Holocaust (1933–1945) Himmler, and other leading Nazis General, latent prejudice was concentrated into active hatred, which drew in more Germans as it combined with elite military and professional acceptance of the overall Nazi project for Germany, then being implemented by an expansive and ruthlessly rationalist bureaucracy German Jews thus faced ever-diminishing choices of desperate fl ight, personal resistance (which would likely bring immediate death), or clinging to a fading hope of somehow waiting out events and thereby surviving Street violence against Jews by the Sturmabteilung (SA), Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and Schutzstaffel (SS) began even before the Nazi Party’s full ascent to power The radicalism of Nazi anti-Semitism escalated in stages once the Party achieved control of the apparatus of the state It began ominously with passage of the Nuremberg laws, legally separating Jews from other Germans Persecution deepened and progressed through social and legal ostracism; confiscation of Jewish property; economic boycott; and finally the orchestrated violence of Kristallnacht Jews were initially encouraged to “voluntarily” leave the Reich lands of Germany and Austria, with every coin possible extorted from any who could afford to pay the bribes necessary to flee After 1936 Britain limited Jewish immigration to Palestine and most other countries shut their doors as well: the Great Depression was underway and unemployment everywhere was at shatteringly high levels Anti-Semitism was at work as well: Jewish refugees were denied entrance to Canada and the United States due to intense anti-Semitism of several top diplomats and immigration officials Some refugee ships were forced to return to Germany after being turned away from European, Canadian, or American ports Jewish passengers were seized from these ships by German officials and deported to concentration camps There followed forcible ghettoization for the whole Jewish population, daily brutality, and more frequent murders Finally, it was made a capital offense for any Jew to even set foot on German soil, which by then included annexed Austria With early German military victories from 1939 to 1941, these horrific conditions pursued Jews across occupied Europe, varying in application with the depth of local hatreds and collaboration with Nazi policies of persecution and deportation Treatment grew ever more harsh, and death squads moved into areas conquered by the Wehrmacht to begin systematic “extermination” of Jews and other populations unwanted in the New Order the Nazis were confidently preparing in Europe The Nazi plan for Europe’s Jews was genocidal even before Red Army resistance blocked the initial “territorial solution” of deporting Germany’s and Europe’s Jews into conquered lands in western Russia: once there, they were to be worked to death as slaves As the war began to go badly for Germany from the Moscow offensive operation (December 5, 1941–January 7, 1942), Hitler and the SS returned to their earlier emphasis of the war in the east as a Vernichtungskrieg (“war of annihilation”) against the “greatest servant of Judaism,” the Bolshevik-Soviet state The Wehrmacht was instructed—it obeyed almost without question, and in many cases with real enthusiasm—to segregate and allow immediate killing of identified Jews, along with Communists, among millions of Soviet prisoners of war Hitler and his closest Nazi co-conspirators also viewed American hostility toward Nazi Germany as part of a plot by “international Jewry.” None of that means Hitler’s 531