IB History Social Policies Including Volksgemeinschaft and Attempts to Create a Racially Pure State Key Definitions

The Nazi Party's youth organization for boys aged 14-18. Boys aged 10-13 joined the Deutsches Jungvolk first. Membership was made compulsory in 1936 and near-universal by 1939. The organization combined physical training, ideological indoctrination, military preparation, and group activities. By 1939, it had around 8 million members. The Hitler Youth emphasized loyalty to Hitler above family or church, racial ideology, discipline, and preparation for military service. Its counterpart for girls was the League of German Girls (BDM).

The "Night of Broken Glass," a nationwide pogrom against Jews in Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938. Organized by the Nazi regime following the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish teenager, the pogrom destroyed around 7,500 Jewish businesses, burned over 1,400 synagogues, killed at least 91 Jews directly, and resulted in the arrest and deportation of around 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps. The name refers to the broken glass from shop windows that covered the streets. Kristallnacht marked an escalation from legal persecution to open physical violence against Jews and is often cited as a key step toward the Holocaust.

Bund Deutscher Madel, the female counterpart of the Hitler Youth for girls aged 14-18. Girls aged 10-13 joined the Jungmadel first. The BDM emphasized physical fitness, domestic skills, and preparation for motherhood rather than military training. Members were taught Nazi racial ideology, German nationalism, and the importance of bearing healthy Aryan children for the nation. Membership became compulsory alongside the Hitler Youth in 1936. The BDM represented the Nazi vision of womens role: physically healthy, ideologically committed, and primarily oriented toward family and child-rearing.

Two laws passed at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg in September 1935 that institutionalized racial antisemitism in German law. The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of German citizenship, making them "subjects of the state" without political rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. A supplementary decree defined who counted as Jewish: anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was fully Jewish; those with one or two Jewish grandparents were classified as "Mischlinge" (mixed-race). The laws affected around 500,000 German Jews directly and created a legal framework for systematic persecution.

The Nazi concept of a racially pure "people's community" that transcended class divisions. It was used to promote national unity and justify the exclusion and persecution of Jews, Roma, and other "non-Aryans."