Jews in Berlin, 1933 to 1945

Immediately after the National Socialists took power on January 30, 1933, the exclusion of Jews and the deprivation of their rights began. At that point, some 160,000 Jewish people lived in Berlin, making up around four percent of the city’s population.

The National Socialists carried out their first major anti-Jewish campaign as early as April 1, 1933—a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. The “Nuremberg Laws” passed in September 1935 defined who was considered “Jewish” according to National Socialist definitions, and reduced Jews to second-class citizens. During the state- organized pogrom on November 9, 1938, 12,000 Jewish men from Berlin were put into concentration camps, and some of them murdered. Synagogues were set alight and stores owned by Jews were destroyed and looted.

Between 1933 and the beginning of the war in 1939, more than 80,000 Berlin Jews managed to leave Germany. From October 1941 to the end of the war in 1945, around 50,000 Jews were deported from Berlin, most of whom were murdered.

After the liberation in May 1945, just over 8,000 Jews were still alive in Berlin. Most of them had been spared deportation through marriage to a non-Jewish partner. Some 1,900 Jewish men and women had survived the camps. Of the approximately 7,000 Jews who went into hiding, only a little over 1,800 survived underground. The others were betrayed or arrested, turned themselves in to the police, or fell victim to illness and air raids.