Antisemitism of the 1930s—Germany and Italy

The 1930s saw the development of antisemitism; anti-Jewish ideas were increasingly applauded among Europe’s societies, and were even fixed in some states’ legislation.

This was tied to two main factors. One was the Great Depression, which caused social pressures to rise. The second was Hitler’s ascent to power—one of the continent’s largest countries officially promoted racist ideas. This meant they not only gained seriousness, but also Germany became a point of institutional reference. By 1933, the legal persecution of German Jews had begun, with one law after another removing them from state bureaucracy and confining them to certain occupations. For instance, after 1936 even having a “non-Aryan” spouse made it impossible to have a veterinary practice.² The most important part of this new order was the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripping Jews of German citizenship. A secret decree of Reinhard Heydrich in 1937 ordered those guilty of “tainting German blood” to concentration camps. As such, a fling with an Aryan was “practically… a death sentence.”³

In 1938, fascist Italy introduced antisemitic legislation—the countryy was politically orbiting closer to the Reich and were more “aware” of racial issues after conquering Ethiopia. In 1937, they too began introducing racist legislation aimed at Africa’s Black inhabitants, and a year later, it was time for the Jews in Italy. “[A]round 30,700 were excluded from public life in the fall of 1938: one in every thousand Italians.”⁴ Not only their livelihoods were at stake—Jewish children were also removed from schools.

Interestingly enough, at first Italian fascism was not basically antisemitic, and Mussolini himself spoke of racism as a specifically German, and rather grotesque invention.⁵ Margherita Sarfatti was a Jew, the Duce’s lover, the author of one of his first biographies, and an important propagandist for the regime. Of course, the Italian fascist dignitaries also included Roberto Farinacci, later a devoted Reich collaborator—without this kind of influence, it would have been hard to imagine Italy “copying” German “solutions.” The traditional social elite, in turn, led by the King and Church hierarchy, had no special love for the Jews,⁶ making it difficult to oppose ideas that conflicted with Christian doctrine. As a Church historian noted: “the Jesuits’ journal [La Civiltà Cattolica] had some difficulty distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ antisemitism, between Catholic suspicion and diffidence towards the Jews and the racial biological version of the Nazis, and now the Italian fascists.”⁷

As historians have long noted, the road from antisemitism to the Holocaust was “twisted”⁸—at first the Nazis wanted to force the Jews to emigrate. Other states were less than eager to take in these sometimes highly educated, but financially destitute people. And the Reich, in turn, did not want them taking their valuables from the country. It was only in 1941 that the most macabre of all possible solutions began to take shape.

“The war… made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal time,” Hitler said in private when the extermination of the Jews had begun.⁹