Jews in Leipzig - The University of Texas at Austin

Chapter 2: “What would the Führer, Adolf Hitler, say?”: Jewish life under the
Nazis, 1933-38
All of the assumptions that fueled the Zionist position during the 1920s were
given the strongest possible validation with the entry into government on 30 January,
1933 of Adolf Hitler. Starting with the nasty discrimination of the April 1933 boycott
and the laws regarding the civil service and judiciary, followed by the Nuremberg laws in
1935, a wave of anti- Semitism swept the city. Jews in Leipzig found themselves
increasingly on the outside looking in. Their responses to that exclusion—the creation of
a whole new set of institutions in which Jews could operate, and then the victory of the
Zionist position—reflect both radical change in response to radically altered positions,
and a surprising degree of continuity, even as the divisions over national identity,
religion, and ethnicity continued in a dramatically altered form.
Jews in Leipzig were remarkably adaptive to their new conditions, but it is utterly
clear that a large range of options were taken from them beginning in 1933. The debate
over identity—the central question of Jewish life in Germany—changed in tone from
1933, as we will see. Gone were the free exchanges between Zionists and
assimilationists. Gradually, that debate was exchanged for a consensus in favor of
Zionism. This was no free choice, though. Partly in recognition of the danger of their
situation, and partly under direct pressure from their tormentors, the Jews of Leipzig shut
down the market of ideas from 1933. There was no more room for an argument about
who they were. From that point, the central fact of life was the simple drive for survival,
and many did not survive.
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