Germany's
Jewish population was in grave danger after the Nazis took power in 1933. The
Nazis (a shortened term for members of the National Socialist German Workers
Party) were carried into power by the rhetoric and political shrewdness of Adolf
Hitler, who was also the principal architect of the party's anti-Semitic philosophy.
Hitler had told intimates in 1925 that the Nazi Party (which at that time was still quite small but growing) would develop into a powerful force in German politics but that to eventually take control of the nation, the party needed "but one enemy that everyone can recognize, and that enemy is the Jews." To this cold and cynical calculation, Hitler added a personal hatred of Judaism, a hatred apparently growing within him since childhood. The hatred had been nurtured during the years of frustration and failure he spent in Vienna before the First World War. When Germany lost that war in 1918, Hitler, having served in the Germany army, blamed the defeat on "betrayal" by elements within German society -- specifically communists and the Jews. "If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the [German] people had been subjected to poison gas," he later wrote, "the sacrifice of millions [of soldiers] at the front would not have been in vain." As his actions later demonstrated, he meant every word.
Nazism's growth in the late 1920s was due more to careful organization and the ravages of the Great Depression than to its anti-Semitic platform. But before they took power in 1933, the Nazis had given ample warning of how they would treat Germany's Jews.
After Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany, the German government was steadily converted into an instrument dedicated to carrying out his policies. This included measures that reflected his burning hatred of the Jews. The anti-Semitic laws passed by Hitler's government, together with the ongoing campaign against the Jews in the controlled press (summarized in the next section), would culminate in the Holocaust. As the German scholar Martin Broszat put it in his study The Hitler State, the "laws and decrees which step by step had further discriminated against the Jews in Germany ... had condemned them to a social ghetto [and] paved the way for the 'final solution.' The progressive undermining of the principle of law [in Germany] through measures cast in legal form finally resulted in an utterly crude, lawless, criminal action."