Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
many professions, trades and industries. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived 'non-Ary-
ans' of German citizenship and forbade them to marry or have sexual relations with Aryans.
The international community, meanwhile, turned a blind eye to the situation in Germany,
perhaps because many leaders were keen to see some order restored to the country after dec-
ades of political upheaval. Hitler's success at stabilising the shaky economy - largely by
pumping public money into employment programs, many involving re-armament and heavy
industry - was widely admired. The 1936 Olympic summer games in Berlin were a public-
relations triumph, as Hitler launched a charm offensive, but terror and persecution resumed
soon after the closing ceremony.
For Jews, the horror escalated on 9 November 1938, with the Reichspogromnacht (often
called Kristallnacht , or Night of Broken Glass). Using the assassination of a German consu-
lar official by a Polish Jew in Paris as a pretext, Nazi thugs desecrated, burned and demol-
ished synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, property and businesses across the country. Jews had
begun to emigrate after 1933, but this event set off a stampede.
The fate of those Jews who stayed behind deteriorated after the outbreak of WWII in
1939. At Hitler's request, a conference in January 1942 in Berlin's Wannsee came up with
the Endlösung (Final Solution): the systematic, bureaucratic and meticulously documented
annihilation of European Jews, carried out by around 100,000 Germans. Sinti and Roma
(gypsies), political opponents, priests, gays and habitual criminals were targeted as well. Of
the roughly seven million people who were sent to concentration camps, only 500,000 sur-
vived.
Resistance
Resistance to Hitler was quashed early by the powerful Nazi machinery of terror, but it nev-
er vanished entirely, as is thoroughly documented in the excellent Topographie des Terrors
exhibit. One of the best known acts of defiance was the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt
on the Führer that was led by senior army officer Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg. On
that fateful day, Stauffenberg brought a briefcase packed with explosives to a meeting of the
high command at the Wolfschanze (Wolf's Lair), Hitler's eastern-front military headquar-
ters. He placed the briefcase under the conference table near Hitler's seat, then excused him-
self and heard the bomb detonate from a distance. What he didn't know was that Hitler had
escaped with minor injuries thanks to the solid oak table which shielded him from the blast.
Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators were quickly identified and shot by firing squad at
the army headquarters in the Bendlerblock in Berlin. The rooms where they hatched their
plot now house the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand , an exhibit about the efforts of the
German Nazi resistance.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search