The Holocaust in Germany
Overall, of the 522,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933, approximately 304,000 emigrated during the first six years of Nazi rule and about 214,000 were left on the eve of World War II.
[2][3][4] During the period of the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933, German Jews assumed an important role in the government of the country and held various positions in politics and diplomacy.
[5][6] During this period, there were also a number of active Jewish political and religious organizations, such as Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens and Agudat Yisrael.
However, the Jewish community of Germany faced several pressing issues, including the integration of eastern European Jews and growing antisemitism, which was fueled by the steady rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP).
Throughout the 1930s, various German government agencies, Nazi Party organizations, and local authorities instituted a variety of anti-Jewish measures without centralized coordination.
[11] They were barred from additional occupations such as real estate brokers or commercial agents,[13] and forbidden to practice as doctors, pharmacists, dentists, or lawyers except for Jewish clients.
[15] Anti-Jewish violence, largely locally organized by members of Nazi Party institutions, took primarily non-lethal forms from 1933 to 1939.
[17] Jews were violently forced to leave some places or denied entry, while others were publicly humiliated for alleged sexual affairs with non-Jews.
[19] Anti-Jewish terror was even worse in areas annexed by Nazi Germany;[20] in Austria, the SS and SA smashed shops and stole cars belonging to Jews.
[38] During the last year of the war, people of partial Jewish descent and non-Jewish partners in mixed marriages were arrested and imprisoned in one hundred such camps.
[36] At the beginning of September 1941, all German Jews were required to wear a yellow star, and later that month, Hitler decided to deport them to the east.
[41] By the end of 1941, 42,000 Jews from Greater Germany and 5,000 Romani people from Austria had been deported to Łódź, Kovno, Riga, and Minsk, where most were not immediately executed.
[45] Around 55,000 German Jews were deported between March and June 1942, mainly to ghettos in the Lublin District of the General Governorate whose inhabitants had shortly before been killed in Belzec.
[49] Although the Nazis' goal of eliminating any Jewish population from Germany had largely been achieved in 1943, it was reversed in 1944 with the deportation of around 200,000 Jews from Greater Hungary due to increasing demand for labor.
