I wonder how the germans knew that someone was jewish?
Short answer: they created a blood purity certificate, and in order to get it you had to do genealogy research. For most people, this meant, marriage, birth, death, and baptismal certificates from your local catholic or confessing Lutheran church.
They also did a census in Austria and Germany post Anschluss, and failure to do your census would get you deported to a concentration camp. There’s an interesting mapping memorial project using the data from that census https://www.mappingthelives.org/
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Unfortunately the National Socialists used the population registry in the Netherlands to select the Jews. The Dutch resistance burned the archive on March 27, 1943.
See traces of war which has tons oh info.
https://www.tracesofwar.com/articles/5329/Raid-on-the-Population-Registry-of-Amsterdam.htm
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For the countries outside Germany, the good organization of the Jewish communities (keeping lists of the community members, etc) became useful for the nazis
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One last note: Poland, for historical reasons, kept lots of jewish documents because of the way Kehillot (local jewish communities) were centrally run as a separate tax collection entity. These were democratic, which means registering to vote.
Entertainingly, you see the similar divisions then as today in the 1936 Kehilla elections in Poland, except with more explicitly socialist point of views. Ok, maybe just entertaining for me.
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