The Years Before the Killing

Why this Chapter exists

What the Holocaust was, and when it began.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the Holocaust as “the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators.” Nearly two of every three Jews in Europe were killed. The regime imprisoned and murdered other groups as well, and the Chapters on Aktion T-4 and the camp system record them. Jews, in Yad Vashem’s words, were “the one single group that the Nazis sought to destroy entirely.” The word holocaust comes from the ancient Greek translation of the Bible, where it meant an offering burned whole. Some people avoid the word for that reason. The Hebrew name is the Shoah, “catastrophe.”

The systematic murder began in 1941, with the mass shootings and killing centers that later Chapters follow. The era is dated earlier. The Museum begins it in January 1933, the month Adolf Hitler came to power, and Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, notes that many historians do the same. Before 1941 the murder of all Jews was not yet Nazi policy. In the six years before Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the regime wrote into law who counted as a Jew, and then legislated against the people it had defined, in Germany and, from March 1938, in Austria.

January 30, 1933

January 30, 1933.

On January 30, 1933, Germany’s elderly president, Paul von Hindenburg, named Adolf Hitler Chancellor, the head of the government. It was done by the rules of the Weimar Republic, the democratic system Germany had lived under since 1918, and which was still in force that morning. The advice came from a former chancellor, Franz von Papen. Papen had arranged a deal. Hitler’s party, the Nazis (in German, the NSDAP), would hold the chancellorship. Conservative non-Nazis would hold most of the cabinet seats. The conservatives who set this up thought they could control him. Papen boasted that the conservatives had engaged Hitler and would keep him boxed in. They were wrong within weeks.

Germany in early 1933 was a country under heavy strain. The Great Depression began with the American stock-market crash of October 1929. It hit Germany harder than most of Western Europe, because German banks had leaned on short-term American loans that suddenly vanished. By early 1932 roughly 6 million Germans were out of work, about 30 percent of the workforce. The political system was breaking down with the economy. The Nazi Party rode that collapse upward: from 12 seats in 1928, to 107 in September 1930 (the second-largest party), to 230 in July 1932 (the largest). Their support dipped to 196 seats in November 1932. But the older mainstream parties had fallen apart so badly that the Nazis stayed the biggest party even as they slipped.

Germany’s Jewish community at that moment numbered about 525,000 people, roughly three-quarters of one percent of a national population of about 65 million. It was a mostly city-dwelling community, and about a third lived in Berlin. Jews were well represented in the professions: about 16 percent of Germany’s lawyers and about 11 percent of its doctors were Jewish. So were many figures in the universities, the press, and business. They were a settled part of German civic life. About 100,000 German Jews had served in the Imperial German Army in the First World War. About 12,000 had been killed fighting for Germany. One of the veterans was Moritz Henschel, who had won the Iron Cross for bravery in 1915 and was an influential lawyer in Berlin when Hitler came to power. The diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Dresden professor of Jewish birth, and other accounts record what many assumed. The Nazi government was a real threat, the thinking went, but Germany’s laws and constitution would hold it in check, or the weight of governing would calm it down. Neither happened.

The first year

The legal machinery, built in eleven months.

The major steps of the first year of Nazi rule came fast, one after another:

