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PRE-HOLOCAUST
A crowd of Germans
A CROWD OF GERMANS outside of a Jewish-owned department store in Berlin on the first day of the Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, 1 April 1933. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives.
A historic image of a shtetl
A Jewish family
A JEWISH FAMILY strolls along a street in prewar Kalisz. Poland, May 16, 1935.
AN ANTI-JEWISH SIGN posted on a street in Bavaria reads "Jews are not wanted here." Julien Bryan took this photograph while visiting Germany in 1937. Back in the United States, Bryan regularly gave lectures with accompanying motion pictures to convey the looming dangers he foresaw in Europe.
AN ANTI-JEWISH SIGN posted on a street in Bavaria reads "Jews are not wanted here." Julien Bryan took this photograph while visiting Germany in 1937. Back in the United States, Bryan regularly gave lectures with accompanying motion pictures to convey the looming dangers he foresaw in Europe.
A RARE PHOTOGRAPH OF A RANSACKED JEWISH HOME.jpg
A RARE PHOTOGRAPH OF A RANSACKED JEWISH HOME in Vienna, taken on Nov. 10, 1938. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Photo archive-No. 04303.
A TYPICAL CAMPAIGN SCENE
A TYPICAL CAMPAIGN SCENE with Nazi posters on display next to the Center Party, Communists, Socialists and others. Below: Repeated propaganda marches became a cheap and effective form of publicity - sometimes leading to violence between rival political groups. Hörst Wessel, pictured at the front, was killed during such a brawl in 1930 and raised to the status of a martyr by Nazis via the "Hörst Wessel" banner anthem.
An anti-Jewish sign
AN ANTI-JEWISH SIGN posted on a street in Bavaria reads "Jews are not wanted here." Julien Bryan took this photograph while visiting Germany in 1937. Back in the United States, Bryan regularly gave lectures with accompanying motion pictures to convey the looming dangers he foresaw in Europe. During one of these presentations in 1938, he said: "And then a sign like this. Along the Rhine you see these signs against the Jew everywhere, … all through central and southern Germany, saying simply and uniformly the same thing. Jews are not wanted here…. Out of my own curiosity because I am a reporter who is anxious to get both sides of the story – I talked further with these peasants and in a number of cases I asked the German people along the Rhine … how come these signs? Who put them up? They rather laughed about it all and not too pleasantly, and they denied having anything to do with it..." Citizens would have viewed this sign in public every day. Think about which municipal officials might have had to approve the content of the sign and its display in a public area. Who might have created it and decided where to hang it? What does this indicate about the involvement of citizens and officials in public discrimination?
Around an antisemitic
AROUND AN ANTISEMITIC "Pesti Ujság" newspaper display, visitors view the exhibition of the Arrow Cross newspaper, Pesti Ujság, at the International Fair in Budapest. The headline reads: "For a Hungary without Jews." Budapest, Hungary, approximately 1941-1942. The Arrow Cross was Hungary's largest fascist political movement after 1935. In the 1939 parliamentary elections it won over 20% of the vote and had more than 250,000 members. Its ideology was ultra-nationalistic and fiercely antisemitic. The Arrow Cross viewed Jews as an "anti-national" "race" that it held responsible for Communism and finance capitalism. The Arrow Cross demanded that Hungary's Jews be "resettled" outside of Europe. Karoly Marothy (Marothy Karoly in Hungarian) founded the newspaper, Pesti Ujság, and served in the Hungarian parliament as a member of the Arrow Cross Party.
Between 1938 and 1939
BETWEEN 1938 AND 1939 some 10,000 children were sent without their parents from Nazi Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to safety in Britain. This rescue movement became known as the Kindertransport.
BOOK BURNINGS 1933
BOOK BURNINGS 1933, some of Germany's most valuable creative works went up in flames on May 10, 1933. The mass book burnings marked a turning point in the Nazis' ideology campaigns. And they were largely organized by university students.
Boy in a basement dwelling
Boy with kindling in a basement dwelling, Krochmalna Street, Warsaw], ca. 1935–1938. ©Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography.
