As the regime’s public persecution of Jews and other so-called undesirables increased in intensity and brazenness in the late 1930s, its economic persecution of these groups progressed as well, albeit through subtler means. As historians have noted, Jews suffered “social death” long before they faced physical deportation and murder. Understanding this social death means examining the ways in which Germans encountered—and adopted—less overt forms of antisemitism in their everyday lives. This culture of antisemitism led to many small changes that, by themselves, would hardly have seemed surprising within the greater context of National Socialist Germany. Nonetheless, these small changes show how Jews were increasingly isolated from the rest of German society.
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Below is a page from a German commercial address book (the equivalent of North America’s “yellow pages”), in this case listing physicians in Prussia. Several of the doctors (at least half) have been singled out with a colon in front of their names, which indicated that they were Jewish. Over course of the 1930s, Jews had already been slowly expelled from the professions through more direct measures, from prohibitions against employment in the civil service to restrictions on medical school admissions, among other regulations. This list of doctors from 1937 conveyed a quiet, yet strong message: that Germans had a choice when it came to physicians, and that in choosing, they ought to support the values and ideals of the Nazi movement. Thus, the list attests not only to the insidious nature of National Socialist ideology, but also to the less easily definable cultural racism in which Germans engaged on a daily basis.