Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 “We Are All Germans; Why Then Ask for Religion?”: Cultural Identity, Language, and Weimar Pluralism, 1928–1932
- 2 “Racial and Social Boundaries between Germans and Jews Are to Be Strictly Drawn”: Dictatorship Building and the Process of Nazifying Language, 1933
- 3 Toward the Eradication of the “Impossible, Untenable Category of ‘German Jews’”: Enforcing and Contesting Racial Difference, 1935–1938
- 4 “The Jewess” Attempted to “Stage a Case on Her Descent”: Linguistic Violence as Part of Genocide, 1941–1945
- 5 “We Are Not Bad Jews, Because We Believe We Are Good and True Germans”: Another Beginning and Persisting Difference, 1945–1948
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Frequency of Key Categories of Germanness and Jewishness
- Bibliography
- Bibliographical Essay
- Index
- References
2 - “Racial and Social Boundaries between Germans and Jews Are to Be Strictly Drawn”: Dictatorship Building and the Process of Nazifying Language, 1933
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 “We Are All Germans; Why Then Ask for Religion?”: Cultural Identity, Language, and Weimar Pluralism, 1928–1932
- 2 “Racial and Social Boundaries between Germans and Jews Are to Be Strictly Drawn”: Dictatorship Building and the Process of Nazifying Language, 1933
- 3 Toward the Eradication of the “Impossible, Untenable Category of ‘German Jews’”: Enforcing and Contesting Racial Difference, 1935–1938
- 4 “The Jewess” Attempted to “Stage a Case on Her Descent”: Linguistic Violence as Part of Genocide, 1941–1945
- 5 “We Are Not Bad Jews, Because We Believe We Are Good and True Germans”: Another Beginning and Persisting Difference, 1945–1948
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Frequency of Key Categories of Germanness and Jewishness
- Bibliography
- Bibliographical Essay
- Index
- References
Summary
In late January 1933, the establishment of the Hitler-led coalition government put the vast resources of a modern nation-state at the disposal of the Nazi Party. No longer limited by such Weimar-government-imposed measures as prohibitions of Nazi newspapers or bans on speaking, the Hitler movement now enlisted the power of the state to fight its real and imagined enemies. In late February 1933, with party leaders Hermann Göring serving as acting Prussian Interior Minister and Wilhelm Frick as the Reich Interior Minister, party activists unleashed a wave of renewed political violence. SA units, turned into auxiliary police, imprisoned approximately 100,000 Germans in makeshift concentration camps across the country. By late spring, party members had murdered at least 500 to 600 opponents. Communists and Social Democrats were prominent among these victims, but Nazi thugs also singled out and killed Jews with no party affiliation at all.
This radiating outburst of physical violence both intersected and propelled the Nazis' dismantling of the Weimar democracy and the gradual creation of a “racial state.” Party leaders seized the long-anticipated opportunity to establish new political agencies at the level of the state and so expand their power. Named Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in March 1933, Joseph Goebbels recruited his staff at the Party's Reich Propaganda Directorate to set up what Richard Evans aptly termed the Hitler government's “most original institutional creation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Language of Nazi GenocideLinguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry, pp. 58 - 101Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
References
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