Official Statistics and the Holocaust: Friedrich Burgdörfer,the Reich Statistics Office,and the ‘Jewish Census’ of 1939

Abstract

Censuses that question individual population groups on ethnic or religious characteristics often precede ethnic cleansing. Is the 1939 census in Germany an exception? The focus of this article is how Friedrich Burgdörfer, as demographer and head of the Reich Statistical Office, made German Jews countable. The main purpose of the German census of Jews was to count them individually, divided according to their degree of Jewish kinship. In addition, from 1939 onwards, the demographers of the Reich Statistical Office provided decision-makers with the statistical data to statistically verify the self-censuses of the Jewish communities, to record the number of the group to be deported in advance in the case of deportations and to provide verifiable information in the event of changes such as people moving away. In this way, science and politics made resources available to each other in order to make the persecution and killing of German Jews plannable and thus feasible.