On September 15, 1935, the Reichstag met in Nuremberg and passed two laws, known as the Nuremberg Laws.
The first, the Reich Citizenship Law, declared that only individuals of “German blood” could be citizens of the German Reich (state), thus depriving German Jews of their citizenship.
The second, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, formalized barriers between Jews and Germans, forbidding marriage and sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans.”
Nazis deprived German Jews of all civil rights and social and cultural life.
Jewish property with a view to compelling Jews to emigrate from Germany.
After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, all the same anti‐Semitic measures were implemented there, year later in Czechoslovakia. By 1938 two‐thirds of German Jews had left the country, and 60 percent of those who stayed had lost their livelihood.
Evacuating the Jews from Germany, the Nazis created compulsory “Jewish Quarters” in most Polish cities and towns known as ghettos. Jews in Poland were forced to move into ghettos.
During the Holocaust, ghettos were small and, in most cases, poor areas in cities and towns, to which the Jews were confined.
Many ghettos were surrounded by walls or fences in order to help enforce the Jews’ isolation and separation from their neighbors and the outside world.
The ghettos were meant to serve as temporary, tightly controlled collection points, where the Jews’ labor potential would be exploited until a future German policy led to their removal.
Ghettos became transition areas, used as collection points for deportation to concentration & death camps.
Beginning of Extermination
In the so‐called euthanasia program, which had begun in the fall of 1939, Nazi doctors killed Germans with mental or physical disabilities.
Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units and, later, militarized battalions of Order Police officials, moved behind German lines to carry out mass murder operations against Jews, Roma, and
Soviet state and Communist Party officials.
Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing centers, often called
extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed gassing facilities.
By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe.
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