Free I Am a Star by Inge Auerbacher Page B

betray their religion. The church branded the Jews “Christ-killers,” and Jews were thought of as evil people.
    During most of the Middle Ages, the only occupations open to Jews were small trade and moneylending. The church regarded moneylending as sinful and did not permit Christians to charge interest. In this way, Jews were also associated with an evil practice.
    In the Middle Ages, the Jews in Germany and other parts of Europe were sometimes forced to live in a restricted part of the city called a ghetto. In some places the Jews were isolated from other people behind walls. In the ghetto the streets were narrow and dark. Many people were poor and lived in overcrowded, crumbling houses, although some people became successful merchants. Everyone in the ghetto was forced to pay high taxes. No Jew was allowed to leave the ghetto from nightfall to daybreak and on Christian holidays. A locked gate sealed them off from the outside world. Harsh penalties were enforced if Jews were found outside of the walls during the curfew.
    Conditions grew even worse when the Black Death struck. History records several outbreaks of this widespread plague and there was a particular epidemic that killed thousands of people in Europe between 1348 and 1351. The terrible sickness was blamed on the Jews, whom the Christians accused of practicing black magic and of poisoning the wells from which the Christians drew their water. Many Jews were expelled and fled eastward from Germany to Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Russia, where they established thriving Jewish communities. They were always a small minority in the total population in any country, however, and were regarded as outsiders because of their different religion and customs.
    For those Jews who remained in Germany, conditions finally improved. In the early 1800s they were permitted to leave the ghetto, and they were gradually accepted by some of the Christian community. During the 1870s, they became full and equal citizens under the law throughout the country. They felt part of the German family, differing from other Germans only in religion.
    A large number of Germans, however, never fully accepted their Jewish fellow citizens because of their different traditions. Jews were still not permitted to reach the highest ranks in law, government, the armed forces, or the universities. At the same time, a new wave of hostility based on a racist theory emerged in many parts of Europe. People began to believe that the Jews were a separate, inferior race. Jews tried hard to become accepted by society, some of them proudly proclaiming that their religion was secondary to their nationality.
    At first, in Germany as elsewhere, most people did not believe this racist anti-Semitism. This attitude changed however as Germans looked for a scapegoat after their disastrous defeat at the end of World War I in 1918. During the war both Jews and non-Jews had fought side by side and died together for their fatherland, but with Germany’s spiritual and economic defeat, this period of unity and patriotism ended. Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and to admit that she had started the war. She had to accept the severe measures that the Allies imposed, and to drastically reduce the army. She also had to pay large amounts of money to compensate for the suffering caused during the war, and to reduce the German Empire. A new democratic government was elected and the Weimar Republic was formed.
    The Weimar government was troubled from the start. The postwar years saw inflation, unemployment and finally, in 1929, a world depression. Jewish people were blamed for the ailing economy and extremists called for them to be pushed out of German society. Racist anti-Semitism gathered support. In this climate of hostility and depression the stage was set for Hitler’s Nazi party to emerge.

CHAPTER 3

    Adolf Hitler’s Rise to Power
     
     
    A dolf Hitler was born on April 20,