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The Persecution
Shortly after Hitler took power in Germany, he ordered all "non-Aryans" to be removed from government jobs. -
Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship, jobs, and property. To make it easier for the Nazis to identify them, Jews had to wear a bright yellow Star of David attached to their clothing. -
Night of Broken Glass
November 9-10, 1938, became known as Kristallnacht, or "Night of Broken Glass." Nazi storm troopers attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues across Germany. An American who witnessed the violence wrote, "Jewish shop windows by the hundreds were systematically and wantonly smashed....The main streets of the city were a positive litter of shattered plate glass." Around 100 Jews were killed, and hundreds more were injured. 30,000 Jews were arrested and hundreds of synagogues were burned. -
The St. Louis
Official indifference to the plight of Germany's Jews was in evidence in the case of the ship St. Louis. This German ocean liner passed Miami in 1939. Although 740 of the liner's 943 passengers had U.S. immigration papers, the Coast Guard followed the ship to prevent anyone from disembarking in America. The ship was forced to return to Europe. "The cruise of the St. Louis," wrote the New York Times, "cries to high heaven of man's inhumanity to man." -
The Final Solution
By 1939, only about a quarter million Jews remained in Germany. But other nations that Hitler occupied had millions more. Obsessed with a desire to rid Europe of its Jews, Hitler imposed what he called the "Final Solutions"--a policy of genocide, the deliberate and systematic killing of an entire population. Hitler's Final Solution rested on the belief that Aryans were a superior people and that the strength and purity of this "master race" must be preserved. -
The Final Stage
The Final Solution reached its final stage in early 1942. At a meeting held in Wannase, a lakeside suburb near Berlin, Hitler's top officials agreeed to begin a new phase of mass murder of Jews. To mass slaughter and starvation they would ass a third method of killing--murder by poision gas.
