Antisemitism in France - The Holocaust

The Holocaust

Further information: History of the Jews in Germany See also: Holocaust

The Holocaust was the most significant event in the modern Jewish and world history and one of the most vast genocides humanity had ever known with 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 2/3 of all European Jews.

By the early 20th century, the Jews in Germany were the most integrated in Europe. The situation changed in the early 1930s after the German loss in World War I and the economic crisis of 1929 which resulted with the rise of the Nazis and their explicitly anti-Semitic program. Hate speech which referred to Jewish citizens as "dirty Jews" became common in anti-Semitic pamphlets and newspapers such as the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Stürmer. Additionally, blame was laid on Jews for having caused Germany's defeat in World War I (see Dolchstosslegende).

Anti-Jewish propaganda expanded rapidly. Nazi cartoons depicting "dirty Jews" frequently portrayed a dirty, physically unattractive and badly dressed "talmudic" Jew in traditional religious garments similar to those worn by Hasidic Jews. Articles attacking Jews, while concentrating on commercial and political activities of prominent Jewish individuals, also frequently attacked them based on religious dogmas, such as blood libel.

The Nazi antisemitic program quickly expanded beyond mere speech. Starting in 1933, repressive laws were passed against Jews, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws which removed most of the rights of citizenship from Jews, using a racial definition based on descent, rather than any religious definition of who was a Jew. Sporadic violence against the Jews became widespread with the Kristallnacht riots, which targeted Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship, killing hundreds across Germany and Austria.

With the Nazi invasion to Poland in 1939 and the beginning of World War ii the Nazis began the final solution of the Jews in Europe. The Jews were concentrated in ghettos and later sent to concentration and death camps where they were murdered. In the occupied territories of the USSR Jews were murdered in mass numbers by death squads with the help of local population. This practice was later replaced by gassing the Jews in the death camps, the largest of them was Auschwitz.