National Socialism and anti-Semitism
Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, marked the beginning of the National Socialist German Workers' Party's (NSDAP) seizure of power. Within a short spell, a dictatorship was established in place of the Weimar Republic, Germany's first parliamentary republic: In March 1933, the parliament, the Reichstag, disempowered itself against the votes of the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) only by transferring legislative powers to Adolf Hitler via the "Ermächtigungsgesetz" (Enabling Act). In the same month, the "Vorläufige Gesetz zur Gleichschaltung der Länder mit dem Reich" (Provisional Act to Bring the Federal States into Line with the Reich) made it possible to abolish all democratic state governments. The "Gesetz gegen die Neubildung von Parteien" (Law against the Formation of New Parties) of July 14, 1933, turned Germany into a National Socialist one-party state.
However, the National Socialists did not just suspend the parliamentary system. They occupied and controlled every aspect of public and cultural life. Books by Jewish, socialist and democratic authors in particular were burned at staged mass events in numerous cities across the German Reich in May 1933, in Frankfurt on the Main that took place on May 10, 1933, on the Römerberg in fromt of the city hall. After the Communist and Social Democratic press was banned in February 1933, freedom of the press was finally abolished in Germany with the "Schriftleitergesetz" (Editors' Law) of October 4, 1933. This was followed by attacks on modern art, which was banned and destroyed as "degenerate".
All sports clubs were also heavily controlled and often reorganized, as they served to implement National Socialist ideology. People were not supposed to be active for the sake of sport. Instead, they were prepared for war through military training and taught propagated "virtues" such as willingness to make sacrifices, discipline and unconditional loyalty to the NSDAP. The so-called Gleichschaltung of all sports clubs took place step by step: In January 1934, the "Reich Sports Leader" Hans von Tschammer und Osten announced the "Deutscher Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (DRL)", which in future acted as the supreme umbrella organization. All sports clubs were divided regionally into 16 districts and organized thematically into 15 sports associations. This made close control possible. The sports clubs also suffered from competition from other National Socialist organizations, above all the "Hitlerjugend" (Hitler Youth, HJ), which all 14 to 18-year-olds had to belong to from December 1936, and the Nazi community "Kraft durch Freude" (Strength through Joy), which was founded on November 27, 1933. Jews had already been excluded from the organizations that existed before 1933 (such as the HJ) before the NSDAP dictatorship, and were later banned from membership in all associations.
The terror of the Nazi regime unfolded above all in the persecution of Jews and dissidents. Initially, the violence was aimed in particular at political opponents from the left wing, such as communists and social democrats, as well as politically active Jews. Numerous Jews and members of the opposition were murdered as early as 1933. With the help of the Political Police and the SS, Heinrich Himmler in particular created an apparatus of terror to which so-called "Gemeinschaftsfremde" (community strangers) and "Asoziale" (asocials) such as beggars, non-conformists, Sinti, but also the disabled and homosexuals fell victim. They were mainly murdered in concentration camps and killing centers.
The entire apparatus of power primarily affected Jews in the German Reich, who were excluded from public life, deprived of their rights and ultimately brutally persecuted and killed in accordance with the ideology of the National Socialists. The so-called Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 degraded Jews to second-class citizens. Initially, anti-Semitic policies focused on the exclusion, plundering and expulsion of Germany's Jewish population. With the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939, the persecution of Jews aimed at mass murder began, especially in the occupied Polish territories. After the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Nazi policy aimed at the systematic extermination of all Jews in the German sphere of influence. German Jews who had not yet emigrated were deported to be murdered in ghettos in German-occupied Eastern Europe such as Lodz, in extermination camps such as Auschwitz or in other murder sites such as Kaunas. It was not until the end of the Second World War in May 1945 that the systematic persecution and murder of all Jews came to an end.
Literatur
"Und keiner hat für uns Kaddisch gesagt…" Deportationen aus Frankfurt am Main 1941 bis 1945. Ed. by the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. Frankfurt on the Main 2004.
Falko Zink, Der Sport und seine Institutionen im Spannungsfeld von Staat und Politik. Eine zeitgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Anpassungsfähigkeit der Institutionen des Sports, Diss. Kaiserslautern 2009.
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Nationalsozialismus, Aufstieg und Herrschaft, 314, 2012.