The Jews of Europe Student: Ștefana Andrei, Class a-X-a D Coordinator teacher, Toader Diana Colegiul Economic Mihail Kogălniceanu Focșani In 1933, there were roughly nine million Jews living in Europe; less than two percent of the total population. The largest Jewish populations lived in Poland, the western part of the Soviet Union, Romania and the Baltic States. In these areas, the Jews constituted between five to ten percent of the total population. In Germany, the Jewish population was about 500 000 people, roughly 0.75 percent of the total population. In many villages in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Jews lived like their ancestors had done for centuries. They lived in small towns in rural areas, some of which had a Jewish population majority. They often kept their traditional clothing and lived in a strictly religious manner. Some were rich but most were poor. In bigger cities, Jews became more and more involved in the society of the surrounding majority population and, even though some of them maintained a traditional lifestyle, many abandoned the religious life. In Western Europe more and more Jews became assimilated, which meant that they adapted to the societies they lived in. In other words, life for the Jews of Europe could be very different from place to place. After the First World War, Germany lost large areas of land under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The German state was also forced to pay huge reparations for the damages that the Allies held Germany and countries associated with it responsible for. In 1923, Germany was hit by hyperinflation, money became worthless and large parts of the population became very poor. In the aftermath of the US stock market crash of 1929, nearly six million Germans lost their jobs. Many people wanted someone to blame and, for Hitler, “the Jew” became the perfect scapegoat. Support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party started to grow in the beginning of the 1930s. Many Germans had lost their faith in democracy and did not believe that the existing parties could improve circumstances. A large part of the population regarded Hitler as a strong leader and expected him to restore the former glory of the German state. In his speeches, Hitler emphasized that Germany must recapture the areas it had lost in the war and acquire more “living space” in order to develop. He spoke about a struggle against “predatory Capitalism” and Communism, and said that the Aryan, white or German “race” was superior to all other “races”. The lowest of all was the Jewish “race”, regarded by Hitler as parasitic and dangerous. While Hitler despised the Jews, he also regarded them as a huge threat and claimed that they wanted to rule the world and control other peoples. His ideas of “the Jew” as sinister and
menacing came from Christian anti-Jewish traditions that claimed that the Jews had killed Jesus. To keep the white Aryan “race” pure, Germans had to avoid mixing with Jews at all costs. In September 1939, Poland was attacked first by Germany and later on by the Soviet Union. Through an agreement between the two states, they divided Poland among themselves. Almost two million Jews lived in the German part. They were regarded by the Nazi leaders as having an even lower standing than the German Jews. Almost immediately, plans were made to cleanse the countryside of Jews and drive them into the city. The authorities wanted to create special areas where Jews were forced to live, so-called ghettos. These areas were often set up in neighbourhoods that already contained many Jews. Non-Jews living there were forced to move out. Relocations into the ghetto often occurred under brutal conditions. A fence or wall was built around the ghetto area. Everyone was forced to wear a special mark on their clothes identifying them as Jews. It could be a yellow six-pointed star, a yellow armband or a white ribbon with a blue six-pointed star. It was strictly forbidden for Jews to go outside the fence of the ghetto. Those who tried to go into hiding were dependent on help to survive. Harsh punishments were meted out by the Germans to anyone caught helping a Jew. The situations made some Jews flee into the ghetto in order to escape persecution and suffering. Hundreds of transports were sent from Germany and the rest of Western Europe to ghettos far away from Germany, for instance to Riga in Latvia or Minsk in Belarus. There were also some transports of Roma to a few ghettos. A number of people were forced into slave labour. The ghettos were eventually liquidated and people who were not considered fit for work were killed in mass shootings or taken to extermination camps.