AQA 7042 · 2O · R19 - The development of anti-Semitic policies and actions; the effect of the Anschluss
This lesson traces how Nazi persecution of Jewish people intensified through dispossession, organised violence and coerced emigration. You will compare the effects of the Anschluss, the November Pogrom and the invasion of Poland without assuming that the later Holocaust was inevitable or fully planned in 1938–39.
Measuring the development of persecution
The starting point is the position created by the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. Those laws had stripped Jews of Reich citizenship and prohibited marriage or sexual relations between people classified as Jewish and people classified by the Nazis as being of “German or related blood.” This is retrieval from the previous row, not the end of the story. Between 1935 and the outbreak of war, persecution developed in its reach, methods, coordination and coercion.
Radicalisation
A process in which policy becomes more extreme or far-reaching. It does not imply a fixed timetable or make later outcomes inevitable.
Hitler's antisemitic ideology gave a consistent direction, but Nazi leaders, party organisations, police forces, civil servants, businesses and local officials created and enforced measures at different levels. Initiatives, opportunities and competition could intensify persecution without a single new law announcing the whole change.
The sequence can be located through six anchors:
| Date | Development | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1935 | Nuremberg Laws | Racial classification and loss of citizenship supplied a legal foundation for further exclusion |
| 1937–early 1938 | Professional restrictions and coerced transfer of Jewish-owned businesses increased | Persecution reached more deeply into livelihoods and property |
| 12–13 March 1938 | Germany occupied and annexed Austria in the Anschluss | Nazi racial rule suddenly covered Austria, where violence, theft and humiliation escalated with exceptional speed |
| 27–29 October 1938 | More than 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship were expelled from the Reich | The regime used mass expulsion against people whom many had regarded as settled German residents |
| 9–10 November 1938 | The November Pogrom occurred across Germany and annexed territories | Coordinated terror, destruction and mass imprisonment operated openly on a nationwide scale |
| 1 September 1939 | Germany invaded Poland | War and occupation placed a far larger Jewish population under German power and changed the geographical setting of policy |
The word antisemitism means prejudice, hostility or discrimination directed against Jews as Jews. This lesson uses that standard modern spelling, although the frozen AQA title retains anti-Semitic. Nazi racial categories were invented tools of persecution; they were not valid biological facts.
The Anschluss as an accelerator
Anschluss means the Nazi annexation of Austria. German troops entered Austria on 12 March 1938 and a law incorporated the country into Germany on 13 March. The plebiscite held afterwards was manipulated, and Jews and Roma were excluded from voting. It must not be treated as neutral evidence that annexation was a freely agreed union.
For about 200,000 people whom the Nazis classified as Jewish in Austria, the effect was immediate. Austrian Nazis, sympathisers and opportunists began arrests, public humiliations, assaults and seizures of property as the existing Austrian state collapsed. German security officials, including Heinrich Himmler and Gestapo personnel, arrived to construct the Nazi police system, while Austrian police and officials participated. The pattern therefore combined German state power with local initiative and opportunities for plunder; it was neither purely imposed from outside nor the action of every Austrian.
The speed mattered. In Germany, persecution had accumulated over five years. In Austria, legal exclusion, public violence, loss of employment, property seizure and pressure to leave arrived together. The Nazi term “Aryanization” concealed coerced transfer and theft: Jewish owners were forced to surrender businesses, homes and other property to non-Jewish beneficiaries, commonly below their value and under state controls that prevented owners from using the proceeds freely.
The Anschluss also produced an administrative model. On 20 August 1938, the regime established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna under Adolf Eichmann. It brought permissions, taxes, property demands and police pressure into one process. Its purpose was not to protect a normal right to migrate. It used terror and dispossession to force Jewish people to seek entry elsewhere while extracting their assets. The Vienna system was important because the SS could present rapid expulsion as a coordinated bureaucratic achievement and adapt the model elsewhere.
This makes Anschluss an accelerator, not a complete explanation. It enlarged the population and territory under Nazi racial rule, encouraged rapid local action and supplied an organisational model. Yet antisemitic ideology, previous German persecution, the choices of Nazi leaders and the later international situation were also necessary to explain what followed.
The November Pogrom: violence and state coordination
The AQA specification calls the events of 9–10 November 1938 Reichkristallnacht. The familiar English phrase “Night of Broken Glass” refers to shattered shop windows, but it can make the event sound like damage to property. November Pogrom is more precise: a pogrom is a collective violent attack on a targeted minority, and here Jewish people, homes, businesses, synagogues and communal life were attacked across Germany, Austria and the annexed Sudetenland.
The immediate sequence separates pretext from cause. In late October, German authorities expelled more than 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship. After his family was caught in this action, seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris on 7 November; vom Rath died on 9 November. Hitler and Joseph Goebbels used the death as a pretext. They did not respond to an unexpected popular uprising: instructions spread from Nazi leaders to party districts, and police orders enabled the violence.
SA, SS and Hitler Youth members, other Nazi activists and some local civilians attacked Jewish people and property. Police were told not to stop the destruction provided non-Jewish lives and property were protected, while firefighters commonly protected neighbouring buildings rather than burning synagogues. Current United States Holocaust Memorial Museum research records more than 1,400 synagogues destroyed and about 26,000 Jewish men imprisoned in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Thousands of businesses and homes were vandalised; people were assaulted, publicly humiliated and killed. The arrests were the first mass imprisonment of Jews by the regime simply because they were Jewish.
The aftermath joined violence to administration. On 12 November, Hermann Göring chaired a meeting of more than 100 party, state and economic representatives. The regime imposed a levy of one billion Reichsmarks on Jewish people, confiscated insurance payments and made owners bear repair costs. Further decrees excluded Jews from retail, schools, universities, cinemas and other areas of economic and social life, while remaining Jewish-owned businesses were subjected to compulsory transfer.
The November Pogrom was therefore a turning point by scale, public visibility, state coordination and consequence. Yet it also had continuities: street violence, economic pressure and antisemitic law already existed. Its importance lies less in introducing wholly new hatred than in combining established methods nationwide and then turning the destruction into intensified imprisonment, theft, exclusion and pressure to leave.
Emigration under coercion and constraint
In ordinary use, emigration means leaving one country to settle in another. In Nazi policy, departure was increasingly coerced. Jewish people made difficult choices in response to threats, but the regime shaped those choices through terror, detention, loss of employment, property seizure, emigration taxes and restrictions on transferring money abroad. After the November Pogrom, some detained men were released only after surrendering businesses or showing plans to leave.
Leaving also required somewhere willing to admit a refugee. Applicants needed combinations of visas, quotas, sponsors and money that differed by destination. At the Évian conference in July 1938, representatives of 32 countries discussed the refugee crisis but produced no comprehensive solution. By the end of June 1939, about 309,000 German, Austrian and Czech Jewish applicants were seeking roughly 27,000 places available under the relevant United States quota.
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