Establishment of the Racial State (1933-1938)

Once in power, the Nazis quickly began to implement their dream of creating an exclusive racial community of pure Germans by physically eliminating all those who were seen as  undesirable in the extended empire. Nazis wanted only a society of pure and healthy Nordic Aryans. They alone were considered desirable. Only they were seen as worthy of prospering and multiplying against all others who were classed as undesirable. This meant that even those Germans who were seen as impure or abnormal had no right to exist. Under the Euthanasia Programme, Helmuths father along with other Nazi officials had condemned to death many Germans who were considered mentally or physically unfit.

Jews were not the only community classified as undesirable. There were others. Many  Gypsies  and blacks living in Nazi Germany were considered as racial inferiors who threatened the biological purity of the superior Aryan race. They were widely  persecuted. Even Russians and Poles were considered subhuman, and hence undeserving of any humanity. When Germany occupied Poland and parts of Russia, captured civilians were forced to work as slave labour. Many of them died simply through hard work and starvation.

Jews remained the worst sufferers in Nazi Germany. Nazi hatred  of Jews had a precursor in the traditional Christian hostility towards Jews. They had been stereotyped as killers of Christ and usurers.Until medieval times  Jews were barred from owning land. They survived mainly through trade and money lending. They lived in separately marked areas called ghettos. They were often persecuted through periodic organised violence, and expulsion from the land. However, Hitlers hatred of Jews was based on pseudoscientific theories of race, which held that conversion was no solution to the Jewish problem. It could be solved only through their total elimination.

From 1933 to 1938 the Nazis terrorised,  pauperised  and segregated the Jews, compelling them to leave the country. The next phase, 1939-1945, aimed at concentrating them in certain areas and eventually killing them in gas chambers in Poland.

Police escorting gypsies who are being deported to Auschwitz, 1943-1944.