The CANDLES museum details the steps that Nazi Germany took in the years from the Enabling Act on March 27, 1933 to the eve of World War II on the north wall of its exhibit.  Here are some of the steps that they mentioned, together with other steps taken from the Wikipedia.  The Holocaust did not spring full-form from Hitler’s brow, it was assembled piece by piece.  Jews and other “untermenschen” (under-men) were progressively shoved to the margins of German society.  The mechanics of extermination were tried out on political opponents and the disabled.

April 1, 1933:  Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses begins.

April 7, 1933:  Non-Aryans barred from legal practice and the civil service.

May 10, 1933:  Nationwide book-burning of “un-German” books taken from libraries and universities by the National Socialist Student League.

July 1933:  Naturalized German Jews stripped of citizenship.

July 14, 1933:  Compulsory sterilization of the disabled…just like in Indiana.

June 30 – July 2, 1934:  Night of the Long Knives.  The Nazis turned on the SA (Brownshirts, Party thugs) who brought them into power, killing dozen.  Members of the National Socialist party who were of its left wing were murdered, as were conservative Germans within and without the Nazi Party.  The Brownshirts had made themselves unpopular with their assorted thuggeries, so Hitler suspected that they would not be too sorely missed.  From this point on, oppression would no longer be the game of amateurs.

September 15, 1935:  Nuremberg laws passed unanimously.  Germans and Jews were forbidden marriage and any such marriages were dissolved.  German women under 45 could no longer work for Jews.  Jews, Roma and other “undesirables” lost their German citizenship and were reclassified as “state subjects”

November 24, 1935:  Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.  This law allowed groups of people to be interned in concentration camps.  The persecution of Roma (Gypsies) kicks off.

November 25, 1936:  Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan against the USSR.  Other nations, including Hungary, Italy and other nations who fought on the Axis side, joined.

July 6-15, 1938:  Evian Conference.  The United States called a conference of 32 nations in order to boost the number of Jewish refugees allowed to leave Germany.  The US and the UK then strangled it in the cradle:  the US got the UK to agree not to mention that US immigration quotas were not quite full, and the UK got the US to forget to remind the conference that Great Britain’s mandate in Palestine included provided a home for the “Jewish nation”.  In the end, only Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic substantially increased their quotas, the Dominicans by 100,000.  The US made the 1938-1940 lists available and allowed another 30,000 in for a total of 120,000.

The Evian Conference was a propaganda coup for Hitler and the Nazis.  The route to escape was shut off for many Jews.

October 28, 1938:  Poland having announced that it would not allow Polish Jews to return after October 1938, Hitler sent 12,000 of them in Germany to Poland, which refused to accept them.  A brutal game of tag developed as Poland and Germany refused to let them in.  Eventually they settled in Poland.  Of course, ten months later the Nazis invaded Poland

November 9-10, 1938:  Kristallnacht.  Almost all of Germany’s synagogues were damaged or destroyed, as were 7,000 Jewish shops.  Germany’s Jews were collectively fined one billion marks for the damage, then underwent the confiscation of 20% of their property to boot.  Wikipedia does cite evidence that most Germans disapproved of Kristallnacht to a degree rarely seen in totalitarian societies, though many “decent” Germans participated in the “festivities” as well.  Goebbels and Nazi propaganda went into overdrive to tamp down this outbreak of conscience, and the religious bodies who disapproved did not organize their disapproval.  (Emphasis mine — organize, organize, organize!) 

The nature of the Nazi regime was clear — from repressive methods that had parallels in other self-styled free countries like eugenics and segregation, the Nazis were breaking into new territory.  While the United States saw its share of “crystal nights” in places like Wilmington, NC and Tulsa, OK as mobs put the local black neighborhoods to the torch, Kristallnacht was approved by the Nazi national government.

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