Even before graduating in 1938, Erwin Zimet worked as a rabbi at various Berlin synagogues and other facilities connected with the Jewish community. As a Polish citizen, he was unexpectedly deported from the country with his father in late October 1938 as part of the so-called Polish Operation (Polenaktion). Both men were taken by force to the border area between Poland and Germany and, together with most of the over 15,000 deportees, were interned in the Zbaszyn (German: Bentschen) refugee camp. There Erwin Zimet served as a rabbi until he was finally able to emigrate to England in March 1939. Shortly afterward he continued on to the United States.

After working for ten years in New York City, Erwin Zimet was offered a position as rabbi at the Temple Beth El in Poughkeepsie in 1948. There he served for forty years before going into retirement. The city’s Hebrew Day School still bears his name today.

Michaela Roßberg

Arthur Rosenthal (1885–1951) and Ilma Flanter (1891–1975) were married in Berlin in January 1914. Judith, their daughter, was born one year later. Arthur, a rabbi candidate with a Ph.D., was ordained in August 1915. He first served in Rybnik, the Gesundbrunnen neighborhood of Berlin and Beuthen before he was appointed rabbi in 1925 at the Israelite Association of Lichtenberg (Berlin). During the November Pogrom of 1938, members of the SA dragged him from his home and forced him to watch as they destroyed the Torah scrolls and the furnishings from his synagogue in Frankfurter Allee.

It was not until July 1939 that the Rosenthals fled to London, taking their son and daughter with them. In Great Britain Arthur Rosenthal was subject to work restrictions and, among others jobs, gave correspondence courses for children evacuated from London. He died at the age of sixty-six in November 1951, ten months after the family moved from London to New York. “My father was unable to accept the demise of German Jewry,” his daughter Judith Helfer wrote several years later. His beloved wife, Ilma, survived him by twenty-four years.

Aubrey Pomerance

Born in Frankenthal in 1882, Ludwig Marum was a lawyer who joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1904. In 1911 he was elected to the Karlsruhe city council. Three years later he became member of the Baden regional parliament and in November 1918 was appointed Justice Minister in “preliminary government” of the new Republic of Baden. From 1919 until 1928 he was leader of the SPD faction in the Baden parliament, before being elected to the Reichstag.

On 10 May 1933 Ludwig Marum, an implacable opponent of the National Socialists, was arrested in Karlsruhe in spite of his immunity as a member of parliament and locked in the police jail in Riefstahlstrasse. Two months later the National Socialists organized his very public transfer to the Kislau concentration camp. The Social Democrats who joined him on the truck were all eventually released. However, Ludwig Marum never returned from the camp. He was murdered in Kislau on 29 March 1934. His funeral in Karlsruhe five days later was attended by more than 3,000 people.

Aubrey Pomerance

Julius Sternberg (1879–1971) was a member of the third generation of the family to run the M.K. Sternberg department store in the historic center of Berlin’s Spandau district. After the death of his father, he took over the clothing and fabric shop at Breite Strasse 21, not only modernizing but expanding it. He was also active in the Jewish community in Spandau, serving as its chairman from 1922 to 1934.

The nationwide boycott in April, which targeted Jews, took place a few weeks before this photo was taken. The sidewalk in front of the Sternberg department store was defaced and the customers were verbally abused and photographed. Members of the SA distributed leaflets in the historic center of Spandau calling for a boycott of Jewish shops. For Sternberg, this was just the beginning of persecution by the Nazis.

In 1938 Julius Sternberg was forced to sell the building housing the department store and most of Sternberg family emigrated to Colombia. His sisters Paula and Fanny, who also posed for this photograph (third and sixth from left), were deported and murdered.

In the mid-1950s Julius Sternberg returned from Bogotá to his “beloved Berlin” but was too old to run the business again. Today, a plaque on the building recalls the Sternberg department store and its last owner.

Monika Flores Martínez

At the time Walter Weissenberg was nearing the end of his law studies. He had begun studying in Freiburg in 1929 and then transferred to Berlin. There he had witnessed the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933. As his wife, Judith, explained seventy years later, it proved a key experience in his life, prompting him to announce to his parents: “I have to get out of here.” Walter eventually withdrew from his final examinations in law and in June 1933 emigrated to England.

Michaela Roßberg

In order to keep the subscriber’s business, the publishing house’s head office offered him a temporary subscription at no cost so that he could make comparisons with other publications within the greatly changed German press landscape. What is interesting is the writer’s perception that the newspaper continued to be highly respected abroad and could, through what he suggests is its critical news coverage, help keep Germany from becoming “intellectually isolated.”

The Berliner Tageblatt, launched in 1872, was Germany’s leading liberal newspaper for decades. After the Nazis assumed power, the company that published the newspaper and its publishing director Hans Lachmann-Mosse—son of company’s founder Rudolf Mosse—soon came under considerable political pressure. In the space of three months, many of its leading Jewish staff members were forced to leave Germany. In mid-February the theater critic Alfred Kerr fled to Prague and two weeks later editor-in-chief Theodor Wolff sought refuge in Switzerland. Ernst Feder, head of the domestic politics desk, went into exile in Paris, as did Hans Lachmann-Mosse. Additional employees left the country in the ensuing months and those who remained in Germany were dismissed.