• February 27, 1933, The Reichstag Fire. The German parliament building burned. A young Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested at the scene and later executed. Historians still debate whether he acted alone or whether the Nazi regime had a hand in it. What is certain is what the regime did with it: it used the fire as an excuse to suspend Germany’s civil liberties overnight.
• February 28, 1933, The Reichstag Fire Decree. Signed by Hindenburg under the emergency powers of Article 48 of the constitution. It suspended the basic protections Germans had counted on: personal freedom, free speech, the right to assemble and organize, privacy of mail and telephone, protection from arbitrary search. It also let the regime take “all necessary measures” against anyone it called an enemy. This decree stayed in force the entire twelve years of Nazi rule. It was the legal ground on which the Gestapo, the secret police, could arrest and jail people without a trial.
• March 5, 1933, Reichstag elections. Held under heavy Nazi intimidation. The Communist Party’s campaigning was shut down under the Fire Decree, and the SA, the Nazi paramilitary known as the brownshirts, attacked opposition candidates in the streets. The Nazis won about 43.9 percent of the vote: a large share, but not the majority they had wanted. A coalition with the conservative DNVP gave them a narrow parliamentary majority.
• March 22, 1933, The concentration camp at Dachau opens. Set up by Heinrich Himmler, then the police chief of Munich. Dozens of improvised camps run by the SA and police had already begun operating that spring. Dachau was the first under SS control and the only early camp that ran continuously to the end. Its first prisoners were mostly Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists: political opponents. Jews were among them from the first weeks, held as political prisoners and singled out for the worst treatment. The camp’s first four murdered prisoners, in April 1933, were Jews. Mass imprisonment of Jews as Jews came from 1938. Dachau ran until April 1945, twelve years, and became the model for the whole camp system that followed.
• March 23, 1933, The Enabling Act. Its formal name translates as the “Law for the Removal of the Distress of the People and the Reich.” Parliament passed it with the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution. The vote came after Nazi intimidation of the deputies in the room, and after the Communist deputies had been removed. The act let Hitler’s cabinet make laws on its own, without parliament, including laws that broke the constitution. It became the legal foundation of Nazi rule. Only the 94 Social Democrats present voted no. The Catholic Center Party’s yes vote has been argued over by historians ever since.
• April 1, 1933, The boycott of Jewish businesses. Organized by a Nazi Party committee chaired by Julius Streicher and carried out in the streets by the SA and SS. For one day across Germany, brownshirts stood at the doors of Jewish-owned shops, offices, and medical practices, with slogans painted on the windows. It was the regime’s first nationwide action against Jews. Ordinary Germans’ reactions were mixed: some joined in, some quietly ignored it, and some deliberately shopped at the targeted stores. It did not produce the wave of public agreement the regime had hoped for. It was called off after a single day, but it had shown Jews that they could no longer count on the ordinary protections of German life.
• April 7, 1933, The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. The regime’s first major anti-Jewish law. Its “Aryan paragraph” pushed “non-Aryans” out of government jobs. The definition it used, people with at least one Jewish grandparent, set an early legal pattern. The later Nuremberg Laws would refine and expand it. At first there were exceptions for First World War veterans and for men whose fathers or sons had died in the war. President Hindenburg had pushed for them. He personally objected to firing Jewish veterans. Those exceptions were chipped away over 1934–35 and removed by the Nuremberg Laws.
• April 25, 1933, The Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities. Capped new admissions of Jewish students to German schools and universities at 1.5 percent, and total Jewish enrollment at 5 percent.
• May 10, 1933, The book burnings. Organized by pro-Nazi students of the German Student Union (Deutsche Studentenschaft) in more than 20 university towns, with the Nazi government’s support. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels spoke in Berlin, where about 20,000 volumes were burned on the Opernplatz (today the Bebelplatz) alone, with similar scenes across the country. The targets included Jewish authors (Freud, Einstein, Heine, Schnitzler, Werfel, Zweig, Toller, Tucholsky), Marxist and socialist writers, the pacifist Erich Maria Remarque, and any other writing the regime branded “un-German.” Today the Bebelplatz holds a memorial by the Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman, dedicated in 1995: a glass plate set into the ground, looking down into an empty white library with room for all the burned books.
• July 14, 1933, The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. Authorized the forced sterilization of people the state labeled as carrying “hereditary” diseases. About 400,000 Germans were sterilized under it between 1934 and 1945. It was the opening move toward the later T-4 program, which murdered at least 70,273 people in 1940–41, by the program’s own count, and toward the wider Nazi medical machinery.
• October 4, 1933, The Editor’s Law. Barred Jews, and people married to Jews, from German journalism. Within the first year, it ended a long and prominent Jewish presence in the German press.

