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Changing Times
Hopes that the Nazis would be deterred from further attempts to publicly marginalize the Jews were dashed quickly as on April 7th, the German government enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which essentially purged Jews (and anyone else who could not prove their "Aryan" lineage) from the civil services. The ethnic Jewish community before WWII in Germany numbered around five hundred thousand, but were disproportionately represented in liberal professions such as law, the civil service, teaching, and other professions reserved for middle class intellectuals. Their purging from the civil service (including positions such as being a judge, or a teacher or work for the government) left spaces open for loyal Nazi-aligned officials to take their place, as well as beginning the process of ostracization from the rest of the German public.
A total of roughly nine million Jews lived in the nations that the Nazis would later occupy during the course of the Second World War when Adolf Hitler came to power. Mostly residing in newly independent Poland, Jews often faced discrimination everywhere and Jewish owned shops had been targeted by the government and private individuals in the deeply Catholic nation. Antisemitism is a long running ideology of hate that was present in many countries in the inter-war period, especially in Europe, where Jews faced official, state sanctioned or social discrimination in some way throughout Eastern and Western Europe.
Listen to a fragment of Walter Loebenberg's testimony about antisemitic attacks in Waechtersbach and moving to Frankfurt, Germany:
