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

Unlike racist regimes in the American South of the Jim
Crow era and during South Africa’s transition from “native
segregation” to apartheid, the Nazi version did not evolve
out of a preexisting racial order based on slavery or colonial-style
domination. In fact the assault on the Jews was
the act of a revolutionary totalitarian regime that brought
radical changes in many areas, not just in Jewish-gentile
relations. Although Jews had certainly been discriminated
against before 1935, the Nuremberg Laws categorically
transformed their status. As the existence of many Mischlinge
suggests, the rate of German-Jewish intermarriage
before the Nazi era had been relatively high, whereas
American and South African antimiscegenation laws outlawed
a practice that was quite rare. (The proportion of
Jews marrying non-Jews had in fact risen from almost 8
percent in the period 1901–1904 to just under 23 percent in
1929.) 44 The revolutionary process did not stop with the
denial of citizenship and the banning of intermarriage.
After the officially sponsored Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938,
the public segregation of Jews was carried to extremes that
in some respects went beyond Jim Crow and apartheid (for
example, all access to public transportation was denied to
Jews, their children could no longer attend school, a special
curfew was imposed upon them, and they could shop only
during certain hours). In 1939, Jews were denied the right
to operate businesses and possess substantial property. The
aim now was not simply the subordination of Jews but their
elimination through forced emigration, or, if that failed,
internment in concentration camps that could become
death camps. The fact that Nazi Germany in the 1930s was
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