Behind these laws and the first camps stood a new kind of organization. The SS (Schutzstaffel, or “protection squad”) had begun in 1925 as a small bodyguard unit for Hitler. In 1929 Heinrich Himmler took it over. It had fewer than 300 men at the time. He began turning it into the core of the Nazi machinery of control: selected by race and loyalty, ranked, uniformed in black, and sworn by a personal oath to Hitler rather than to the German constitution. Its members wore the swastika of the wider Nazi movement and, on the collar, the SS’s own emblem: the doubled Sig rune, the twin angular lightning bolts that formed the “SS” itself. The Totenkopf, or death’s-head, marked the units that guarded the camps.

Over the next few years the SS absorbed the powers of the state itself. Hermann Göring created the Gestapo, the secret state police, in Prussia in 1933. By 1934 Himmler controlled it. In June 1936 he was named Chief of German Police, which placed the Gestapo, the criminal police, and the ordinary uniformed police all under his command alongside the SS. Party organization and state authority had fused into a single apparatus. A separate SS branch, the Death’s-Head units (SS-Totenkopfverbände), ran the concentration camps. From 1939 the SS would also carry out mass shootings, and from late 1941 it would operate the killing centers. By the late 1930s it was no longer an outlaw party militia but a salaried, uniformed, openly recognized branch of the German state.

The regime built its machine of persecution through ordinary law-making and Germany’s existing offices, with the cooperation of the civil service, the courts, the police, the universities, and the medical and legal professions. The machine would grow over the next six years. But its foundations were already in place by the end of 1933: named enemies, suspended liberties, exclusion from jobs and schools, a controlled press, and the power to jail without trial.

German Jews organized to meet the crisis. In May 1933, Jewish artists, teachers, and writers dismissed from their posts founded the Jewish Cultural League (Jüdischer Kulturbund) in Berlin. By early 1938 it had more than 50,000 members, and it staged concerts, plays, operas, and lectures under Gestapo supervision. In September 1933, Jewish leaders formed the Reich Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden), an umbrella body for the country’s Jewish religious and political groups. Its president was the Berlin rabbi Leo Baeck. It coordinated self-help: legal defense where any was still possible, food and shelter for families suddenly impoverished, and support for emigration. Religious life went on too. In 1935 Rabbi Max Dienemann ordained Regina Jonas of Berlin, the first woman known to have been ordained a rabbi. She served the city’s Jews until her deportation in 1942 and her murder at Auschwitz in 1944.

The Nuremberg Laws · 1935

The Nuremberg Laws, defining “Jew” in law.

On September 15, 1935, at the Nazi Party’s yearly rally in the city of Nuremberg, Hitler announced the laws that turned the persecution into a fixed legal system. The regime had been building toward this for two and a half years. Now it was written into the legal code:

• The Reich Citizenship Law. It split German residents into two classes: “Reich citizens,” who held full rights, and “state subjects,” who did not. Only “persons of German or related blood” could be Reich citizens. The effect was to strip German Jews of their citizenship. Later decrees spelled it out: Jews were state subjects, not citizens. That meant they lost the protections citizenship had given them.
• The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. It banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and “citizens of German or related blood.” It barred Jews from employing German women under 45 as household servants. It forbade Jews to fly the German flag. Breaking these rules carried jail or penitentiary sentences, and in practice, increasingly, concentration-camp imprisonment after the sentence was served.

The laws raised an obvious question: who counted, legally, as a Jew? A follow-up decree on November 14, 1935 answered it by counting grandparents:

• A person with three or four Jewish grandparents was a “full Jew.”
• A person with two Jewish grandparents who practiced Judaism, was married to a Jew, or was born of a marriage to a Jew also counted as a Jew.
• A person with two Jewish grandparents and none of those ties was a “first-degree mixed-race” (in German, Mischling).
• A person with one Jewish grandparent was a “second-degree mixed-race.”

