From April 1933 German law progressively excluded Jews from the civil service, the professions, education and the economy; the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 removed their citizenship and criminalised marriage and sexual relations with 'Germans or kindred blood'. Expropriation accelerated after 1937, and in October 1938 about 17,000 Jews of Polish citizenship were expelled from Germany in the Polenaktion, many being stranded in the no man's land at Zbaszyn. The pogrom of 9-10 November 1938 destroyed hundreds of synagogues and thousands of businesses, killed at least 91 people and sent some 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps, after which emigration became flight. Receiving states largely kept their doors narrow: the Evian conference of July 1938 produced no significant new quotas, the United States left its German quota partly unfilled, and in June 1939 the liner St. Louis was turned away from Cuba and the United States. Britain admitted about 10,000 unaccompanied children while restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine under the 1939 White Paper. Roughly two in five of the Jews who fled Germany and Austria found refuge in countries that Germany later occupied.
The German state stripped Jews of citizenship, employment and property, driving emigration that other states then restricted by quota
The census of June 1933 counted 499,682 people of the Jewish faith in Germany, and the usual working figure including those defined as Jews by the Nuremberg Laws but not religiously affiliated is about 525,000. Austria added roughly 185,000 in March 1938 and the Czech lands about 118,000 in 1939. Roughly 300,000-330,000 Jews left Germany before the war and about 117,000 left Austria, so the combined outflow of about 400,000 is drawn from a wider base than the 1933 German figure.
At least 91 Jews were killed outright in the November 1938 pogrom, and several hundred more of the roughly 30,000 men then arrested died in the concentration camps in the following weeks; suicides in Germany and Austria in 1938-39 added several hundred more. Mass killing began only after the war started, so the toll of the prewar persecution itself was in the hundreds rather than the thousands.
The stripping of citizenship under the 1935 laws, the expropriation and destruction of Jewish property and synagogues in November 1938, and the mass arrests that followed are documented in German legal texts, police and insurance records, and the diplomatic reporting summarised by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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