The Night War

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and religious discrimination.

Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in the period after World War I, and under his influence, the Nazi Party grew to be the largest in Germany by 1932. Shortly thereafter, Hitler was appointed chancellor by President von Hindenburg. In 1934, after von Hindenburg’s death, Hitler merged the chancellery with the presidency, assuming the title of Führer, which means “leader” or “guide.” Hitler’s rhetoric centered on establishing Germany as a leading world power made up of ethnically pure and genetically superior Germans, whom he referred to as the “Aryan” race.

Part of Hitler’s plan for German expansion and domination was the extermination of European Jewry; Hitler conceived of Judaism as a race rather than as a religious belief system. He believed that Jews were a lesser, subhuman species: untermenschen, who were determined to achieve world domination at the detriment of all other races, especially the Aryan race.

Initially, murders of Jews took the form of close-range shooting into mass graves. This was carried out by a specialized sub-group of the Nazi army called the Einsatzgruppen. Tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania lost their lives in this way.