With this, the regime defined Jewishness as a matter of descent. A person’s own beliefs made no difference: a Christian with three or four Jewish grandparents counted as a Jew. There was no biological test, so officials counted a grandparent as Jewish if that grandparent had belonged to the Jewish religious community. Through ordinary German law-making, a whole category of Germans, identified by ancestry, had been placed outside the protections of citizenship. Western newspapers covered the laws, but no major government took concrete action in response. The regime soon stated that the same racial rules applied to Roma and to Black Germans. By the end of 1935 the racial definition was fixed in law. Most of the machinery of dispossession was built in 1938 and 1939. Historians like Saul Friedländer and Peter Longerich have traced it in detail.

Roma and Sinti, the Romani peoples living in Germany, were also arrested as “asocials” and sent to the concentration camps, alongside political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and gay men convicted under Paragraph 175 of the criminal code. Disabled Germans, already being sterilized under the law of July 1933, would be the first group the regime set out to kill, in the T-4 program from 1939.

1936

1936, The Olympic pause.

When Berlin hosted the Summer Olympics from August 1 to 16, 1936, the visible persecution went quiet. The regime knew the world’s press would be watching, and that the Games would shape how other countries saw it. So it took down the anti-Jewish signs around Berlin for a time. It reined in much of the SA’s street violence. It softened the public face of the persecution in the months before and during the Games.

The persecution itself did not pause. The Nuremberg Laws stayed in force. Jewish civil servants and professionals kept losing their jobs. The Gestapo kept operating under the Reichstag Fire Decree. Historians read the pause as evidence that the regime could turn the visibility of its persecution up or down depending on who was watching, and that it paid close attention to foreign opinion.

The Berlin Games are best remembered for the four gold medals won by the African-American athlete Jesse Owens, whose victories contradicted the Nazi claims of racial superiority on the regime’s own stage. But the Olympics also handed the regime a stamp of legitimacy in front of the many visitors and readers who took in the coverage. International business and diplomacy with Nazi Germany rolled on through 1936 and 1937, in full view of the persecution.

1937–1938

1937–1938, The pressure increases.

After the Olympics, the persecution sped up again:

• Buchenwald concentration camp opens (July 1937), after Dachau (1933) and Sachsenhausen (1936), built on a hill outside the city of Weimar. It ran until April 1945.
• “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses accelerates. This was the process of forcing Jewish-owned businesses either to sell to “Aryan” buyers at far below their real value or to shut down. By the end of 1938, much of the Jewish economic presence in Germany had been wiped out this way.
• The Decree on the Registration of Jewish Property (April 26, 1938) ordered German Jews to register all property worth more than 5,000 Reichsmarks. The point was to make a list of Jewish wealth for the regime to seize later. It became the basis for the mass confiscations that followed Kristallnacht.
• The “Names Decree” (August 17, 1938) forced German Jews whose given names were not on an official list of “Jewish” names to add a middle name to their papers. Men had to add “Israel” and women “Sara,” so that any official document would mark them as Jewish.
• The “J” stamp on Jewish passports (October 5, 1938), added at the request of the Swiss government, which wanted to spot Jewish refugees at its border. The red “J” flagged German Jews to foreign immigration officers and made escape harder.
• Jewish lawyers and doctors lose their practices (1937–1938). In 1937 and 1938 the regime revoked the licenses of Jewish lawyers, and by September 1938 Jewish physicians were effectively banned from treating non-Jewish patients.
• The destruction of Munich’s main synagogue (June 9, 1938), on Hitler’s direct order, the first major synagogue the regime destroyed before the war, five months before Kristallnacht.

Austria · March 1938

The persecution reaches Austria.

On March 12, 1938, the German army marched into Austria. The next day Hitler declared the Anschluss, the union of Germany and Austria. About 192,000 Jews lived in Austria. Most, around 170,000, lived in Vienna, with smaller communities in Graz, Linz, and the provinces. Overnight, the German persecution applied to them too.

