Persecution and Racial Policy

A national community built on exclusion

The Nazis claimed that they would unite Germany in a Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘people’s community’. However, membership depended on accepting Nazi authority and fitting the regime’s ideas about race and social behaviour. People labelled ‘outsiders’ faced exclusion rather than the unity the Nazis promised.

Nazi racial ideology placed supposedly ‘Aryan’ Germans above other groups. This was a false hierarchy, not a scientific description of humanity. Jews and Roma were persecuted on racial grounds; Jehovah’s Witnesses were targeted for their religious beliefs and refusal to obey particular Nazi demands. Gay men faced persecution because the regime condemned homosexuality. Eugenics policies targeted people whose health or disabilities the Nazis regarded as undesirable.

These distinctions matter: persecution served both the Nazi aim of reshaping the population and its demand for obedience.

Jewish people: from discrimination to legal exclusion

Antisemitism existed in Europe long before Hitler came to power. The Nazis exploited existing prejudice and made Jewish people scapegoats for Germany’s problems. They falsely associated Jews with Germany’s defeat in the First World War, communism and economic crises. Propaganda turned these accusations into an argument for excluding Jewish people from German life.

After Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, persecution began immediately, including boycotts of Jewish businesses. Propaganda and school teaching encouraged hostility towards Jews. Restrictions also narrowed everyday freedoms: from 1934, some local councils excluded Jewish people from parks and swimming pools. Such measures attacked livelihoods, social relationships and the ability to participate in ordinary public life.

The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 embedded racial discrimination in national law. The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jewish people of German citizenship rights, denying them equal membership of the state. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, announced on 15 September 1935, prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and people classified as having German or related blood. The regime was therefore controlling both public rights and intimate relationships in pursuit of its supposed ‘racial purity’.

The regime classified people by ancestry rather than simply by their religious practice. Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was classified as Jewish. Conversion to Christianity therefore did not necessarily protect someone from persecution. Nazi policy treated Jewish identity as something inherited, not a belief a person could choose to change.

During 1938, Jewish people had to register their possessions and carry identity cards. These measures made people and their property easier for the authorities to identify and control. Increasing restrictions and violence aimed to drive Jews out of Germany.

Kristallnacht: state-organised violence

Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’, took place on 9–10 November 1938. The immediate pretext was the shooting of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager whose family had been deported from Germany to Poland. Grynszpan shot him on 7 November; vom Rath died on 9 November. Nazi propaganda blamed all Jews for the shooting.

The violence was not a spontaneous public response. Hitler and Joseph Goebbels supported and instigated nationwide attacks, and Nazi officials passed instructions to their local organisations. Members of the SA, SS and Hitler Youth took part, as did some ordinary civilians. Police were instructed not to stop the attacks, while protecting non-Jewish lives and property. Firefighters allowed synagogues to burn while preventing flames from spreading to neighbouring buildings.

More than 1,400 synagogues were burned or destroyed across Germany and its annexed territories. Thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were vandalised, homes were attacked, and Jewish people were humiliated, assaulted and killed. Police imprisoned about 26,000 Jewish men in concentration camps because they were Jewish.

The authorities then punished the victims, imposing a collective 1 billion Reichsmark ‘atonement payment’ on the Jewish community. Further anti-Jewish restrictions followed.

Kristallnacht was a turning point because legal exclusion and everyday discrimination escalated into nationwide, openly violent persecution and mass imprisonment. Even the home offered no reliable refuge. Jewish people could not depend on the authorities for protection: the state itself organised their persecution. The violence convinced many that leaving Germany was their only chance of survival.

Roma: racial classification and confinement

Roma had lived in Germany for centuries and had experienced prejudice before 1933. Nazi rule intensified this discrimination by classifying them as racially ‘inferior’ and outside the national community.

Romani families in major cities were rounded up, fingerprinted and photographed. They were then forced into special camps under police guard. Registration and confinement worked together: the authorities identified families and restricted where they could live and move.

