In January 1940 she enrolled at the university to study for a degree in Chemistry. In May or June of that year she was forced to abandon the university course, however, having been identified as a Class 1 "Mischling". The reference was to her racial provenance. The so-called Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had been implemented with increasing fervour on the part of the authorities in Vienna since Austria's incorporation into Germany, and although her father had been baptised as a Protestant in 1909 or 1910, the authorities chose to regard him as Jewish, and applied the race-based discriminatory laws to deprive his daughter of her university place. She was nevertheless able to earn a living through private tutoring in Mathematics. (Elfriede's mother was identified by the authorities as "Aryan", which according to at least one source is what later saved her father from deportation. Both Elfriede and her elder sister, Gerda, were baptised into the majority church – in Austria – as Roman Catholics.)