A history of the Holocaust from 1933 to 1938 told from the Jewish perspective through period documents, annotations, and black-and-white photographs.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Combining rich documentation selected from the five-volume series on Jewish Responses to Persecution, this text combines a carefully curated selection of primary sources together with basic background information to illuminate key aspects of Jewish life during the Holocaust. Many available for the first time in English translation, these letters, reports, and testimonies, as well as photographs and other visual documents, provide an array of first-hand contemporaneous accounts by victims. With its focus on highlighting the diversity of Jewish experiences, perceptions and actions, the book calls into question prevailing perceptions of Jews as a homogenous, faceless, or passive group and helps complicate students’ understanding of the Holocaust. While no source reader can comprehensively cover this vast subject, this volume addresses key aspects of victim experiences in terms of gender, age, location, chronology, and social and political background. Selected from vast archival collections by a team of expert scholars, this book provides a wealth of material for discussion, reflection, and further study on issues of mass atrocities in their historical and current manifestations. The book’s cover photograph depicts the 1942 wedding of Salomon Schrijver and Flora Mendels in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. Salomon and Flora Schrijver were deported via Westerbork to Sobibor where they were murdered on July 9, 1943. USHMMPA (courtesy of Samuel Schryver).

"This volume contains a concise selection of primary sources on the Holocaust featured and annotated in our larger series titled Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933-1946"--Page 1.

The Nazi Holocaust is often said to dominate the study of modern Jewish history. Engel demonstrates that, to the contrary, historians of the Jews have often insisted that the Holocaust be sequestered from their field, assigning it instead to historians of Europe, Germany, or the Third Reich. He shows that reasons for this counterintuitive situation lie in the evolution of the Jewish historical profession since the 1920s. This one-of-a-kind study takes readers on a tour of twentieth-century scholars of the history of European Jewry, and the social and political contexts in which they worked, in order to understand why many have declined to view their subject from the vantage point of Jews' encounter with the Third Reich. Engel argues vehemently against this separation and describes ways in which a few exceptional scholars have used the Holocaust to illuminate key problems in the Jewish past.

For decades, historians have debated how and to what extent the Holocaust penetrated the German national consciousness between 1933 and 1945. How much did “ordinary” Germans know about the subjugation and mass murder of the Jews, when did they know it, and how did they respond collectively and as individuals? This compact volume brings together six historical investigations into the subject from leading scholars employing newly accessible and previously underexploited evidence. Ranging from the roots of popular anti-Semitism to the complex motivations of Germans who hid Jews, these studies illuminate some of the most difficult questions in Holocaust historiography, supplemented with an array of fascinating primary source materials.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jewish Responses to Persecution: Volume II, 1938–1940 is the second volume of the five-volume set within the series "Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context." This volume brings together in an accessible historical narrative a broad range of documents—including diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper articles, reports, Jewish identity cards, and personal photographs—from Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe and beyond Europe's borders. The volume skillfully illuminates the daily lives of a diverse range of Jews who suffered under Nazism, their coping strategies, and their efforts to assess the implications for the present and future of the persecution they faced during this period. Volume II begins with Kristallnacht in 1938 and continues through the Jewish flight out of Germany, the onset of World War II, the forced relocation of the Jews of Europe to the East, and the formation of Jewish ghettos, particularly in Poland. The twelve chapters, divided into four parts, track the trajectory of German expansion and anti-Jewish policies chronologically, attesting to a clear progression of persecution over time and space. At the same time, they reflect the vast differences in the responses of Jewish communities, groups, and individuals within and beyond the Germans' grasp, differences that resulted both from the unevenness of the Reich's policy toward Jews as well as the varied backgrounds, traditions, expectations, and life histories of Jews affected by German policy. This volume raises essential questions, such as: What was the spectrum of Jewish perceptions and actions under Nazi domination? How did Jews affected directly, or others standing on the outside, view the situation? In what ways were Jews able to influence their own fate under persecution? What role did Jewish tradition play in how the present and future were interpreted? The answers inherent in the documents are often varied or inconclusive; nonetheless these sources add considerably to our understanding of the Holocaust.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jewish Responses to Persecution: 1941–1942 is the third volume in a five-volume set published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that offers a new perspective on Holocaust history. Incorporating historical documents and accessible narrative, this volume sheds light on the personal and public lives of Jews during a period when Hitler’s triumph in Europe seemed assured, and the mass murder of millions had begun in earnest. The primary source material presented here, including letters, diary entries, photographs, transcripts of speeches, newspaper articles, and official memos and reports, makes this volume an essential research tool and curriculum companion.

German Jews and Migration to the United States, 1933–1945 is a collection of first-person accounts, many previously unpublished, that document the flight and exile of German Jews from Nazi Germany to the USA,. The authors of the letters and memoirs included in this collection share two important characteristics: They all had close ties to Munich, the Bavarian capital, and they all emigrated to the USA, though sometimes via detours and/or after stays of varying lengths in other places of refuge. Selected to represent a wide range of exile experiences, these testimonies are carefully edited, extensively annotated, and accompanied by biographical introductions to make them accessible to readers, especially those who are new to the subject. These autobiographical sources reveal the often-traumatic experiences and consequences of forced migration, displacement, resettlement, and new beginnings. In addition, this book demonstrates that migration is not only a process by which groups and individuals relocate from one place to another but also a dynamic of transmigration affected by migrant networks and the complex relationships between national policies and the agency of migrants.

A provocative and insightful analysis that sheds new light on one of the most puzzling and historically unsettling conundrums Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Countless historians have grappled with these questions, but few have come up with answers as original and insightful as those of maverick German historian Götz Aly. Tracing the prehistory of the Holocaust from the 1800s to the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933, Aly shows that German anti-Semitism was—to a previously overlooked extent—driven in large part by material concerns, not racist ideology or religious animosity. As Germany made its way through the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the difficulties of the lethargic, economically backward German majority stood in marked contrast to the social and economic success of the agile Jewish minority. This success aroused envy and fear among the Gentile population, creating fertile ground for murderous Nazi politics. Surprisingly, and controversially, Aly shows that the roots of the Holocaust are deeply intertwined with German efforts to create greater social equality. Redistributing wealth from the well-off to the less fortunate was in many respects a laudable goal, particularly at a time when many lived in poverty. But as the notion of material equality took over the public imagination, the skilled, well-educated Jewish population came to be seen as having more than its fair share. Aly's account of this fatal social dynamic opens up a new vantage point on the greatest crime in history and is sure to prompt heated debate for years to come.