What happened in Austria was even more violent than the German pattern had been, with more open public participation. Within days, Austrian SA and SS men forced Vienna’s Jews into public humiliation and looted Jewish businesses. The scenes are well documented: elderly Jews made to scrub the city’s streets on their knees while crowds watched. Ordinary Austrians joined the violence in large numbers. The five years it had taken to build the machine in Germany were matched in Austria in a matter of months.

It was in Vienna, in those months, that Adolf Eichmann set up the new Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He would later organize much of the Nazi deportation system. His system funneled Austrian Jews through a single bureaucratic channel that forced them to emigrate while stripping away their property as they left. It worked faster than the German process, precisely because it was built on confiscation. It became the model for the wider emigration apparatus and, later, the deportation apparatus. About 117,000 Jews left annexed Austria between March 1938 and the outbreak of war in September 1939, most of them processed through Eichmann’s office.

Évian · July 1938

Évian, the world declines to help.

The Anschluss set off a refugee crisis, and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt called for an international meeting. In July 1938, representatives of 32 countries met at the resort town of Évian-les-Bains, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, to discuss what to do about Jewish refugees. They talked for nine days, from July 6 to 15. The conference is remembered for its failure.

Of the 32 countries, 31 declined to take in more Jewish refugees. Each gave its own reasons. Australia’s representative said his country had “no real racial problem” and did not wish “to import one.” Britain refused to discuss immigration to Palestine, which it controlled. The United States would not raise its immigration quotas, set by Congress in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. The quota for German and Austrian immigrants was filled for the first time only in 1939. France said it had already taken in many refugees and could not manage more.

The one real exception was the Dominican Republic, which offered to admit up to 100,000 Jewish refugees as farm settlers. The dictator Rafael Trujillo had his own tangled motives, but the offer was real. In the end several hundred refugees reached the Dominican Republic through a settlement at Sosúa. The rest of the capacity went unused, blocked by visa restrictions, the difficulty of moving refugees across oceans, and the sheer scale of the crisis.

The German government answered that it was “astounding” that countries which criticized Germany’s treatment of its Jews would not open their own doors to them when the opportunity arose. Historians of American refugee policy, David Wyman’s Paper Walls (1968) among the foundational accounts, have treated Évian as one of the turning points of these years.

The Polenaktion · October 1938

The expulsion of Jews with Polish citizenship.

On the night of October 28–29, 1938, the Gestapo arrested about 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship living in Germany. Many had been in Germany for decades and had German-born children. The Gestapo pushed them across the Polish border at the town of Zbąszyń and other crossings. The trigger was a Polish decree of March 1938 that stripped citizenship from Poles who had been out of the country for more than five years. That described exactly these long-settled Polish Jews. Poland wanted to keep them from returning. Germany expelled them before the citizenship change took effect on October 31.

People were given about an hour to grab what they could carry. The rest was left behind. Polish border guards at first refused to let them in. Thousands were stranded at the frontier for weeks in miserable conditions. Zbąszyń, on the Polish side, took in about 8,000 of them and became a symbol of the whole episode.

Among those expelled were the parents, sister, and brother of Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris. In the first days of November a postcard from his sister reached him, describing the family’s expulsion. On November 7, 1938, Grynszpan walked into the German Embassy in Paris and shot a diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. Vom Rath died of his wounds on November 9. The Nazi regime seized on the killing as its excuse for Kristallnacht.

November 9–10, 1938

Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

On the night of November 9–10, 1938, organized anti-Jewish violence swept across Germany, annexed Austria, and the Sudetenland. That Czech border region had been annexed weeks earlier under the Munich Agreement of September 1938, in which Britain and France agreed to let Germany take it. Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, incited and unleashed it with Hitler’s approval, and the party’s regional machinery carried it into every town. The SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth, and parts of the Nazi apparatus carried it out, with documented participation by ordinary civilians. The name, Kristallnacht, “Crystal Night,” or the Night of Broken Glass, comes from the shattered glass that covered the streets after Jewish shops, synagogues, and homes were destroyed.

