Book Description

This source edition on the persecution and murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany presents in a total of 16 volumes a thematically comprehensive selection of documents on the Holocaust. The work illustrates the contemporary contexts, the dynamics, and the intermediate stages of the political and social processes that led to this unprecedented mass crime. It can be used as an academic aid or be read as a written monument to the murdered Jews of Europe: by teachers, researchers, students, and all other interested parties. The edition comprises authentic testimony by persecutors, victims, and onlookers. These testimonies are furnished with academic annotations and the vast majority of them are published here for the first time in English. Volume 2 documents the persecution of the Jews in the German Reich between January 1938 and the end of August 1939. In the months between the Anschluss of Austria and the beginning of the Second World War, the Nazi leadership imposed a state of siege on the Jews in the form of ‘Aryanization’, organized expulsion, and the pogroms of November 1938.