HISTORY 322 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: April Laws, Gleichschaltung, Jewish Question
3/6/18 - The Racial State:
• Nazism in Phases:
o 1933- 1934: The Nazi Revolution:
▪ Politics of Gleichschaltung consolidated party and state, centralized authority and
brought all important branches (politics, industry, military, police) under Hitler’s
direct control
• Focus on political opponents that could potentially end nazi reign
prematurely
• Racial legislation development was a lot less systematic
o 1934-1936: Routinization and Expansion:
▪ Forging consensus and building a people’s community based on a combination of
benefits, sacrifice and terror
▪ Making a spectacle out of economic upswing, full employment and the
reclaiming of German national honor on an international stage
▪ Until 1938, people believed that the racial things that Nazi’s preached were not at
the core of nazism
o 1938-1945: Radicalization
▪ Radicalization of Nazi practices, war and extermination become the primary
focus of the regime and take priority over the people’s community
• Racism as official state dogma
o Woman’s body:
▪ Symbolize - motherhood, fertility, simplicity, health, beauty
▪ Also hygiene/reproduction
▪ Stood for collective body of nation that is able to regenerate and tax the enemies
• Huge shift from large numbers of abortion
• Nazis are terrified about the decline of aryan members of the community
o At same time, trying to build up national defenses
▪ youth/labor services to make men invincible and protect
women’s bodies from threat of racial contamination
• The Racial Nazi State (done w/o a master plan)
o Create a master race
▪ Worried and terrified that G people are insufficiently racialized/pure
▪ Aryans as the culture creating race vs. jews as culture destroying race
• Three different races:
o Culture creating
o Culture bearing
o Culture destroying
▪ Implement only culture creating members procreating
▪ If reproduction is unchecked -
• People with undesirable traits: physical
disabilities, criminal tendencies, etc. → produce
at a faster reproductive rate
▪ Racial fitness postulated against degeneracy, weakness, inferiority
o Purification of the ‘Aryan Race’ eradication of :life unworthy of living” (Leben)
o Expulsion of Jews from national body, 1933-39
o Extermination of the “enemy within’: The “final solution” to the “jewish question”
beginning in the context of war
• Creating the Master Race...1st steps:
o Rhetoric is very clear but plans are not (weird experimental steps)
o April 1st, 1933: First Anti-Jewish Boycott
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
▪ Proved to Nazis that racial was not embedded enough in German society because
it failed
• Not sufficient enough for people to stop purchasing in jewish stores
• Most people stayed home or continued to shop
• Problem:
o SA was often positioning itself with signs in front of Jewish
businesses to intimidate
▪ Citizens just stayed home and didn’t shop at all
• Signaled that race education to become racially conscious is necessary
▪ Necessary thing to do because international Jewry was vilifying Germany in its
propaganda
• Cast as a defense mechanism
o April Laws: Writing Racism into Law:
▪ Civil Service Law (april 7, 1933) - also known as Aryan Clause → allowed
regime to fire members of civil service that lacked racial/political qualifications
• 1st attempt to write racism into law
• May 1933 - Veterans clause: Jews who hadn’t served in WWI were
dismissed of their posts in civil service
• April 22, 19333 - Ban of jewish doctors from clinics and hospitals run by
the national health organization
o Cannot practice medicine unless treating other jews
• April 25, 1933 - Laws against overcrowding of German schools and
Universities
o Too many overeducated jews taking education from “good aryan
citizens”
o No more than 1.5% of total number of schools can be jewish
o 35,000 people are kicked out of jobs
• April 1933 - Registration of “Rhineland Bastards”
o Children of German women and Black French troops
▪ (Locarno)
▪ 1st step to racial registration of population
▪ Goering gets statistics on how many of them they are
▪ 1st individuals subject to eugenic measures of regime
• Children sterilized
• Individuals disappear with no trace
▪ Jew begins a catch all category for all the things that
nazis hope to be eradicated from G
• Targets of racial state are numerous
• Unworthy life: racial hereditary disabilities
o Behavior = subject to scientific scrutiny → behavior becomes
subject to science
▪ ex) women who have multiple sexual partners and are
not prostitutes are feeble minded (lack economic sense)
• Terrible carriers of disease - grave threat to
National Body
• Descriptors of jews that are attached to other
characteristics (imperialists, criminals, etc)
▪ Arguments are made so people feel like it makes sense
• How it affects their own “pocketbooks”
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
