This material documenting the persecution of Jews in Danzig during the 1930s was donated by two members of the former Danzig Jewish community: Mr Berent, representative of the board of the Jewish community; and Dr Erwin Lichtenstein, representative of the Danzig synagogue community and editor of the independent Danziger Rundschau, who later became a lawyer in Tel Aviv and representative of the circa 1500 strong former Danziger Jewish community in Israel.

The collection is in 4 parts. The first part (509/I) consists of correspondence between Danzig Jewish community representatives and members of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig and reports of meetings between the two organisations. The outstanding feature of this material is the continuous repetition of complaints concerning anti-Semitic outrages such as boycott, display of Streicher’s paper Der Stürmer and the public singing of the stormtroopers’ song “When Jews’ blood spurts from the knife, things go twice as well.” Assurances are invariably given by Dr. Rauschning, then chairman of the Senate, who seems genuinely troubled, but in 1935 goes into exile. He was intermittently supported by his deputy, Arthur Greiser, an ardent Nazi, who in the early days paid lip service to the Jewish community’s concerns, but who showed his true colours, when they protested once more that their complaints went unheeded by taking grave offence at this “gross insult to the government” and informing the Jews that their complaints would henceforth remain unattended.

Parts II and III of this collection follow on the microfilm. Part IV is in hard copy. The material is in chronological order. None of it has been numbered. All of it is in German.