At the end of the 1920s , most German Jews were loyal to Germany , assimilated and relatively prosperous . They served in the German army and contributed to every field of German science , business and culture . After the Nazis were elected to power in 1933 , the state-sponsored anti-Semitic persecution such as the Nuremberg Laws ( 1935 ) and the Kristallnacht ( 1938 ) drove masses of German Jews to seek asylum abroad , with over 304,500 German Jews choosing to emigrate , 1933-1939 . Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1936 , " The world seemed to be divided into two parts — those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter . " The Evian Conference demonstrated that by the end of the 1930s it was almost impossible to find a destination open for Jewish immigration
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Shanghai Ghetto