Abstract
Throughout occupied Europe, Jews thwarted Nazi plans to exterminate them by relying on false documents — and on their own courage and ingenuity — to blend into the local population and pass as non-Jews. Despite the constant tension of being on guard every minute of the day, and despite the ever-present threat of death if they were caught, they managed to defy the Third Reich and to survive the Holocaust.
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Notes
Marion Kaplan estimates that a larger percentage, closer to three fifths of the German Jews, managed to leave eventually, but she too notes that the largest single emigration was in 1939, after Kristallnacht, when 78,000 Jews left. Before then, more than half of the 500,000 German Jews were still in Germany. Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p.132 citing Herbert Strauss ‘Jewish Emigration from Germany, Part 1’, Leo Baeck Yearbook (1980), pp.317–18, 326–27.
The largest number of Jews to leave Germany in one year left after the November pogrom: 78,000 in 1939. In September 1939 there were about 185,00 racially defined Jews left in Germany (out of an initial population of about 500,000 in 1933.) By October 1941, when all Jewish immigration was banned, there were 164,000 Jews left in Germany. Marion Kaplan Between Dignity and Despair, p. 132 citing Herbert Strauss ‘Jewish Emigration from Germany, Part 1’, Leo Beck Yearbook (1980).
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin Underground: 1938–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), p.70.
Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
Nechama Tec When Light Pierced the Darkness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p.36.
See, for example, Monika Richarz (ed.), Jewish Life in German: Memoirs from Three Generations (University of Indiana Press, 1991); Marion Kaplan Between Dignity and Despair;
Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Alan Abrams Special Treatment: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Third Race, (1985), cited in Kaplan, p.76.
Adina Blady Szwajger, Remember Nothing More (New York: Pantheon, 1990), p. 158.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Weitzman, L.J. (2001). Masks for Survival. In: Roth, J.K., Maxwell, E., Levy, M., Whitworth, W. (eds) Remembering for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_38
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