Description
Book Synopsis Most books on Nazi Germany focus on the war years. Much less is known about the preceding years although these give important clues with regard to the events after November 1938, which culminated in the Holocaust. This book is based on eyewitness accounts chosen from the many memoirs that Harvard University received in 1940 after it had sent out a call to German-Jewish refugees to describe their experiences before and after 1933. These invaluable documents became part of the Harvard archives where the editors of this volume discovered them fifty years later. These memoirs, written so soon after the emigration when the impressions were still vivid, movingly describe the gradual deterioration of the situation of the Jews, the daily humiliations and insults they had to suffer, and their desperate attempts to leave Germany. An informative introduction puts these accounts into a wider framework.
Trade Review “[A] welcome complement to historians' accounts of Jewish reactions to Nazi persecution before 1939. It richly maps the spatial, emotional and psychological effects of social abandonment, propaganda and the atomization of everyday life that made many Jews come to feel what National Socialist policy had always intended — that they were Germans no more.” • H-German
Table of Contents Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1. Boycott: Don't Buy from Jews!
Chapter 2. The First Victims: Doctors and Lawyers
Chapter 3. Plundering and Ruined Livelihoods
Chapter 4. Friends Become Strangers
Chapter 5. Through the Eyes of Children
Chapter 6. German Culture is Verboten!
Chapter 7. Self-Help - Self-Assertion - Self-Discovery
Chapter 8. The Beginning of the End: The Reich Pogrom Night
Chapter 9. Farewell to Germany
