Exam 14: Responses to Global Crisis, 1920–1939

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The term "kulaks" refers to a category of relatively affluent farmers in the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and the early Soviet Union. The word "kulak" originally comes from the Russian word for "fist," which was used to describe someone who was tight-fisted or miserly. Over time, it came to denote wealthier peasants who owned larger farms than their neighbors, had better equipment, and often hired labor to work their fields.

During the early 20th century, particularly after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war, the term took on a more political and class-based connotation. The Soviet government, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and later Joseph Stalin, labeled kulaks as class enemies due to their relatively prosperous status and resistance to collectivization policies.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet Union launched a campaign of dekulakization, which aimed to redistribute land and resources from the kulaks to poorer peasants and to integrate individual landholdings into collective farms (kolkhozes) and state farms (sovkhozes). This process often involved violent repression, with many kulaks being arrested, exiled to remote regions such as Siberia, or executed. Their property was confiscated, and their families were subjected to harsh treatment and stigmatization.

The dekulakization campaign and forced collectivization are considered to have contributed to the widespread famine in the Soviet Union during the early 1930s, particularly the Holodomor in Ukraine, which resulted in millions of deaths. The term "kulak" became synonymous with an enemy of the state and was used to justify the severe measures taken against those who were labeled as such.

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The Nuremberg Laws were a set of anti-Semitic statutes enacted by Nazi Germany on September 15, 1935, during the Nazi Party's annual rally in Nuremberg. These laws were a formal legal codification of racial discrimination and the persecution of Jews, which were integral to the Nazi ideology. The two main laws were the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor" and the "Reich Citizenship Law."

The "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor" prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and forbade the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households. The purpose of this law was to maintain the perceived purity of German blood and to prevent the integration of Jews into German society.

The "Reich Citizenship Law" stripped Jews of their German citizenship, relegating them to the status of "subjects" without full political rights. This law defined who was considered a Jew based on ancestry; individuals with three or more Jewish grandparents were classified as Jews, regardless of their adherence to Judaism or their identification with the Jewish community.

The Nuremberg Laws laid the groundwork for the systematic exclusion of Jews from German social and economic life. They were expanded upon with numerous supplementary decrees and regulations that further limited the rights of Jews in Germany, ultimately leading to their segregation, exploitation, and eventual mass extermination during the Holocaust. These laws were a crucial step in the Nazis' efforts to institutionalize racism and create a legal framework for the genocide that would follow.