Opposition, persecution and the racial state
Opposition, Persecution and the Racial State
Between 1933 and 1939 the Nazi regime escalated both the persecution of groups it defined as racially or ideologically undesirable and its suppression of any organised opposition. These two processes were connected: as the terror apparatus described in the previous lesson made open political resistance nearly impossible, the regime felt emboldened to pursue its racial programme with increasing intensity. By November 1938 it was staging a nationwide pogrom in broad daylight.
The Lack of Effective Opposition
The left-wing parties — the chief potential source of organised opposition — had been destroyed by mid-1933. Individual Communists and Social Democrats continued resistance underground, printing leaflets and maintaining networks, but they were continually disrupted by Gestapo raids. The churches represented a more complex case.
The Confessing Church, formed in 1934, opposed the Nazi-controlled “German Christians” who sought to merge Christianity with Nazi ideology. Figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller challenged the regime on theological grounds. Niemöller was arrested and spent 1937–1945 in concentration camps. Bonhoeffer, who moved from theological resistance to active conspiracy against Hitler, was executed at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945. But the Confessing Church focused on Church autonomy rather than systematic opposition to Nazi racial policy — and most German Christians did not resist.
The Nuremberg Laws, passed in September 1935, stripped Jews of German citizenship and banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. They provided a legal foundation for systematic discrimination and defined Jewishness in racial terms.
Persecution of Jews: A Staged Escalation
Antisemitic persecution intensified in stages. In April 1933 there was a boycott of Jewish businesses. Jewish civil servants were dismissed under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship and banned intermarriage. The Anschluss with Austria in March 1938 extended persecution to Austria’s 200,000 Jews. Then came the turning point of November 1938.
On the nights of 9–10 November 1938, Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”) swept Germany and Austria. Triggered by the shooting of a German diplomat in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan — a young Jewish man whose family had been deported — the pogrom was orchestrated by Goebbels and the SS. Around 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, over 1,400 synagogues burned, 91 Jews killed, and approximately 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps. Jews were then fined one billion Reichsmarks for the “damage they had caused.”
Antisemitic persecution is the most documented, but the regime simultaneously targeted other groups. Roma and Sinti people were classified as racial aliens; from the mid-1930s they were arrested, placed in camps, and from 1938 subjected to systematic persecution. Many thousands were killed in concentration camps before and during the war, with the total death toll estimated by the Holocaust Museum (USHMM) at between 220,000 and 500,000.
Disabled people were targeted through the eugenics programme. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (July 1933) mandated compulsory sterilisation for those with conditions including schizophrenia, epilepsy and hereditary blindness. Estimates suggest around 400,000 people were forcibly sterilised. Homosexual men were persecuted under Paragraph 175 of the criminal code; an estimated 50,000 were convicted and many sent to concentration camps. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refused to give the Hitler salute, swear loyalty oaths or serve in the military, were also systematically arrested.
The T4 Euthanasia Programme
In late 1939 Hitler authorised Aktion T4, a systematic programme of killing disabled people. Named after the Berlin address of the coordinating office, T4 involved murdering patients from psychiatric hospitals and care homes using gas, lethal injection and starvation. Between 1939 and 1941 approximately 70,000 people were killed. When Bishop Clemens von Galen publicly denounced the programme in 1941 sermons, the regime officially halted T4 in response to public pressure — one of the few examples of public protest visibly affecting policy. Killing continued covertly, however.
Four persecuted groups: Jews (Nuremberg Laws 1935, Kristallnacht 1938); disabled people (Sterilisation Law 1933, T4 programme 1939); homosexuals (Paragraph 175 prosecutions, concentration camps); Jehovah’s Witnesses (arrested for refusing Hitler salute and military service).
The persecution of disabled people was not separate from antisemitism — both drew on a single ideological framework: eugenics, or “racial hygiene.” The regime defined the German nation in biological terms and argued that only by removing “undesirable” hereditary traits and racial influences could the “Aryan” nation be strengthened. This ideology linked antisemitism, disability persecution, the sterilisation programme and the T4 murders within a single system of racial thought.
Nazi racial science was pseudoscience — its claims had no basis in genetics. But it was presented with institutional authority (university courses, government programmes) and was consumed by a population already primed by decades of European racist thought. The ideological path from the 1933 sterilisation law to the Holocaust was not inevitable, but it was continuous.