Anti-Semitism In Friedländer's Nazi Germany And The Jews?

The results of World War I had a dramatic effect on the historical evolution of the European empire. Anti-Semitism was prevalent at the end of World War I, and as a result the cruel treatment of the Jewish population was widely accepted and practiced by those who supported Adolf Hitler. The deterioration of the Weimar republic along with the great depression set Germany back tremendously. This set back gave Hitler the opportunity to come into power. A series of events lead up to the anti- Jewish regime that would later spread throughout the European nation. In this paper I will be examining content from Saul Friedländer’s “Nazi Germany and the Jews” as well as the film sunshine by István Szabó. I will compare the view of the time period from …show more content…
The film follows the lives of the Sonnenschein family, a middle class family. The movies begins with the narrator telling the audience about a family recipe for tonic that was created by a family ancestor. Valerie was the daughter of the man that created the tonic. Upon her fathers sudden death she was adopted by her aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Sonnenschein. The Sonnenschein family had two sons, István and Gustave. The brother were both very intelligent men. István became a lawyer and Gustave became a doctor. Both of the sons worked very hard to achieve the level of academia that they did. Valerie and István fell in love with each other and created the second generation of …show more content…
The passing of the Nuremburg laws drove the European nations into what we know now as the Holocaust. At the start of Hitler’s regime the goal was to “separate” the Jewish population, the plan quickly changed into a mass extermination. In September of 1935 the Nuremburg laws were instituted. The laws became a means of eliminating the “alien blood” from the German population. These new laws created rules and regulations as far as interbreeding and marriage was concerned. It would be considered a criminal offence if a Jewish person interbreed with a pure Aryan person. A standard was created, this standard regulated who was to be considered Jewish. As stated in Friedländer; “ Half Jews were michlinge; only as a result of their personal choice (not as the result of the decision of a public agency), either by choosing a Jewish spouse or joining the Jewish religious community, did they become Jews”. The separation did not stop at marriage; laws determined if a person was Jewish if they had 3 or more Jewish