Germany
Deportation of German Jews to Lodz
The anti-Jewish policy of the first six years of the Nazi regime resulted in the German Jews’ being segregated, isolated from society and impoverished. After the beginning of the war in 1939,  a series of new decrees were enacted against the Jews in Germany. They were placed under night curfew, they received only restricted ration cards, no allotments of clothes, they had to moved to marked Jewish houses, they were forbidden to use public transportation and telephones, and as of September 1941 they had to wear the yellow star. One months later, in October 1941, immigration of Jews from Germany was prohibited and the deportations to the east began, first to, the ghettos of Eastern Europe, and eventually to Theresienstadt and the extermination camps. Approximately 140,000 German Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

By 1943 the German public was well aware of the murder of the Jews. Strangely enough no law was enacted in Germany against helping Jews, there was only a decree of 1941 that forbade displaying friendly relations with Jews. Nevertheless, rescuers in Germany were faced with the threat of being sent to concentration camp on this or other counts. But mostly rescuers had to thwart the general moral collapse that enveloped German society, and lived under the constant danger of denunciations by neighbors – a widespread phenomenon in Nazi Germany.