Genocide by Attrition 35 However, the Nazi government did not initially have a singular approach for the first several years of its rule. By one count, state, regional, and municipal officials issued more than 400 different decrees and regulations between 1933 and 1939 restricting nearly all aspects of the public and private lives of Jews.21 Some of the decrees and regulations were centralized, but many were not.22 The diversity reflected the infighting and competition among factions within the Nazi party, the military, and different government institutions at the time.23 One German lawyer, who conducted his research within Nazi Germany during this period, attributed these dynamics to what he termed the “Dual State.”24 The Dual State consisted of a “normative state” (Normenstaat) and a “prerogative state” (Maßnahmenstaat).25 The normative state was based on the legislative, judicial, and law-enforcing bodies that the Nazi regime had inherited from its predecessor government, the Weimar Republic that governed Germany between 1919 and 1933.26 By contrast, the prerogative state, established by the Nazis in 1933, exercised “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” against people considered to be enemies of Nazism.27 Due to the initial infighting and competition, the Dual State often functioned at cross-purposes, as the “prerogative state ignored or annulled implicitly exactly those laws and law-enforcing bodies that the normative state sustained.”28 The situation changed significantly by the late 1930s as the Nazi regime increased its ability to centralize its power, both by garnering more widespread support for its racist ideology and by expanding use of “terror through uncertainty.”29 The Nazi regime’s first effort to document the entire country’s population began with a national census in 1933.30 Interestingly, the census did not classify people by race at this time but rather by religion in conjunction with other biographical data. The census revealed that approximately 525,000 Jews lived in Germany, 80 percent of whom enjoyed full citizenship, while the remainder, primarily German-born Polish Jews, held permanent resident status.31 The figure, when compared against the country’s population of 67 million people at the time, meant that Jews then constituted a little less than 0.75 percent of Germany’s total population.32 The 1933 census was later linked with a “marriage and family book,” which included genealogical data for both the paternal and maternal lines, a new system of residential registration for tracking movement, and the subsequent development of special racial databases.33 Together, these identification systems made it progressively easier for the regime to “locate” its future Jewish victims for the purposes of persecution, resettlement, and mass murder.34 21 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Antisemitic Legislation 1933-1939,” website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/ content/en/article/antisemitic-legislation-1933-1939. 22 David Martin Luebke and Sybil Milton, “Locating the Victim: An Overview of Census-Taking, Tabulation Technology, and Persecution in Nazi Germany,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994, p. 30. 23 Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, trans. E.A. Shils, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 24 Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Id. at p. xxiii. 28 Fortify Rights email communication with Thomas Kühne, September 27, 2020. 29 Ibid. 30 Luebke and Milton, “Locating the Victim: An Overview of Census-Taking, Tabulation Technology, and Persecution in Nazi Germany,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 31 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Germany: Jewish Population in 1933,” website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/ content/en/article/germany-jewish-population-in-1933. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Luebke and Milton, “Locating the Victim: An Overview of Census-Taking, Tabulation Technology, and Persecution in Nazi Germany,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, p. 25.