A specific example came before the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when Roma in Berlin were arrested and moved to the Berlin-Marzahn camp. The attempt to present an attractive public image of Germany was accompanied by the coercive removal of people the regime considered undesirable.

Jehovah’s Witnesses: religious conviction against state demands

Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted for their beliefs, not their ancestry. Their faith prohibited military service and expressions of obedience such as saluting a national flag or giving the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. These convictions conflicted directly with Nazi demands for loyalty.

From 1933, the regime moved to outlaw their activities. Witnesses faced imprisonment in concentration camps, loss of employment and withdrawal of welfare benefits and civil rights. Nevertheless, some continued to meet secretly, preach and distribute religious pamphlets.

The experience of Berthold Mewes’s family shows how persecution reached into family life. His family attended secret Bible meetings, and his mother was arrested in 1939 and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Religious persecution could therefore separate families as well as punish individual believers.

Gay men: criminalisation and coercion

The Nazis closed gay bars and meeting places, dissolved associations and shut down gay publications. This destroyed spaces in which gay people could meet and support one another. Nazi leaders also claimed that homosexuality threatened population growth, linking persecution to their demand for more children from people they considered ‘racially fit’.

The regime used Paragraph 175, the law banning sexual relations between men. Laws became more severe after 1935, increasing the threat of prosecution and imprisonment. Although the term ‘homosexuals’ appears in accounts of Nazi persecution, the criminal persecution described here particularly targeted men.

In January 1937, Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim was among 230 men arrested in Lübeck under the revised criminal code. He was imprisoned, arrested again in 1938 and tortured. His release was made conditional on agreeing to castration. His experience illustrates how legal persecution could develop into physical violence and coercion over a person’s body.

Eugenics: controlling who could have children

Eugenics means attempting to control reproduction to encourage supposedly desirable inherited characteristics. Nazi policy treated some people with disabilities as a genetic and financial burden and claimed that preventing them from having children would improve the population. These claims denied their equal worth and rights.

The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, enacted on 14 July 1933, mandated forced sterilisation of people placed in specified categories of supposed hereditary illness or disability. These included schizophrenia, hereditary deafness and blindness, and severe physical deformity. Nazi classifications rested on assumptions about heredity, not reliable proof that every person’s condition would be inherited by their children.

Hereditary health courts decided who would be sterilised. Doctors and other specialists participated in these courts, giving coercive decisions an appearance of legal and medical legitimacy. Those targeted could be subjected to operations without genuine consent. Sterilisation made a person unable to reproduce; it was not the same as killing them.

For example, Gerda D., a shopworker, was sterilised after a disputed diagnosis of schizophrenia. Authorities later forbade her to marry. Her experience shows how a medical classification could take away both reproductive freedom and the right to form a family. The Marital Health Law of October 1935 further restricted marriage between people deemed ‘hereditarily healthy’ and those the regime classified as genetically unfit.

The move towards killing in 1939

In 1939, Nazi eugenics policies escalated beyond preventing births to organising murder. On 18 August 1939, the Interior Ministry ordered doctors, nurses and midwives to report children under three showing signs of severe mental or physical disability. From October 1939, authorities encouraged parents to place children in specially designated clinics. These were actually killing wards, where medical staff murdered children through drug overdoses or starvation.

The Nazis used the word ‘euthanasia’ to conceal the purpose of these killings. In this context it meant a secret murder programme, not compassionate care or a freely chosen death.

The child killing programme should be distinguished from Aktion T4, the centrally organised programme targeting adult patients with disabilities. Hitler authorised the adult programme in autumn 1939, backdating his authorisation to 1 September. Its centralised killings began in 1940, beyond this lesson’s main 1933–1939 period.

Racial persecution and eugenics were connected by the belief that the state should decide who belonged in Germany’s future population. The regime did not merely restrict where people could work, worship or live: it claimed authority over whether they could become parents and, increasingly, whether they could live at all.