As a result, the publishing house was under new management by the time this letter was written on 12 May. Reading between the lines, one senses the tightrope act that management is engaged in between maintaining journalistic independence and coping with the tangible political pressure. The decision to transfer all the publisher’s businesses to a charitable foundation and use profits to “benefit the victims of the war irrespective of denomination” was hardly magnanimous, but made under duress.

However, once the Berliner Tageblatt had been “ideologically aligned” and brought under control, the Nazis granted it a degree of independence. It continued to be published until late January 1939.

Aubrey Pomerance

There were a number of exceptions to this rule: doctors who had taken up their work before the First World War, who had fathers or sons who had fought at the front in the war, or who had fought themselves. Those who had served as medics at the front were also exempt.

The radiologist Sigmar Karplus (1878–1962) met two of these conditions. He had received his medical license in 1902 and—as certified in this document from the Central Search Office for War Casualties and Graves—he had worked for eight months as a senior physician in a military hospital in Thorn. Karplus was evidently required to submit the certificate to the authorities. Because of his exemption, he was able to continue treating publicly insured patients at his practice on Kaiserdamm in Berlin. However, he was no longer allowed to train radiologists.

In late September 1938, the Nazi regime revoked the medical licenses of all Jewish doctors in Germany. Afterward, only a small number of selected physicians were granted permission to work. They were required to call themselves “Krankenbehandler” (“treaters of the sick”) and were only permitted to treat Jewish patients. They included Sigmar Karplus, who was thus allowed to keep his practice open. Tipped off by a former non-Jewish patient, Karplus was also able to avoid arrest during the November pogroms

Aubrey Pomerance

The Cassel family lived in Berlin, where Lili’s father worked as a dermatologist treating patients in the middleclass district of Wilmersdorf. Soon after her birthday, the Nazis’ anti-Jewish laws began affecting her life as well. She was soon forced to leave her school in Wilmersdorf due to legislation passed on 25 April restricting the proportion of Jewish children at public schools. She spent three years at a Catholic institution before she was accepted by the Waldschule Kaliski, a private Jewish reform school.

Lili’s family emigrated to England after the November Pogrom of 1938 and continued on to the United States in 1940. In 1952 Lili married Erich Wronker, whom she had known since her childhood. Erich’s family had owned Hermann Wronker AG and run several department stores in various German cities until the company was Aryanized in 1934.

In the United States Lili Wronker studied art and became a successful book illustrator. She has been affiliated with the Jewish Museum as a donor since 2000 and in 2008 served as a historical witness at a workshop held by the museum’s archive, telling young people about her life.

Michaela Roßberg

At the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, more than 10 percent of all doctors in Germany were of Jewish descent. Directly after taking power, the Nazis made it their goal to oust these doctors from their professions. Professional organizations were “aligned” (gleichgeschaltet) and Jewish officials and members were expelled from them. After the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service went into effect on 7 April 1933, Jewish physicians were dismissed from their positions in the public health sector. Not long afterward they were stripped of the license allowing them to bill their services to the statutory health insurance system. This meant they could only treat private patients.

These regulations affected Heinrich Ziegler as well. The letter presented here from the Osthavelland District Welfare Association informed him that his position as a doctor at the Velten maternity center was being terminated “with immediate effect.” The reason for the dismissal was his “non-Aryan descent.” In addition, the association asked him to return the money he had already received for April due to “non-performance of medical services.” He had evidently been notified the previous month that the association no longer wanted him to continue working there.

Over the following years Heinrich Ziegler was able to continue working as a physician at his own practice due to the fact that he had fought at the front during the First World War. However, when the Nazi regime withdrew the medical licenses of almost all Jewish physicians in 1938, he emigrated with his family to British India. One of his wife’s uncles, who had already emigrated there, helped him to obtain the entry permits.

Heinrich Ziegler continued to work as a doctor and opened his own practice in Karachi. After Pakistan gained independence, he took on Pakistani citizenship. However, in 1960, after twenty years in exile, he returned to Germany and died in Munich in 1971.

Franziska Bogdanov

But what did school hold in store for the inquisitive boy? Did it offer him tolerant teachers and individual support? Or, at the very least, friendly classmates? Nothing is known about Peter’s experiences during those first years at school. He soon switched to the Waldschule Kaliski, a private Jewish reform school that from 1934 on was only allowed to admit Jewish children. In 1933, Jewish doctrine and history were added to the school’s curriculum as a way of strengthening the Jewish identity of children often unsettled by what was happening around them. In the following years, this “haven of security,” as former students described the school years later, intensively prepared its young charges for emigration, which now seemed inevitable. Foreign languages, manual and domestic skills, diplomas that were recognized internationally—all these things were offered to ensure the students would be able to lead independent lives abroad.

Ulrike Neuwirth