BURNING SYNAGOGUE
BURNING SYNAGOGUE, on November 9-10, 1938, the Nazi Party organized a “spontaneous” mob attack against Jews throughout Germany and Austria. That night, thousands of attacks were made on Jews, Jewish-owned property, and synagogues; this became known as Kristallnacht.
CHILDREN PLAYING
CHILDREN PLAYING in a Jewish neighborhood in Paris, France, during the Holocaust.
Discouraging German-Jewish Integration
DISCOURAGING GERMAN-JEWISH INTEGRATION, in 1933, Jewish businessman Oskar Danker and his girlfriend, a Christian woman, were forced to carry signs discouraging Jewish-German integration. Intimate relationships between “true Germans” and Jews were outlawed by 1935. Credit: akg-images / Pictures From History.
GAY LESBIAN DANGERS
GAY LESBIAN DANGERS, this photograph depicts two members of the Berlin Order Police standing guard outside a local Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) headquarters in March 1933. The windows are boarded up and lined with pro- Hitler posters and Nazi flags. Only weeks earlier, however, this building had hosted the Eldorado nightclub—a central location for Berlin’s gay and transgender communities. The only visible remnant of the former venue is the banner above the front door, reading, Hier ist's Richtig or "Here it's right." Until its closure shortly after the Nazi Party’s rise to power in 1933, the Eldorado had been a popular gathering place for celebrities, artists, and tourists.4 Although many valued the Eldorado Club and other similar establishments as places of freedom of expression and cultural enrichment, others saw the Eldorado as a symbol of cultural decline and the decadence of Weimar Germabny. During that period, Berlin became well known for its art, film, and club scene, much of which conflicted with traditional German values. Berlin emerged as "the undisputed gay capital of the world," and German activists like Magnus Hirschfeld became important members of an international gay rights movement. But more conservative Germans regarded these developments as a threat to their vision of a German national community. Hirshfeld's offices were raided by the Hitler Youth on May 6, 1933. His extensive library was part of one of the infamous May book burnings.
GERMAN NAZIS STAND BY RANSACKED
GERMAN NAZIS STAND BY RANSACKED Jewish property during Kristallnacht, most likely in the town of Fuerth, Germany, on Nov. 10, 1938. (Yad Vashem via AP)
Germans lived in extreme poverty
GERMANS LIVED IN EXTREME POVERTY after WWI and had few social programs to rely on. Getty
Germany
GERMANY, a bench with the inscription "Only for Jews"
Holocaust Memorial Center observes annual Kristallnacht commemoration.jpg
Holocaust Memorial Center observes annual Kristallnacht commemoration, "Hell's Threshold," by Nadia Werbitzky, is based on her mother's memory of the October 1941 Nazi roundup of 7,500 Jews in Mariupol, Ukraine.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR RECALLS
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR RECALLS Kristallnacht horrors. The November 1938 file photo shows a group of people standing outside a Jewish-owned shop in an unnamed German town, after kristallnacht, when nazi-incited mass riots left more than 91 Jews dead, damaged more than 1,000 synagogues and left some 7,500 Jewish businesses ransacked and looted. (ap photo, file)
HOME VANDALIZED DURING KRISTALLNACHT
HOME VANDALIZED DURING KRISTALLNACHT, a private Jewish home vandalized during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass" pogrom). Vienna, Austria, November 10, 1938.
IMAGES FROM A HOME MOVIE
IMAGES FROM A HOME MOVIE titled: “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938,” which showed a Jewish community in Poland a year before the Nazi invasion.Credit...U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
JEWISH BUSINESSMEN
JEWISH BUSINESSMEN are paraded down a street in Leipzig, carrying signs that read: “Don’t buy from Jews; Shop at German stores!” (Courtesy of the USHMM Photo Archives) Copyright © Jewish Foundation for the Righteous
JEWISH COMMUNITY OF DEBLIN
JEWISH LIFE IN EUROPE
JEWISH LIFE IN EUROPE, a vanished world.
JEWISH WOMEN IN LINZ
JEWISH WOMEN IN LINZ, Austria are exhibited in public with a cardboard sign stating, 'I have been excluded from the national community (volksgemeinschaft)', during the anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht, November 1938. Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty images
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