The Leo Baeck Institute London is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2022 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book Essay Prize in German-Jewish Studies is Stefan Boberg for his article Implementing the Reichsbürgergesetz: Registration, Statistics, and the Deportations of German Jews, published in the 2022 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.
His article reconsiders the process by which Jews were excluded from the National Socialist state in the 1940s by analysing its administrative preconditions. It focuses on the identification of those individuals in the ‘Altreich’—pre-war German territory—who were defined as Jewish or of ‘mixed blood’ by the 1935 Reichsbürgergesetz (Reich Citizenship Law). Due to the prior absence of criteria, the number and identities of this group were unknown to the authorities. After summarizing historiographical discussions about the involvement of statisticians in the identification and registration of German Jews, this article argues that the hitherto neglected Volkskartei (People’s Card Index) was as important for the localization of Germany’s Jews prior to the deportations as the 1939 census was for their identification. Only the coordinated interaction of both devices made it possible to aggregate and provide the required information to facilitate National Socialist deportations.
Stefan Boberg earned his PhD at the University of Sussex’s Centre for German-Jewish Studies. His focus is on German history, in particular the datafication of identity and race.
