The Early Holocaust: From the “Jewish Question” to Kristallnacht

2025-08-11

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“Being a Jew is not a crime, I am not a dog.” This is the story of the start of the Holocaust. Serving as the scapegoat for everything from a disappearing child to the Black Plague, European Jews are used to “anti-Jewry.” But as the nation state rises in the modern world, it brings the so-called “Jewish Question” to the fore: can one be a faithful Jew and modern citizen? As modern antisemitism rises and European Jews face pogroms and the Dreyfus Affair, some begin to think they need a nation of their own. Jewish nationalism,...

“Being a Jew is not a crime, I am not a dog.”

This is the story of the start of the Holocaust.

Serving as the scapegoat for everything from a disappearing child to the Black Plague, European Jews are used to “anti-Jewry.” But as the nation state rises in the modern world, it brings the so-called “Jewish Question” to the fore: can one be a faithful Jew and modern citizen? As modern antisemitism rises and European Jews face pogroms and the Dreyfus Affair, some begin to think they need a nation of their own. Jewish nationalism, or “Zionism,” is born.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Great War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazism is leaning into the continent’s centuries-old anti-Jewry and antisemitic ideas to claim that the Jews are responsible for Germany’s postwar woes. Once in power, he begins systematically removing rights from the Reich’s Jewish population. This includes taking their citizenship through the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935, and an unfathomable, deadly, destructive pogrom in 1938: Kristallnacht.

Stateless and persecuted, European Jews try to flee Nazism—can they find safety in America? We’ll see how that goes as we follow the St. Louis to America’s shores, and as the German American Bund gathers in Madison Square Garden…

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