Career and Employment

Abstract The two major economic crises of the Weimar Republic — the inflation at the beginning and the Depression at the end — accelerated the stagnation and economic decline that had already begun before World War I. As early as 1933, a social worker predicted that German Jews would experience such grave restrictions in their “economic sphere” that their standard of living would be reduced to the point of ending their “middle-class existence”. This chapter shows how this prediction came true, with the onslaught of discrimination, boycotts, and ultimately “Aryanization” — a euphemism for the Nazi expropriation of Jews.