ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Nazi regime's three conceptions of Jewish identity – as foreign, mortal threats, and subhumans. Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, one of the principal architects of the final solution, offered a similar but far more sinister essentialist understanding of Jewish identity to his fellow SS officers. The idea that the Jews were foreign and required separation from Germans derived from the pre-Nazi socio-political environment and found its expression in the earliest Nazi Party platforms in the 1920s. Throughout the 1930s, the Nazi regime implemented a number of measures that successively stripped Jews of their legal and economic rights as well as their place within German culture and society. The December 1938 "Aryanization" scheme allowed Nazi Party officials to buy out desperate Jewish businessmen for a fraction of the value of their businesses. Invoking the epic-struggle motif, Goebbels proclaimed that the Jews are receiving a penalty that is certainly hard, but more than deserved.