What the night did:

• Killed. At least 91 Jews were killed in the immediate violence, by the Nazi Party’s own internal count, which historians treat as an undercount. Counting deaths in the camp imprisonments that followed and suicides in the days after, the toll reaches several hundred. Estimates vary among historians.
• Arrested. Some 26,000 to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned in Dachau, Buchenwald, and a third camp, Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. Most were released over the following weeks, often only after proving they had a plan to emigrate. The point was to drive Jewish emigration faster.
• Synagogues destroyed. Reinhard Heydrich’s report of November 11, 1938 counted 267 synagogues across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland burned or wrecked. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum now puts the number of synagogues burned or destroyed at more than 1,400.
• Businesses destroyed or looted. About 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses were smashed or robbed. The forced-sale process of Aryanization sped up sharply afterward.
• Homes ransacked. Much of the urban Jewish community, especially in Berlin and Vienna, was hit by home invasions, looting, and assaults.

The aftermath turned the violence into outright robbery of the community. On November 12, 1938, the regime ordered German Jews to pay a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks, an “atonement payment” that blamed them all for one young man’s killing of a German diplomat in Paris. A separate decree made Jews pay to repair the pogrom’s damage themselves. A decree of December 3, 1938 completed the legal machinery for seizing Jewish businesses. Parallel rules on housing, work, and access to public spaces followed in the months after.

The world reacted more strongly than it had to the Nuremberg Laws. The U.S. ambassador to Germany, Hugh Wilson, was recalled to Washington on November 14, 1938. American and Western European newspapers covered the pogrom. There was public condemnation in democratic countries. Yet immigration policy barely moved. The United States did not raise its quotas. Britain did not widen Palestine immigration. It would restrict it further in the May 1939 White Paper. Britain did take in the roughly 10,000 children of the Kindertransport. The Wagner-Rogers Bill would have let 20,000 German Jewish refugee children into the U.S. outside the quota. It died in a Senate committee in 1939, blocked by anti-immigrant and antisemitic opposition.

1939

1939, The doors close.

In the first eight months of 1939, the ways out of Germany shut one by one:

• The January 30, 1939 Reichstag speech. On the sixth anniversary of becoming Chancellor, Hitler made what he himself called a “prophecy.” He declared that if “international Jewish financiers” plunged the world into another war, the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” It was a public threat of annihilation, made by the head of government before the national parliament. Historians debate how far it reflected a plan already formed. Hitler pointed back to this speech again and again during the war, while the killings were under way.
• The occupation of the Czech lands (March 15, 1939). After the Munich Agreement broke Czechoslovakia apart, the German army occupied the remaining Czech lands, with Slovakia split off as a German satellite state. It created the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and brought about 118,000 more Jews under Nazi rule.
• The May 1939 White Paper. Britain capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at about 75,000 over the next five years. It narrowed that escape route just as German Jewish emigration reached its peak. Historians still debate how much British policy was driven by Arab political concerns, imperial calculation, or antisemitism within parts of the establishment.
• The Reich Association of Jews in Germany (July 4, 1939). A compulsory organization every German Jew had to join, replacing the community’s own voluntary institutions. The regime used it as the administrative channel for managing emigration, welfare, and the ongoing dispossession.
• The Hitler-Stalin Pact (August 23, 1939). The non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Its secret clauses divided Poland and Eastern Europe between them, and left Poland diplomatically isolated as the German invasion loomed.
• September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland. The start of the Second World War. German forces crossed the border around 4:45 a.m. Poland held roughly 3.3 million Jews, the community described in Unit 2 · Ch. 07 · The Jews of Poland and Lithuania. About 2 million of them, in the west and center, came under Nazi control over the following weeks. The 1.3 million in the east fell under Soviet rule, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and seized them too. Mobile killing began here, as Security Police task forces (Einsatzgruppen) followed the army into Poland. With other SS and police units and local ethnic-German militias, they shot tens of thousands of members of the Polish elites and thousands of Jews. The far larger killings began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

May 1939

The voyage of the St. Louis.

