January 30, 2013 marks the eightieth anniversary of the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor. Within a short space of time, the Nazis established a brutal dictatorship and implemented measures that put an end to the civic equality of Jews. By late 1933, the regime had issued over three hundred partially or exclusively anti-Jewish laws, decrees and regulations that affected the lives of almost all Jews in Germany.
The online project “1933: The Beginning of the End of German Jewry” will present a variety of primary source materials that bear witness to the disenfranchisement and exclusion of German Jews, as well as to aspects of their everyday life. All the documents and photographs displayed stem from the archives of the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Leo Baeck Institute, which maintains a branch of its archives at the museum. The project will run until the end of 2013 and will publish several items a month, 80 years to the day that they were produced. Ranging from certificates, identity cards, letters and postcards to applications, minute books, diary entries, notes and photographs, these materials provide insight into the direct and indirect effects of the anti-Jewish measures and the reactions they provoked. The project will enable viewers to follow events of the year 1933 for an extended period of time and to gain an understanding of the dimensions and significance they had for German Jewry.
The archives of both the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Leo Baeck Institute preserve thousands of documents from the seventeenth century to the present day relating to the life and fate of Jews in Germany. The project “1933: The Beginning of the End of German Jewry” offers viewers the opportunity to discover a small selection of these holdings and to learn about the people and fates to which they bear witness.
Almost all of the sources presented here have been given as gifts to the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Leo Baeck Institute. We would be pleased to receive any additional documents or photographs that show the life and fate of German Jews in 1933 or in the years before and after.
Contact:
Aubrey Pomerance
Head of Archives
a.pomerance@jmberlin.de
The project is part of the Berlin theme year »Destroyed Diversity: 1933–1938–1945.
Upcoming Events
Bambi and the Theory of Relativity.
Cabinet exhibition opens on 7 May 2013, 11 a.m.
On 10 May 1933, books by over 350 authors were burned on National Socialist bonfires. To mark the eightieth anniversary of this event, the Jewish Museum is presenting the collection of books banned by the Nazis that George Warburg spent 25 years tracking down before donating them to the museum. >> More information about the exhibition
Refusal, Opposition and Protest. Lesser known reactions of German Jews to Nazi persecution.
Lecture, 8 August 2013, 7 p.m.
In his lecture Wolf Gruner describes how Jews resisted Nazi repression, for example, by refusing to obey official decrees and, in some cases, even mounting public protests. Gruner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Jewish women ceramicists from Germany after 1933.
Cabinet exhibition opens on 10 October 2013
With the rise of National Socialism, Jewish artists found themselves among those whose possibilities of employment and capacity to earn their living as freelancers were particularly threatened. The exhibition presents the work of three ceramic artists: Hedwig Grossmann from Berlin, Hanna Charag-Zuntz from Hamburg and Eva Samuel from Essen. >> More information about the exhibition