The Supplementary Card
1939 · Sealed Census Envelopes · Work 706 of 1,871
The stairwell landing of a Berlin tenement house on a May evening in 1939, on the wooden window sill of the landing a census taker's brown leather document case lying opened flat, in it a growing stack of sealed plain unmarked envelopes of yellowish wood-pulp paper, a pencil lying on top, worn wooden stair treads, the lower wall coated in dark brown oil paint and bare pale plaster above, weak light from a single stairwell lamp with a milk glass shade, the census taker seen from behind in a grey civilian suit and felt hat at a flat door, taking one more sealed envelope from a hand in a plain knitted cardigan sleeve reaching out of the door gap.
- What it was used for
- The supplementary card was an extra sheet attached to the German census of 17 May 1939. Every household had to fill one in, non-Jewish households included. It asked for names, dates and places of birth, addresses and university degrees, and - unlike 1933, which had asked about religion - for Jewish descent in the sense of the Nuremberg Laws, that is, about Jewish grandparents. False answers carried heavy penalties. Enumerators took the card back in a sealed envelope, and confidentiality and purely statistical evaluation were promised. The official result recorded 318,320 persons of Jewish descent. Cards affirming a Jewish grandparent were passed in August 1942 to the Reichssippenamt, the Reich Genealogical Office.
- What was new
- What was new was the question itself. In 1933 the state had asked what a person believed. In 1939 it asked who the grandparents were. That made an affiliation determinable even where the person concerned had never lived it. The sealed envelope and the promise of purely statistical use belonged to the same process: the material afterwards went to the Reichssippenamt, and most cards probably survived the war in its rooms at Oranienburger Straße 28 in Berlin, a confiscated building of the Jewish community. Writing for the Bundesarchiv, Nicolai M. Zimmermann states that use in preparing the deportations is not demonstrated and is rather unlikely, since the cards reached the registration offices only in 1941 and the Reichssippenamt only from January 1942. Cards survive for about 130,000 households, by Zimmermann's reckoning 87.19 per cent of the persons of Jewish descent recorded. From the late 1940s the East Berlin Jewish community used this material to answer enquiries.
What the sources leave open: Zimmermann's essay for the Bundesarchiv carries no year of publication. He does not give the number of cards issued, only those surviving. The cards for Thuringia, the Rhine Province and further districts are missing. Some were destroyed in air raids, others probably destroyed in 1945 at Roßla in the Harz. For the Reichssippenamt Zimmermann gives August 1942 for the transfer in one place and from January 1942 in another.