GERMANY: JEWISH POPULATION IN 1933

GERMANY: JEWISH POPULATION IN 1933

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/germany-jewish-population-in-1933

Germany is the most populous country in the European Union with an estimated 2019 population of 83.52 million, which ranks 17th in the world. Despite a drop in the country's growth rate, its 2019 population is now estimated at 83.52 million, which makes Germany the 17th most populous country in the world.

Jewish communities before the war

Germany

English

Jewish communities in central Europe [LCID: ger77170]

Jewish communities in central Europe

Eighty percent of the Jews in Germany (about 400,000 people) held German citizenship. The remainder were mostly Jews of Polish citizenship, many of whom were born in Germany and who had permanent resident status in Germany. In all, about 70 percent of the Jews in Germany lived in urban areas. Fifty percent of all Jews in Germany lived in the 10 largest German cities. The largest Jewish population centers were in Berlin (about 160,000), Frankfurt am Main (about 26,000), Breslau (about 20,000), Hamburg (about 17,000), Cologne (about 15,000), Hannover (about 13,000), and Leipzig (about 12,000). Slightly more than 10,000 Jews lived in the Free City of Danzig. The overwhelming majority of Jews in Austria, some 178,000, lived in the capital city, Vienna. The largest Jewish community in Czechoslovakia was in Prague, the capital city, with 35,000 people.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum

According to the census of June 16, 1933, the Jewish population of Germany, including the Saar region (which at that time was still under the administration of the League of Nations), was approximately 505,000 people out of a total population of 67 million, or somewhat less than 0.75 percent. That number represented a reduction from the estimated 523,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933; the decrease was due in part to emigration following the Nazi takeover in January. (An estimated 37,000 Jews emigrated from Germany during 1933.)

Training for emigration

Members of a German Zionist youth group learn farming techniques in preparation for their new lives in Palestine. Many Jewish youths in Nazi Germany participated in similar programs, hoping to escape persecution by leaving the country.

Chronos Film

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Some 80 percent (about 400,000) of the Jews in Germany held German citizenship. The remainder were mostly Jews of Polish citizenship. Many of the Polish Jews had been born in Germany and had permanent resident status.

About 70 percent of the Jews in Germany lived in urban areas, with 50 percent of all Jews living in the 10 largest German cities. The largest Jewish population center was in Berlin (about 160,000 in 1925), representing less than 4 percent of the city's entire population. Other large Jewish population centers included Frankfurt am Main (about 26,000), Breslau (about 20,000), Hamburg (about 17,000), Cologne (about 15,000), Hannover (about 13,000), and Leipzig (about 12,000). Nevertheless, in 1933 one in five German Jews still lived in small towns.

Gerda Haas describes prewar Jewish community life in Ansbach

Gerda was raised in a religious family in the small town of Ansbach, Germany, where her father was the Jewish butcher. She attended German schools until 1936, and then moved to Berlin to attend a Jewish school. She returned to her hometown after Kristallnacht in November 1938. Her family was then ordered to move to Munich, and in July 1939 her father left for England and then the United States. He was unable to arrange for the rest of his family to join him. Gerda moved to Berlin in 1939 to study nursing. She worked in the Jewish hospital there for two years. Her mother was deported to Riga, Latvia, and her sister, also a nurse, was transported to Auschwitz; neither survived the war. In 1943, Gerda was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto where she continued to work as a nurse. She left on a transport to Switzerland in February 1945 and was reunited with her father in the United States in April 1946.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection