Hitler's Social Changes

Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on the 30th of January, 1933 brought many changes to the German society and affected many different social groups present at the time. While Hitler’s regime is mainly known to be one that was filled with death, fear and destruction, he was able to make several changes that benefited the life of the ordinary German civilian. However, the positive changes were largely overshadowed by the horrors he bestowed upon other, minority social groups such as the Jewish and the disabled.

Life for ordinary male civilians under Hitler’s regime was one filled with prosperity and hope. When the Great Depression hit on October 29, 1929, it sent financial markets worldwide into a “tailspin with disastrous effects.” More than
Although anti-Semitism in Germany did not begin with Hitler, he had the most extreme methods in “the extermination of the Jewish race”. Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the twin goals of racial purity and spatial expansion, Hitler opened the first official concentration camp at Dachau in March 1933. Hitler encouraged the German people to blame the Jews for “plunging the German people into the bloodletting of the World War” and “poisoning public opinion”. Propaganda was not the only weapon the Nazis used against the Jews. They also relied on terror. A boycott of Jewish-owned businesses—was the first major public event that specifically targeted Jews. In the mornings, Nazi guards would place themselves in front of Jewish shops and factories and “every shopper was warned not to buy from the Jews.” Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young. The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau. From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported
In October 1939, Hitler initiated a decree which allowed physicians to grant a "mercy death" to "patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health." The intent of the "euthanasia" program, however, was not to relieve the suffering of the chronically ill. The "Sterilisation Law" explained the importance of weeding out so-called genetic defects from the German gene pool. Its aim was to exterminate the mentally ill and the handicapped, thus "cleansing" the "Aryan" race of persons considered genetically defective and a financial burden to society. Forced sterilisations began in January 1934, and altogether an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people were sterilised under the law. A diagnosis of "feeblemindedness" provided the grounds in the majority of cases, followed by schizophrenia and epilepsy. The usual method of sterilisation was vasectomy and ligation of ovarian tubes of women. Radiation therapy was used in a small number of cases. Several thousand people died as a result of the operations, women disproportionately because of the greater risks of tubal ligation. Most of the people targeted by the law were patients in mental hospitals and other institutions. The majority of those sterilized were between the ages of twenty and forty, about equally divided between men and women.