Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 - Paperback

by Saul Friedlander (Author)

"Friedlander draws strength from memory, yet adheres scrupulously to the discipline of a historian's detachment. He writes history with a novelist's sense of the telling detail; he is both analytic and evocative.... "Nazi Germany and the Jews"... provides a readable, reliable, commendably unconventional overview".
-- "New York Times Book Review"

"Judicious, analytic and compassionate.... This is a brilliant book, combining scholarly rigor with a compassionate treatment of the human dimension of historic decisions".
-- "Boston Globe"

"Rare sensibility graces the first volume of Friedlander's history.... [He] has wrestled the ever-more-vast literature on the Holocaust into a forceful, coherent account.... Friedlander brings to the subject the dignity, complexity and restraint it requires. He never shrinks from the truth that there is something unknowable at the core of the Nazi genocide".
-- "Weekly Standard" "FriedlSnder raises a series of crucial questions...which will have a deep impact on the current debate concerning the history of the extermination of the Jews....A major historiographical achievement".--Carlo Ginzberg, UCLA

"Easily the best book of a distinguished historian. Likely to be the definitive work".--Walter Laqueur, "Los Angeles Times"

"FriedlSnder writes history with a novelist's sense of the telling detail; he is both analytic and evocative".--Fritz Stern, "New York Times Book Review"

Back Jacket

A great historian crowns a lifetime of thought and research by answering a question that has haunted us for more than 50 years: How did one of the most industrially and culturally advanced nations in the world embark on and continue along the path leading to one of the most enormous criminal enterprises in history, the extermination of Europe's Jews?

Giving considerable emphasis to a wealth of new archival findings, Saul Friedlander restores the voices of Jews who, after the 1933 Nazi accession to power, were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality. We hear from the persecutors themselves: the leaders of the Nazi party, the members of the Protestant and Catholic hierarchies, the university elites, and the heads of the business community. Most telling of all, perhaps, are the testimonies of ordinary German citizens, who in the main acquiesced to increasing waves of dismissals, segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, expulsion, and violence.