August 20: Nuremberg, Germany: Laws stripping the Jews of Germany of some important civil and legal rights, setting the stage, in turn, for Nazi “quackery science” lauding the Germans as a “super–race.”
Step–by–step the Nazis will strip–away layer after layer as regards the Jews.
Break their rights. Break their dignity. Break their composure. Break their equilibrium. Break their status. Break their shops. Break their synagogues. Break their careers. Break their honor. Break their neighborhoods. Break their institutions. Break their leaders. Break their legal protection. Break their businesses. Break their families. Break their self–esteem. Break their health. Break their hope. Break their spirit. Break their bodies. Break their hearts.
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“The Churches and their theologians had formulated compelling religious, social, and moral idées forces that provided a conceptual framework for the Nazi Holocaust. The National–Socialist conception of the Jew as less than human, or inhuman, was based on the Christian conception of the Jew as traitor, murderer, plague, pollution, filth, devil, and insect, which “prepared both killers and victims for the Jews’ literal destruction.” Jewish deaths at the hands of Christians before 1933 amounted to millions. In the Christian mind, as John Bossy has put it, “the Jews were the original enemies of Christ, who had procured his crucifixion and death and had taken his blood upon their heads and upon those of their children. Nothing was easier for the average Christian to understand than that this was a crime that cried out for vengeance…” And over the nearly two millennia of the Christian era, vengeance has been taken by means of Church policies of degradation and only half–hearted protection during pogroms and mass murder of Jews from the Middle Ages on.”
– Robert Michael, Holy Hatred, p. 21.
(Palgrave MacMillan 2008)