Germany: Jewish Population in 1933

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.

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.

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.