Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

Chapter Two:
The Destruction of Jewish Livelihoods, 1933–1938
From Boycott to Expropriation
For the period from 1933 until the pogrom in November 1938, the Jews of
Magdeburg experienced the same economic strangulation and social isolation as
their co-religionists did elsewhere in Germany. 1 The destruction of the economic
life of its Jewish community was attended to zealously by both the Nazi Party and
the local authorities with the assistance of the city’s citizenry.
The experiences of individuals varied for a number of reasons. Business
people and those self-employed often did not feel the effects as immediately as
those who were salaried or civil servants or those professionals whose livelihoods
depended on governmental certification. Self-employed individuals operating
businesses not requiring professional certification could still exert some influence
over their business lives, even as the situation grew progressively worse with
constant defamations, boycotts and the eventual threat of looming ‘aryanisation.’
This was not the case for salaried individuals and most professionals, the majority
of whom were forced to retrain or were reduced to impoverishment in the early
years of the regime after having been dismissed or forced into retirement. In
1 In the most thorough and recent study of the processes and practices of the economic
exclusion of the Jews in Germany, Frank Bajohr has used the Jewish community of
Hamburg as a case study. In 1933 Hamburg’s Jewish community was the fourthlargest
in Germany, with a population of 16,885 or 1.5% of the city’s population and
was also one of the nation’s most affluent. Whilst it neither compares numerically,
nor socio-economically to Magdeburg, Bajohr’s study provides a parallel to the
application of the policies of ‘aryanisation.’ See Frank Bajohr, ‘Aryanization’ in
Hamburg: The Economic Exclusion of Jews and the Confiscation of Their Property in
Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 New York: Berghahn Books, 2002.
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