Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

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target and to commence the isolation of the Jewish community, to maintain
surveillance of the community and to collect data on the community. Whilst this
was occurring, the Jewish community attempted to adjust to the new situation it
faced on a daily basis in the public domain. The policies of separation commenced
as early as 7 April 1933 with the enactment of the Berufsbeamtengesetz and on 25
April 1933 4 when quotas on the numbers of Jewish students at schools and
universities were introduced. Exemptions for war veterans and their families
played a vital role, as none of the interviewees was forced out of school in
Magdeburg, owing to their fathers’ war service.
Jews received mixed signals with these policies. Whilst they experienced the
atmosphere of public defamation and boycott, a majority of the Jewish population
remained exempt from a number of antisemitic measures. 5 This ambiguity in
policy gave the Jewish population the hope that they had not been completely
rejected. Consequently, the older generation still maintained and cherished its
German-Jewish identities. So strong was this that during the period under
discussion, the majority of community members still believed that the display of
their German allegiance would prove to the non-Jewish population that they were
not a separate and foreign body in Germany.
On 9 July 1934, the Gestapa in Berlin dispatched a national memorandum
with the request that a detailed questionnaire on all existing Jewish organisations
and institutions be completed and returned by 1 September 1934. 6 This marked
the commencement of preparations for legal exclusion. By early 1935 the policy
of exclusion needed to be formalised from the Nazi viewpoint, as there were still
4
Meyer, ed., op. cit., p. 438.
5
This has been previously demonstrated in Chapter Two.
6
Betrifft: Überwachung des Judentums, 9. Juli 1934, Collection JM, File 10624,
YVA, op. cit., pp. 7–10.