Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

achievements of the mid-1930s—putting Germans back to
work, building the autobahn, occupying the Rhineland,
staging and winning the Olympics—created the “unshaken
faith” in him that “brought with it widespread acceptance,
passive or not, of the measures against the Jews.” 40 Antisemitic
policies thus became part of a package that could be
accepted only in its totality.
This does not mean, however, that ordinary Germans
were unlikely to harbor antisemitic sentiments. A belief in
the ineradicable Otherness of the Jew had become firmly
rooted in German culture as a result of decades, if not centuries,
of antisemitic discourse. 41 But such prejudice can be of
relatively low intensity and does not automatically lead to
overtly racist regimes or holocausts. Hitler and the Nazi
leadership were the instigators and implementers of the persecutions
of the 1930s and the exterminations of the war
years. What they required from most Germans was acquiescence
rather than direct involvement. They would not have
received it, however, if Jews had been accepted as fellow
members of the national community, or Volksgemeinschaft.
From the time they came to power in 1933, the Nazis
harassed and abused Germany’s half-million Jews. But it
was with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 that
Germany became a full-fledged racist regime, comparable
to those already established in the American South or coming
into existence in South Africa. One of the laws limited
German citizenship to those who were of German or related
ancestry, which excluded all Jews. (Blacks in the American
South were nominally citizens, but the rights associated
with citizenship had been effectively nullified.)
German Jews thus became resident aliens in the land of
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