On May 13, 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis left Hamburg carrying 937 passengers, most of them Jewish refugees fleeing Germany after Kristallnacht. Most held Cuban landing papers they believed would let them off the ship in Havana, with the hope of eventually entering the United States. When the ship reached Havana on May 27, the Cuban government, citing landing certificates it had invalidated by decree on May 5, before the ship ever sailed, let only 28 passengers ashore.

The ship then sailed north along the Florida coast in early June, close enough to see the U.S. shore, while the captain and Jewish refugee organizations pleaded with Washington to admit the passengers outside the quota. The U.S. government refused. The ship turned back for Europe on June 6 and reached Antwerp on June 17.

Four European countries took the passengers in: the United Kingdom (288), France (224), the Netherlands (181), and Belgium (214). Of the roughly 620 who returned to the European continent, 254 were later killed in the Holocaust. All of them had been admitted to the Netherlands, France, or Belgium, countries Germany would soon occupy. All but one of the 288 who reached Britain survived the war. The one was killed in an air raid in 1940.

The St. Louis played out in full view of the American press, the U.S. refusal happened in the open, and the passengers’ later fates could be traced. It became the best-known emblem of a wider refusal: the limits the United States and other countries kept on Jewish immigration in 1938 and 1939, while escape from Germany was still possible.

Who got out

Who got out, and who could not.

The record of German Jewish emigration, year by year:

• 1933 (the first year of Nazi rule): about 37,000, driven by the shock of the regime taking power.
• 1934: about 23,000, lower, as the first shock faded and many held onto the hope that the regime would soften.
• 1935: about 21,000.
• 1936: about 25,000, during the Olympic-pause year.
• 1937: about 23,000.
• 1938: about 36,000, pushed up by the Anschluss, the speed-up of Aryanization, and Kristallnacht.
• 1939 (through September): about 77,000, the rush to leave after Kristallnacht, before the war closed the routes.

Yearly counts are estimates and do not add up exactly to the overall total below.

By the count of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), roughly 282,000 people emigrated from Germany between 1933 and September 1939, more than half of Germany’s 1933 Jewish population. Another 117,000 left annexed Austria. About 202,000 Jews were still in Germany at the end of 1939. Most were later deported and killed between 1941 and 1944.

Where the emigrants went. The figures below cover the whole German Reich, Austria included, which is why they exceed the German total alone:

• The United States: some 95,000, within the existing quotas, and often only after long waits and heavy paperwork.
• Palestine (then under British control): about 60,000, under the Mandate’s restricted certificate system. The count includes those who left through the Ha’avara Agreement, a contested 1933 arrangement that let German Jewish emigrants move part of their assets to Palestine through German export goods.
• The United Kingdom: about 40,000, including the roughly 10,000 children of the Kindertransport, brought over between December 1938 and September 1939.
• Central and South America: about 75,000, the largest numbers to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Bolivia.
• Western Europe: tens of thousands to France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland, often only a temporary refuge, since German occupation would soon follow.
• Asia: about 18,000 to Shanghai, which required no visa to enter between 1938 and 1941, plus smaller numbers elsewhere.

What historians debate

What historians still debate.

