In mid-1932 the Nazis received 37% of the vote and became the largest party. Their opponents - the centrist Catholic party, the socialists and the communists - were divided among themselves, but still blocked Hitler from power. Fresh elections in November 1932 failed to give Hitler a decisive majority, but in January 1933 President Hindenburg made him Chancellor anyway. Within a short time Hitler transformed Germany’s fragile democracy into a totalitarian dictatorship. From the very beginning Jews were singled out, together with communists and socialists, as key enemies of the new Nazi state. Indeed, Jews and communists were almost interchangeable in Hitler’s worldview.

In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were introduced as the first step of what later became the organised murder of millions of Jews. The Reich Citizenship Law revoked their citizenship, as well as their political and civil rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour banned marriage and sexual relations between Germans and Jews. Despite hundreds of years of community life, Jews were deprived of their German identity. Under the Nuremberg Laws a Jew was defined as:

(a) Whoever is descended from at least three, according to race, fully Jewish grandparents. A grandparent is considered a full Jew, without any further precondition, who is or was a member of the Jewish religious community.

(b) A half-Jew is also considered a Jew if he has two fully Jewish grandparents:

(a) who belonged to the Jewish religious community on 15 September 1935, or became a member there or after that date.

(b) who was married to a Jew as at 15 September 1935, or married a Jew after that date.

(c) whose parent was married to a Jew after 15 September 1935.

(d) who is the issue of an extramarital liaison with a Jew and was born out of wedlock after 31 July 1936.

A full chronology of Nazi measures against Jews can be found in the Holocaust Timeline. Other key events included Kristallnacht ("the Night of Broken Glass") in November 1938, when the Nazis organised a pogrom in which 92 Jews were killed, 27 000 arrested and many synagogues, schools, orphanages and other community institutions were destroyed along with Jewish businesses. In January 1939 an order was issued which allowed the Nazis to seize Jewish assets and transfer them to German control. Hitler’s clear intent towards Jews was spelled out at this time when he declared that:

“… if the Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

This threat to the Jews of Europe, not only Germany, was significant because this was before war had even started and Hitler had not yet conquered large parts of Europe. Yet Hitler already planned the physical extermination of European Jews, which he carried out during World War II with the support and participation of large sections of German society.

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