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Hitler launched a nationwide boycott against Jewish enterprises, doctors and lawyers. Entrances to their establishments and offices were blocked. Anti-semitic graffiti was put up and windows smashed. It was a precursor of worse to come, including propaganda to institutionalize public anger against Jews as enemies of the Third Reich.
By 1935, Jews were publicly humiliated, banned from certain towns, and party activists assaulted the orthodox, cut their beards and shaved their heads to vilify them and Judaism.
Racist legislation followed, including the infamous "Nuremberg Laws" discussed below. Landlords were forced to break leases with Jewish tenants. By 1936, distinctions were removed between harming Jews physically and using legal measures to destroy their businesses and livelihoods.
By 1938, violence escalated, starting with the Austrian Anschluss in March. A wave of anti-Jewish measures followed, aimed at Austrian Jews. Nazi policy enforced "Aryanizations," confiscations, arrests, and physical violence against Jews. In November, the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom occurred, directly incited by Hitler and Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda.
They exploited the attempted assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris on November 7. Violent riots followed. The entire party apparatus was involved. In most German cities and towns, enterprises and Jewish homes were looted; 200 or more synagogues and 7,500 Jewish enterprises were attacked, burned and destroyed; and when it ended, 680 Jews were dead and nearly 30,000 interned in concentration camps.
In addition, the ministerial bureaucracy and Gestapo intensified enforcement of Jewish emigration and keeping Jews and Aryans totally apart. Violent anti-Jewish acts were exempted from German law. Many occurred, including murders, rapes and other sexual assaults, organized pogroms, public humiliations, vandalism, anti-semitic graffiti, boycotts, confiscations, looting and other forms of theft - virtually anything to vilify and remove German Jewry.
On the eve of WW II, German society was accustomed to anti-semitic violence. It was the genesis of the 1941-45 holocaust, facilitated by the 1935 "Nuremberg Laws" that:"
-- protected "German Blood and German Honour";
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