Historians still debate several questions about these years:

• Did Hitler plan the killing from the start? Scholars divide between “intentionalists,” who see the murder of Europe’s Jews as Hitler’s aim from early on, and “functionalists,” who see the killing project emerging through escalation between 1933 and 1941. Most historians now land between the two: Hitler’s hatred was fixed from the 1920s, but the specific decision that produced the killing of 1941 took shape through the radicalization of these years.
• How much did ordinary Germans take part? The record shows active participation by much of the civil service, the courts, the doctors, the universities, and the police, alongside passive acceptance by much of the wider public. It also shows the smaller number who resisted, who hid Jews or defied the regime. They are honored today through Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations program.
• Could other countries have done more? The record of closed doors is clear. What is debated is which alternative policies were actually possible at the time, and how many more lives a wider opening would have saved.
• The Ha’avara Agreement. The 1933 transfer deal between the German government and the Zionist Federation of Germany split Jewish opinion at the time. Some saw it as a rescue line for German Jews, others as collaboration with the Nazi regime.
• Why did the rush to leave come so late? Emigration spiked only after the Anschluss (March 1938) and Kristallnacht (November 1938), rather than in 1933–37 when escape was easier. The explanations include the widespread hope that the regime would moderate and the heavy financial cost of leaving (the Reich Flight Tax and other barriers). They also include the bureaucratic tangle of getting out and the tightening limits of the countries that might have received them.

Key takeaways

• On January 30, 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor by legal means. The conservative politicians who arranged it believed they could control him.
• Within eleven months the regime built its legal machinery: the Reichstag Fire Decree, the Enabling Act, Dachau, and the first anti-Jewish laws.
• The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 reduced German Jews to second-class subjects, stripped of political citizenship, and defined Jewishness by ancestry, through ordinary law-making.
• The persecution escalated step by step: the Olympic pause of 1936, Aryanization, the Anschluss, and Kristallnacht in November 1938.
• German Jews organized to meet the crisis. The Jewish Cultural League staged concerts, plays, and lectures, and the Reich Representation of German Jews, led by the Berlin rabbi Leo Baeck, coordinated self-help.
• The world’s doors stayed largely closed. The Évian Conference of 1938 produced one real offer of refuge, and the St. Louis was turned away.
• About 282,000 Jews escaped Germany by September 1939, more than half the community. About 202,000 remained, and most were later deported and killed.
• By September 1, 1939, the mass murder of Europe’s Jews had not yet begun. The machinery of exclusion and dispossession was in place. The machinery of killing was built in the years that followed.

Object Spotlight

The letter “J.”

A German passport of the 1930s was a small booklet with an eagle on the cover, and for its holder it was the way out. On October 5, 1938, a decree ordered every passport held by a German Jew handed in, to be returned with one addition: a red letter “J,” about an inch tall, stamped beside the photograph.

One letter turned a travel document into a marker. Border officials anywhere could now sort Jewish Germans from other Germans at a glance. Countries that did not want Jewish refugees could refuse them without reading past the first page. The stamp left the right to leave intact, but it told every other country who was asking to come in.

Stamped passports of this kind survive in museum and family collections around the world, each one once carried by a person trying to get out.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. This Chapter examines the rise of Nazi Germany, the legal dismantling of civil rights, antisemitic legislation, refugee policy, and the progression from discrimination to systematic persecution before mass murder.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • trace the escalation from discrimination to persecution over time
  • distinguish persecution from genocide
  • analyze laws, speeches, and photographs as primary sources
  • evaluate refugee policy and the international response (the Évian Conference)
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments from primary and secondary sources
• International Classroom Relevance. Supports Holocaust education, genocide studies, human-rights education, and source-based history instruction internationally.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Grade 8 (United States History) 8.6 and NY Global History 10.5 (Unresolved Global Conflict, 1914–1945).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction by documenting how propaganda, law, bureaucracy, and state institutions gradually isolated and persecuted Jewish citizens before genocide began.
• Common Core, Reading in History/Social Studies (grades 6–12). Students assess an author’s purpose and point of view (RH.6–8.6, RH.9–10.6, RH.11–12.6) and compare and corroborate multiple sources (RH.6–8.9, RH.9–10.9, RH.11–12.9), working from laws, speeches, photographs, memoirs, newspapers, and refugee records.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 and D2.His.14 (grades 6–8 and 9–12). Students investigate chronology, historical causation, continuity and change, and evidence-based historical interpretation.