Jews Living In Germany At Start Of Holocaust

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

First day of school

Berta Rosenheim, Jewish,  poses with a large cone, traditionally filled with sweets and stationery, on her first day of school. Leipzig, Germany, April 1929.

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Approximately 500,000 to 530,000 Jews lived in Germany around 1930–1933, comprising less than 1% of the total population. While precise yearly census data for 1930-31 is less common than 1933 figures, estimations confirm the population remained around 525,000 just before the Nazis took power.  (We Jews continue to be only less than 1% of world population.)

In the 1930s, prominent German ships like the SS Europa and SS Bremen dominated transatlantic routes from Germany to the United States, representing a peak in maritime luxury and speed. These, along with other vessels, frequently transported passengers and mail, often sailing from major ports like Hamburg or Bremen to New York, often featuring distinctive, sleek designs.                                               

      MS St Louis ship:  In 1939, the St. Louis carried more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany intending to escape antisemitic persecution. The refugees first tried to disembark in Cuba but were denied permission to land. After Cuba, the captain, Gustav Schröder, went to the United States and Canada, trying to find a nation to take the Jews in, but both nations refused. He finally returned the ship to Europe, where various countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, accepted some refugees.

Following the German occupation of France, Belgium and the Netherlands during World War II, refugees were persecuted during the Holocaust, and some historians have estimated that approximately a quarter of them were killed in death camps. These events, also known as the "Voyage of the Damned", have inspired film, opera, and fiction.

   Jewish refugees arrive at Haifa's Port on November 1, 1945. 

 In 1945, it was illegal for Jews to immigrate to Palestine primarily due to the British Mandatory authority’s strict enforcement of the 1939 White Paper. This policy, aimed at preventing further Arab revolts and securing British strategic interests, aimed to limit Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, after which further immigration was disallowed without Arab consent. (Giving the mandate to Britainwas political as they had kept out Jews from their country for365 years!!!)

Of 75,000 Jewish refugees of 1933, 1934 and 1935, the largest singlegroup, 30,000 in all, had gone to Palestine.   9,000 had gone to the USA.

About 2,000 had gone to Britain and others to South Africa, Canada, andAustralia, which were English speaking countries.  Thousands more went toFrance, Holland, Belgium, Austria and Czechoslovakia.  

Those German Jews who, like Richard Frankel, were under pressure, left Germany .  More than 75,000 German Jews had emigrated or fled by theend of August 1935.  Of these, several thousand were Jewish according toNazis, known to them as "Christian non-Aryans".  They were condemnedwith being non-Aryan;  meaning Jewish.

Who was Richard Frankel?  Take your pick.  

• Dr. Richard E. Frankel (Modern Historian): A contemporary American professor of modern German history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who specializes in antisemitism, nationalism, and the Holocaust. He is the author of Bismarck's Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898-1945 and Antisemitism Before the Holocaust. He is not a person from the 1930s himself, but a scholar of that era.
• Richard Frenkel (Holocaust Victim): A two-year-old child born in 1940 who was deported from France to Auschwitz in 1942.
• Richard Frenkel (Berlin/New York): A man born around 1884 in Germany who lived in Berlin in 1935 and emigrated to New York by 1940. 
• What happened to the Jews who remained in Germany like my Uncle Werner Oster's parents?  They were Ferdinand Oster and Rosa  Ullmann.  They  died August 1, 1942 in Krasniczyn concentration camp, Poland Camp; Holocaust KZ.  Based on available records, there is no evidence of a major concentrationor extermination camp in Krasniczyn, Poland. It appears there may be confusion with the nearby Budzyń concentration camp, where hundreds to thousands of Jews were imprisoned and many perished between 1942 and 1944. 
• These camps were as follows:
• Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oswiecim, near Kraków) 
• Belzec (near the current Ukrainian border north-west of L'viv) 
• Kulmhof (Chelmno, between Warsaw and Poznan) 
• Majdanek (near Lublin) 
• Sobibór (south of Brest-Litovsk) 
• Treblinka (north-east of Warsaw) 
• Warschau (in Warsaw) 
• A quarter (1/4) of the remaining Jews had been kept from their professional liveli-
• hood by boycott, decree, or local pressure.  More than 10,000 public health and
• social workers had been driven out of their posts.  4,000 lawyers were without the
• right to practice, 2,000 doctors had been expelled from hospitals and clinics;  
• 2,000 actors, singers and musicians had been driven from their orchestras, clubs
• and cafes.  1200 editors and journalists had been dismissed, and 800 university
• professors and leturers, and 800 elementary and secondary school-teachers.

The search for Jews, and for converted Jews, to be driven out of their jobs was con-

tinuous.  On September 5, 1935, the SS newspaper published the names of 8 half

-Jews and converted Jews, all of the Evangelical-Lutheran faith at the time, who had

been dismissed without notice" and deprived of opportunity 'of acting as organists in

Christian churches".  The Reich Chamber of Music is taking steps to protect the

church from pernicious influence." 

Reference:

Holocaust by Martin Gilbert