In the early war years, the newly transformed Reich Association of Jews in Germany ( Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland), led by prominent Jewish theologian Leo Baeck but subject to the demands of Nazi German authorities, worked to organize further Jewish emigration, to support Jewish schools and self-help organizations, and to help the German Jewish community contend with an ever-growing mass of discriminatory legislation.įollowing the outbreak of war on September 1, 1939, the government imposed new restrictions on Jews remaining in Germany. Yet the most drastic changes for the German Jewish community came with World War II in Europe.
Thousands of Jews remained interned in concentration camps following the mass arrests in the aftermath of Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) in November 1938. By early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind.
Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation had marginalized and disenfranchised Germany's Jewish citizenry and had expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life. In the years between 19, the Nazi regime had brought radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community.
Over half of these individuals, approximately 304,000 Jews, emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship, leaving only approximately 214,000 Jews in Germany proper (1937 borders) on the eve of World War II. In January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany.
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