are burned to the ground.
    - Windows of Jewish business, shops and homes are smashed and their contents are looted, broken or burned.
    - The Jewish Population had to pay a special tax to pay for all the damages caused This was the first state sponsored, widespread, violent attack on the Jewish Population.

  • Decree for combating the 'Gypsy Plague'

    All of them were required to carry an identity card that classed them as 'Pure Gypsy', 'Mixed Race Gypsy' or 'Non-Gypsy Iteritant'.
    This decree also banned multi-family travelling groups, and meant they had to request special permission to travel from camp to camp.

  • All denominational schools had been abolished

    These were religious schools for Catholics, Protestants etc.

  • Sachesnhausen - 1900 political prisoners are suddenly confronted by 6000 work-shy inmates

    They were considered lazy, cowardly and, in the SS rank system, were the third lowest rank.

  • The T4 Program - 5000 Children were killed

    Hitler personally signed a directive that protected Doctors who performed Euthanasia on their patients. Disabled children were starved to death or killed by lethal injection.
    It was based in Berlin.
    The T4 program attracted significant opposition and the Catholic Church in Germany, led by Bishop Von Galen, publicised the horrors of the policy to the public. Notably, They succeeded in having the Program halted by August 1941.
  • Period: to

    The Prison Population increases by 80,000

    1939 = 120,000
    1941 = 200,000
  • Period: to

    In this time period the number of petty thefts increase by 71%

  • Period: to

    Rape convictions drop by 72%

    • Partially because of the number of men conscripted and mobilised to the front.

  • The Germans Conquer Poland

    They split it up into regions - one of which was the general government. It housed the greatest number of deported Jews, mostly in ghettos.

  • Decree against National Pests

    Targeted Thieves, Blackout Exploiters and 'anti-social saboteurs'

  • Decree against Violent Criminals

    Gave courts greater power to deal with violent criminals.

  • Brothels are secretly decriminalised

  • Deportation of the Roma and sinta begins.

    In May alone nearly 2500 were deported.

  • By this time many cities had set up camp grounds to isolate the Sinta and Roma from the rest of the population.

    They had extremely low water quality, poor gas supply, almost non-existent street lighting and bad sewage mains. By March 1940 almost 40% of their inhabitants had Scabies.

  • Romania began to murder Jews town by town from June.

    • In Lasi between 4000 and 8000 Jews were murdered.
    • 5000 were deported.
    • 100,000 Jews were murdered in Berrasabia and North Bukovina.
    • They were murdered so brutally that many Germans complained about the scale of it and the treatment of the bodies.

  • Operation Barbarossa began

    • The SS Einsatzgruppen began the 'Holocaust of Bullets'.
    • Between June and July they killed 500,000 Jewish soviets.
    • They were ordered not to intervene in local pogroms in the occupied territories.
    • Special Group A shot 250,000 Jews in 1941 in the Baltic States.
    • Himmler and Heydrich did discipline a group who only killed 9 Jews in Gropno despite the large Jewish population.
    • They were supported by Police Units, who could be just as brutal and sometimes more.

  • German Forces arrived in Kaunas (Lithuania)

    • They were welcomed and seen as liberating people from Stalinist rule.
    • The locals immediately turned on the area's Jewish community, and murdered a group of 50 Jews, one at a time, with a crowbar.

  • The first purpose built killing facility, set up at Chelmo, received its first victims.

    • It was a gas van disguised as a disused coffee van.
    • It had been in action for 2 years under the control of Herbert Lange, and euthanised disabled Polish people.
    • Carbon Monoxide gas was used to poison the Jews before their bodies were disposed of.
    • Between 150,000 and 300,000 Jews were murdered at Chelmo over the course of its existence.

  • The USA joins the war after the attack on Pearl harbour by the Japanese.

    This helped to clarify Hitler's vision of total war by January 1939.
    Also around this time, Hitler and Himmler have a secret meeting that can only have been Hitler authorising Himmler to proceed with mass extermination.

  • It had become clear that Victory over the USSR had not been achieved.

    • The plans for deportation to Madagascar and Ural were scrapped.
    • The Number of Jews in the General Government of Poland was unsustainable. The food and resources needed to keep them all was taking away from what the German population could receive.

  • 28 state regulated brothels had been set up in Berlin

  • The first mass exterminations are carried out at Auschwitz with the sole purpose of killing.

    Over the course of its existence, Over 1.1 million people would be killed at Auschwitz. It was seconded only by the Treblinka camp.

  • The Wannsee Conference

    • Chaired by Heydrich
    • Announcement of the 'evacuation' of the Jews to the East, where many would be worked to death.
    • Heydrich was extending an existing strategy of deportation and 'natural wastage' by suggesting the implementation of the 'solution'.
    • It acted as an opportunity for the SS to assert their role in the Final Solution.
    • Heydrich was very pleased with how successful the administration based meeting went - no important decisions about the solution were made there.

  • Himler begins the 'general transfer' of eligible prisoners to Death Camps

  • Following the implementation of the final solution, Himmler ordered the deportation of the entire Jewish population of the General Government by this date.

    • He was essentially asking for them all to be murdered within the calendar year.

  • Himmler orders the mass deportation of Gypsies to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

    He notably excluded those that were classed as 'Pure Gypsy' something that reportedly caused many arguments between him and other leading Nazis.

  • 1,274,166 Jewish people were murdered in the Reinhard Death Camps of Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec by the end of 1942

  • 14,700 prisoners have been transferred to Concentration Camps

  • Goebbels' Total War Speech

    • Sparked a massive Anti-Semitic propaganda drive.

  • The Deportation of Gypsies to Auschwitz begins.

    13,000 'half-breed Gypsies' were deported overall, and it is believed that 15,000 managed to avoid it. All those who were exempt were expected to give consent for sterilisation if they were older than 12.
    Between 1943 and 1945, around 2,250 were sterilised.

  • 8 major German Concentration Camps had Brothels

    These were used as an incentive for the male workers.
    31,140 women were prostitutes in Nazi Concentration Camps.