48 pages • 1 hour read
Judith KerrWhen Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, held power in Germany from 1933 to 1945. Led by the fascist dictator Adolf Hitler, the party instituted a policy of racial cleansing based on discriminatory and illegitimate racial science that promoted the Aryan race as superior. The Nazi Party’s genocidal policies aimed to restore the fatherland of Germany to its alleged former glory.
Anti-Jewish legislation and boycotts increased between 1933 and 1935, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws, which mandated the separation of Aryans from Non-Aryans (which included Jews and other groups designated as racially inferior). These aims mandated complete legal and social separation of German Jews from other Germans. On November 9th, 1938, on a night now infamously known as Kristallnacht, Jewish business, homes, and Synagogues were violently destroyed or burned (“Antisemitism in History: Nazi Anti Semitism.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2023).
As part of the alleged restoration of the German fatherland, Hitler also invaded surrounding countries, first Austria and then Poland, prompting an Allied Forces response that signaled the beginning of World War II. Jews from many countries across Europe, including Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Romania, Norway, Latvia, Italy, Hungary, Greece, Estonia, Denmark, Bulgaria, Belgium, Austria, and Albania were systematically murdered in an attempted genocide that took the lives of over six million men, women, and children in an event now known as the Holocaust (“
