Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

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public eye became policy. Now that Jews had been ostensibly removed from the
economy, they would also be removed from the view of the public.
In the period between the Reichskristallnacht and September 1939 the Jews of
Magdeburg experienced an even greater level of demonisation, exclusion and
pauperisation. The majority of employable community members were now
unemployed. At the very best they were living off the proceeds of the sale of
assets and at worst relying on welfare assistance. Total segregation had
commenced and was consolidated by their evictions from homes and allocation of
rooms in ‘Judenhäuser.’ Jews from Magdeburg were still emigrating when war
broke out. For those who remained, in the wake of the vacuum created by the
departure of Rabbi Dr Wilde, the teacher Hermann Spier led the community. The
first official religious service after the pogrom occurred at Passover 1939, when
members of all the former religious communities gathered to worship in unison in
the former rooms of the B’nai B’rith, located in the community building next door
to the destroyed synagogue. 192 Sadly, but importantly, the pogrom and the
intensity of the inflicted persecutions had created some sense of unity at this
moment of communal fate. For the Jews of Magdeburg, what they had
experienced in the previous nine months became a prelude to new levels of
persecution yet to come, in the wake of Germany waging war.
192 Correspondence from M. F. to the author, 12 July 1999.