The Holocaust Journal (Lest We Forget)

Germany - 1936 (Part 2)

"The Devil is the father of the Jew.
When God created the world,
He invented the races:
The Indians, the Negroes, the Chinese,
And also the wicked creature called the Jew."

--Verse in a German children's book; 1936

Before the 1936 Summer Olympics were held in Berlin, all anti-Jewish signs and posters which were everywhere present in Germany were removed. At the completion of the games, these signs and posters were again prominently displayed and the German government went after the Jews with a vengeance.

Before the games, some Americans talked of a boycott. Avery Brundage, the head of the U.S. National Olympic Committee, was able to fend off that boycott, claiming that "the Olympic boycott lobby is led by Jewish 'special interests.' While in Germany, Brundage was wined and dined by top Nazi officials, including Hermann Goring.

* June 17 - Heinrich Himmler is appointed as the chief of German police. Himmler fused all the police forces in Germany, was responsible only to Hitler, "circumvented legal systems and state bureaucracies. The Nazi police apparatus was free to define 'legality,' and was unhindered by moral constraints."

Himmler constructed "a police state based on coercion and terror."

* June 19 - Max Schmeling, a German heavyweight boxer, defeated African American boxer, Joe Louis. Hitler was ecstatic and played up the event as evidence of Aryan superiority.

* June 26 - Himmler appointed Reinhard Heydrich as head of the SD (Security Service branch of the SD). Heydrich looked Ayran and was a "cunning" administrator. He was also totally without a moral sense. He was "instrumental in building the SS terror system and designing the 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish question.'"

* June 30 - Polish Jews strike in protest of anti-Semitism.

* July 3 - Stefan Lux, a German Jew, commits suicide in the assembly room of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, as a protest of Germany's treatment of the Jews.

* September 7 - All Jewish assets in Germany are taxed at 25 percent.

* September 23 - The Sachsenhausen concentration camp is opened about 15 miles northeast of Berlin. While it first housed mostly political prisoners, Jews began arriving in large numbers in 1938. Sachsenhausen was known for its cruel medical experiments. By 1945, 100,000 people had been murdered or died at Sachsenhausen.

* October 25 - Hitler and Mussolini sign a treaty in preparation for war.

* November 18 - Germany's Condor Legion (comprised of volunteers) heads for Spain to fight with Franco's fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Germany used this involvement to test weapons and military tactics.

* November 27 - Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, decrees that there will no more film criticism. The Nazis proceed to produce numerous vicious anti-Semitic movies.

* November 29 - German's Minister of Agriculture, Walther Darre, claims that democracy and liberalism were invented by the Jews.

Homosexuals were treated especially harshly by the Nazis. The German government said that homosexuality was a crime of degeneracy and was determined to rid Germany of all traces of it.
"From 1933 to 1944, the Nazis convicted and sent to concentration camps tens of thousands of men on charges of homosexuality. There they were humiliated, tortured, subjected to medical experimentation, and killed."

" ... they were subjected to degradation and sadistic beatings by guards. Many were castrated or became human guinea pigs for hormone experiments conducted by SS doctors."