Ernst Vom Rath

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, German Jews began to see the implementation of domineering rules and regulations by the Third Reich. Their businesses were boycotted, they were denied German citizenship, and were disproportionately persecuted when compared to “Aryan” Germans. Some were even sent to early forms of concentration camps, where they held some arrested Jewish people. Still, these sentiments towards Jews, although terrible, were mostly nonviolent, save the occasional beating. However, anti-Semitism reached its boiling point in 1938. The assassination of Ernst vom Rath by a seventeen year old Jewish boy caused the Nazi regime to turn from solely hateful and oppressive policies to primarily violent and murderous
He had total power to make legislation, no matter how discriminatory it may have been. Purifying Germany through racial cleansing was always Hitler’s plan, but at the beginning he planned to accomplish this through ridding Nazi Germany of any and all Jewish power and influence, in hopes that Jews would emigrate to other countries. The first laws passed against Jewish people included their exclusion from civil service and the discrimination of Jewish doctors and lawyers. At this point, German Jews began to realize that they were not welcome in their own country under the Führer’s rule. Jews were further persecuted in 1935 under the Nuremberg Laws, which made it illegal for Jews to marry “pure” Germans, and forbade granting Reich citizenship to Jewish people. As discriminatory as these acts were, at this time few Jews were physically harmed by the Nazi regime. Concentration camps mainly housed political prisoners, and not Jews, in the year 1935, and the prisoner population was at the Holocaust’s lowest figure of 3,000. Jews were unfairly persecuted, but up until this point anti-Semitism had not escalated to the point of