Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

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still resident in Magdeburg and known to the local Gestapo were of mixed
marriage and the children of such marriages.
According to the census of 1939, approximately 739 individuals in Magdeburg
had four Jewish grandparents; five had three Jewish grandparents, 320 had two
Jewish grandparents and approximately a further 224 had one Jewish
grandparent. 165 Converts to Judaism were not included in any statistic, owing to
their non-Jewish racial pedigree. Of these statistics, the respondents would have
been members of both the Christian and Jewish communities, in addition to those
individuals who were unaffiliated. Whilst the figures of those belonging to
Christian communities and those unaffiliated with either the Christian or the
Jewish communities remain unknown, the Lutheran Church in Magdeburg
received memoranda from both the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland
and the Gestapa on how to treat members of the Lutheran community who were of
Jewish lineage. 166 Furthermore, it received counsel on a diverse range of matters
relating to Jewish Christians. 167 Jews married to non-Jews also sought baptism in
the vain hope of protecting themselves. As late as May 1942, the head office of
the Lutheran Church for the church province of Saxony, based in Magdeburg,
sought counsel on such a matter from its head office in Berlin. 168 In a blistering
165 Sonderaufbereitung der Volkszählung vom 17. Mai 1939, Listung der
Erhebungsbögen für Provinz Sachsen, Stadtkreis Magdeburg, Gemeinde Magdeburg,
BAB, op. cit., pp. 3–29. The statistics from the census were based on the respondent’s
number of ‘racially’ Jewish grandparents. All figures are approximates. The racial
classification of a further 66 individuals could not be established. These figures were
defined according to racial classification, as dictated by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935,
and, consequently, converts to Judaism were not included in the statistics.
166 Behandlung evangelisher Gemeindeglieder jüdischer Abstammung, 23. April 1940
Bestand Rep. A, Generalia, Signatur Nr. 429b, AKPS, unnumbered page, one page.
167 For a highly comprehensive and detailed account on the persecution and treatment
of Jewish Christians, see James F. Tent, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Nazi
Persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
168 Correspondence to the head of office of the Lutheran Church for the province of