The Nazis began their pursuit of the Jews and looking for a solution to their problem
with the Jews, what they called "The Jewish Question", from the moment they came to power
in 1933. They looked for ways to separate the Jews
from German society, and the economy and politics, civil society, and culture and in everything.
They boycotted the Jews, passed laws against the Jews, disenfranchised the Jews, kicked
the Jews out of citizenship, and tried to force the Jews to emigrate from the Third
Reich, as a way of relieving Germany of this threat that the Nazis imagined.
The climax of all that, of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, came in November 1938, with the
violent, nationally organized "Kristallnacht Pogrom", in which thousands of Jewish stores
were destroyed, homes were destroyed, more than 1,500 synagogues were burned to the ground,
more than 100 Jews were murdered, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration
camps and to prisons. And this pressure on the Jews to leave, to be separated from society,
continued and pushed the Jews - indeed, many were leaving as time went on, looking for
places to go. In the course of the pre-war years, 1933 to September 1939, approximately
half of the German Jews actually left Germany, some 250,000. Unfortunately for many of them,
they ended up going to neighboring countries and being caught. Those who managed to get
further away, of course, ended up saving their lives, although they didn't exactly know that
that was the issue when they left.