Changes

Upon taking power, the Nazis began immediately to rid Germany of its Jewish citizens. In the Aryan Paragraph of 1933, the regime decreed that Jews could not hold civil service positions. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived Jews of the right to citizenship and restricted relationships between "Aryans" (racially pure Germans) and Jews. After the ''Kristallnacht'' (Crystal Night) of November 9, 1938, an organized act of violence perpetrated by Nazis against Jews in all parts of Germany, the persecution of Jews entered a new phase. Random acts of violence, by then commonplace, were replaced by the systematic isolation of the Jewish population in Germany, which had numbered about 600,000 in the early 1930s.

Upon taking power, the Nazis began immediately to rid Germany of its Jewish citizens. In the Aryan Paragraph of 1933, the regime decreed that Jews could not hold civil service positions. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived Jews of the right to citizenship and restricted relationships between "Aryans" (racially pure Germans) and Jews. After the ''Kristallnacht'' (Crystal Night) of November 9, 1938, an organized act of violence perpetrated by Nazis against Jews in all parts of Germany, the persecution of Jews entered a new phase. Random acts of violence, by then commonplace, were replaced by the systematic isolation of the Jewish population in Germany, which had numbered about 600,000 in the early 1930s.

Much of the groundwork for selling the mass murder of Jews to average [[German]]s was laid by [[Julius Streicher]], whose newspaper, ''Der Sturmer'', offered a heady cocktail of simple-minded hatred, malice, and slander against Jews and anyone perceived as having sympathy for the Jews. While many educated Germans, even educated Nazis, considered Streicher a joke, the dehumanizing language he popularized helped to inure Germans to the increasingly draconian legal measures against the Jewish population. Streicher’s rhetoric presumed that Jews were inherently and unalterably evil, and flatly rejected the concept of the Jew as a human being like other human beings. "His blood," Streicher wrote, "carries not honor and honesty, rather criminality, fraud, hypocrisy, lies, the lust for defilement, and the lust for murder…a race that has drives toward the unnatural and toward criminality cannot recognize natural moral laws."  [[Heinrich Himmler]], the man who oversaw the genocidal policies of the Third Reich, said of Streicher, "In times to come when the story of the reawakening of the German people is written, and when the next generation will be unable to understand how the German people could ever have been friendly with the Jews, it will be said that Julius Streicher and his weekly newspaper were responsible for a good part of the education about the enemy of mankind."

Much of the groundwork for selling the mass murder of Jews to average [[German]]s was laid by [[Julius Streicher]], whose newspaper, ''[[Der Stürmer|Der Sturmer]]'', offered a heady cocktail of simple-minded hatred, malice, and slander against Jews and anyone perceived as having sympathy for the Jews. While many educated Germans, even educated Nazis, considered Streicher a joke, the dehumanizing language he popularized helped to inure Germans to the increasingly draconian legal measures against the Jewish population. Streicher’s rhetoric presumed that Jews were inherently and unalterably evil, and flatly rejected the concept of the Jew as a human being like other human beings. "His blood," Streicher wrote, "carries not honor and honesty, rather criminality, fraud, hypocrisy, lies, the lust for defilement, and the lust for murder…a race that has drives toward the unnatural and toward criminality cannot recognize natural moral laws."  [[Heinrich Himmler]], the man who oversaw the genocidal policies of the Third Reich, said of Streicher, "In times to come when the story of the reawakening of the German people is written, and when the next generation will be unable to understand how the German people could ever have been friendly with the Jews, it will be said that Julius Streicher and his weekly newspaper were responsible for a good part of the education about the enemy of mankind."

As Streicher whipped up Hitler’s base of the uneducated and fearful, Hitler’s propaganda minister, [[Joseph Goebbels]] offered a steady diet of smooth vindictiveness for those Germans too well informed to accept at face value Streicher’s wild tales of Jewish seduction and human sacrifice. Their stance was typically that any suffering the Jews endure at the hands of Germans was the responsibility of the Jews themselves, that the passage of laws restricting Jewish participation in public life was, in fact, an effort to protect Jews from the righteous indignation of an injured populace:  

As Streicher whipped up Hitler’s base of the uneducated and fearful, Hitler’s propaganda minister, [[Joseph Goebbels]] offered a steady diet of smooth vindictiveness for those Germans too well informed to accept at face value Streicher’s wild tales of Jewish seduction and human sacrifice. Their stance was typically that any suffering the Jews endure at the hands of Germans was the responsibility of the Jews themselves, that the passage of laws restricting Jewish participation in public life was, in fact, an effort to protect Jews from the righteous indignation of an injured populace: