Hitler and the Jews

My favourite podcast The Rest Is History, presented by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, has run two episodes on Hitler and the Jews and they make for searing listening.

For 2,700 years Jewish people had been targeted – initially because of their alleged rôle in the death of Jesus Christ – but Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism  was on another level.

He blamed the Jews for being Bolsheviks, for all of Germany’s ills, and for destroying the purity of the nation.

His solution – the “Final One” – was to get rid of them all.

This started with the racial Nuremberg laws – abated slightly when the Nazis wanted to present an unobjectionable face at the Berlin Olympics – but continued in full fury with Kristallnacht in 1938 – the subject of the latest episode of The Rest Is History.

A Jewish emigré in Paris assassinated a minor official in the German embassy after his parents were abducted.  This led to a horrific pogrom with the destruction of the main synagogue in Munich and attacks on Jewish shops.

Jews were treated as third class citizens, banned from public places, the professions and especially harshly treated in the schools.

Hitler was abetted by the Head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and Josef Goebbels.

The average German citizen has also to be complicit in this.

Jews had been well integrated into German society and many were decorated as soldiers in World War One, which might explain why many hung around so long to await an even more dreadful date.

Nor did many countries, including Britain and France, show any enthusiasm to let them in.

Teachers were especially cruel to their Jewish pupils   Such a teacher might have been 24 at the time of Kristallnacht and thus 86 and conceivably alive in 2000 yet I have never seen one interviewed.

I’ would like to think this was a sad event consigned to history but the barbaric attack on Jews  on October 7th prove otherwise.