Central Office for Jewish Emigration
Encyclopedia
The Central Office for Jewish Emigration was a designation of Nazi
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 institutions in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, Prague and Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...

. Its purpose was to expel Jews from Nazi-controlled areas.

History

The office in Vienna was founded in Autumn of 1938 by Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...

. He began the office as a way of getting around the red tape the Jews of Austria faced when trying to leave the country. Eichmann, wanting to speed up the rate at which Jews left areas of Nazi-controlled land, created an efficient machine to quicken the pace:


I immediately said: this is like an automatic factory, let us say a flour mill connected to some bakery. You put in at the one end a Jew who still has capital and has, let us say, a factory or a shop or an account in a bank, and he passes through the entire building, from counter to counter, from office to office – he comes out at the other end, he has no money, he has no rights, only a passport in which is written: You must leave this country within two weeks; if you fail to do so, you will go to a concentration camp.


Every organization, public or private, which was associated with emigration was required to have a representative at the Office. The Office answered to the Office of the Security Service in Berlin.

The Office paid for the emigration of the Jews by taking money from wealthier Jews and using it to expel their fellows.

Following the Vienna branch, Eichmann opened another branch in Prague. Eventually, Eichmann set up a Central Office so that all arrangements for emigration could be made in one location. On 24 January 1939 the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established with Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich , also known as The Hangman, was a high-ranking German Nazi official.He was SS-Obergruppenführer and General der Polizei, chief of the Reich Main Security Office and Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia...

at the head. It was charged with the task of using all available means to prompt Jews to emigrate: and establishing a Jewish organization that would incorporate all of German Jewry and co-ordinate emigration from the Jewish side.
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