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of incitement, abuse, terror and violence of varying proportions. There was one goal: to make the
Jews leave Germany.
On March 9, 1933, several weeks after Hitler assumed power, organized attacks on Jews broke
out across Germany. Two weeks later, the Dachau concentration camp, situated near Munich,
opened. Dachau became a place of internment for Communists, Socialists, German liberals and
anyone considered an enemy of the Reich. It became the model for the network of concentration
camps that would be established later by the Nazis. Within a few months, democracy was
obliterated in Germany, and the country became a centralized, single-party police state.
On April 1, 1933, a general boycott against German Jews was declared, in which SA members
stood outside Jewish-owned stores and businesses in order to prevent customers from entering.
Approximately one week later, a law concerning the rehabilitation of the professional civil
service was passed. The purpose of the legislation was to purge the civil service of officials of
Jewish origin and those deemed disloyal to the regime. It was the first racial law that attempted
to isolate Jews and oust them from German life. The first laws banished Jews from the civil
service, judicial system, public medicine, and the German army (then being reorganized).
Ceremonial public book burnings took place throughout Germany. Many books were torched
solely because their authors were Jews. The exclusion of Jews from German cultural life was
highly visible, ousting their considerable contribution to the German press, literature, theater, and
music.
In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed, stripping the Jews of their citizenship
and forbidding intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. Jews were banned from universities;
Jewish actors were dismissed from theaters; Jewish authors works were rejected by publishers;
and Jewish journalists were hard-pressed to find newspapers that would publish their writings.
Famous artists and scientists played an important role in this campaign of dispossession and
party labeling of literature, art, and science. Some scientists and physicians were involved in the
theoretical underpinnings of the racial doctrine.