Holocaust, The

Setting the Stage for the Holocaust

Before World War II began, the so-called Nuremberg Laws had been passed in Germany as an early step toward the Holocaust. The Nuremberg Laws, passed in 1935, two years after Nazism became the state ideology, acted on the Nazi Party's codification of anti-Semitism and scientific racism. Various types of heritage were defined, depending on whether one's grandparents were all non-Jewish German, if three or four of them were Jewish, or if one or two of them were Jewish. Rights and privileges were denied to those who lacked sufficient German heritage. Bans were also issued on sex or marriage between Jews and non-Jews and on participation of Jews in German civic life. In contrast with earlier anti-Semitic laws, the goal was not to convert Jews to Christianity—indeed, Jewishness was defined according to birth and could not be altered or escaped through any means.

Depictions of the Holocaust focus on the concentration camps where prisoners were worked as slaves until they died or were killed, but this tends to gloss over the sheer amount of resources Germany expended on the systematic slaughter of the Jewish people. The Nazi state has been called “a genocidal state” by scholar Michael Berenbaum because of the vast bureaucracy and complex planning necessary to carry out the Third Reich's genocidal mission.

By 1900, the United States had become home to the third-largest Jewish population in the world. In the early 20th century, the Jewish community in the United States had become deeply involved not only in American economic and social life but in the Progressive movement and the major social movements of the era. The African American civil rights movement included many prominent Jewish leaders, as did the labor movement, the fight for women's suffrage, and movements devoted to pacifism, social reforms, ending poverty and hunger, improving health care, and freedom of religious practice. During World War I, the Jewish Welfare Board was founded to assist in enlistment and fund-raising campaigns, as well as to address the needs of Jewish servicemen. Helping the refugees and other victims of World War I brought the disparate elements of the American Jewish community together for the first time. Old World divisions might never vanish completely, but no longer did they seem as sharply drawn as at the turn of the century; indeed, many acknowledged that the difference between American Jews and Jews elsewhere was larger than between different groups of American Jews.

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