This is taken from a series of photographs of anti-Semitic signs in Germany taken by a Dutch photographer in 1935. He photographed twenty-two signs along the road connecting the German town of Bad Bentheim, on the Dutch border, to the capital Berlin, some five hundred kilometres away that he found on the sides of the road, at entrances to villages, and in front of homes. The photographer was employed by two German-Jewish journalists, Hans Reichman and Alfred Weiner, who formed their own news agency in 1929 and who then, after fleeing Germany, established the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam. The Jewish journalists attempted to raise awareness of rising anti-Semitism in Germany across the Western world by sending people into Germany to report on the situation, but despite sending their photos to a number of media organizations, they were not published, and the wider world remained ignorant of Nazi anti-Semitic policies. The two escaped once more, this time to London, in 1939. The material collected by Weiner and Reichman became part of the Weiner Library, one of the important documentation centres for Holocaust research.
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The Nazi Party - The Nazi party (full name: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) was a political party established in 1920, with Adolf Hitler becoming party leader in 1921. The party’s ideology was nationalist, racist, anti-communist, and anti-Semitic. In the years following the First World War, Germany’s economic situation was very bad, causing great social and political unrest. The German public blamed their country’s defeat in the war on social elements that weakened and betrayed Germany, in particular the Jews.
As Germany’s economic and social situation deteriorated, more and more people adopted the extreme politics of the Nazi party, and by 1932, the Nazi party had become the largest party in the Reichstag. The Nazis soon began to suspend civil liberties and eliminate political opposition. Anti-Jewish laws were passed and propaganda was distributed in newspapers, posters, books, and films aiming at segregating Jews from the “Aryan” society and denying them political, civil, and legal rights.
