Hermann Beck

This book revises standard assumptions among historians of Nazi Germany that physical violence against Jews slowly accelerated from 1933 onwards, with a first high point in November 1938 (“Kristallnacht”), and then further escalating to deportations and the mass murder of the Holocaust. Based on documentary evidence from about twenty German archives, the present work shows that there were many hundreds, possibly thousands, of violent attacks on Jews in Germany ranging from brutal assaults, abductions, and expulsions to murder. The work examines in detail the reaction of those German institutions and elites that were still in a position to react and protest in the spring of 1933. It makes two essentially new contributions to the literature on the history of the Third Reich: (1) a detailed examination of the antisemitic violence—from boycotts, violent attacks, robbery, extortion, abductions, and humiliating “pillory marches” to grievous bodily harm and murder—which has hitherto not been adequately recognized; (2) an analysis of the reactions of those institutions that still had the capacity to protest against Nazi attacks and legislative measures—the Protestant Church, the Catholic Church, the bureaucracies, and Hitler’s conservative coalition partner, the DNVP—and the mindset of the elites who led them, to determine their various responses to flagrant antisemitic abuses. Individual protests against violent attacks, the April boycott, and Nazi legislative measures were already hazardous in March and April 1933, but established institutions in the German State and society were still able to voice their concerns and raise objections. By doing so, they might have stopped or at least postponed a radicalization that eventually led to the pogrom of 1938 and the Holocaust.