Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution

Dachau had been established on March 20 and was officially inaugurated by SS chief Heinrich Himmler on April 1.

The primary political targets of the new regime and of its terror system, at least during the first months after the Nazi accession to power, were not Jews but Communists.

Thus, as late as the summer of 1933, in the opening statement of his lectures on the Roman poet Horace, the Kiel University historian Felix Jacoby declared: “As a Jew I find myself in a difficult situation. But as a historian I have learned not to consider historical events from a private perspective. Since 1927, I have voted for Adolf Hitler, and I consider myself lucky to be able to lecture on Augustus’ poet in the year of the national revival. Augustus is the only figure of world history whom one may compare to Adolf Hitler.”33 This, however, was a rather exceptional case.

By and large there was no apparent sense of panic or even of urgency among the great majority of the approximately 525,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933.

As peripheral as it may seem in hindsight, the cultural domain was the first from which Jews (and “leftists”) were massively expelled.