Anti-Semitism in the Third Reich - Herman Graml

This book is a history of the course of antisemitism in the Third Reich of Germany. It is also an investigation of the origins of antisemitism in German thought and society from the late 18th century to its maturity in the pathological hatred embodied in Nazi ideology and policy.

The book opens with a graphic account of the Reichskristallnacht. On 9 November 1938 in a series of carefully worded orders the National Socialist party instructed the Sturmabteilung (the SA) to destroy Jewish businesses and to burn synagogues. The police and fire brigades were instructed not to intervene. The press were invited to attend. Throughout that night all over Germany Jewish property was burnt and the Jews baited, bullied and beaten, some drowned in rivers and canals, others incarcerated for transport to concentration camps.

The Reichskristallnacht, Dr. Graml argues, marked the turning point between persecution and the Holocaust. Using evidence drawn from a wide range of confidential documents, diaries and secret reports he examines the long series of events that led up to it and the inexorable progress thereafter to the Holocaust. He also faces the vexed question as to how far the systematic attempt to exterminate the Jewish peoples of Europe was an expression of Nazi policy and how far the ill of the people.

This powerful book will be of compelling interest to all students of the history of the twentieth century. It is fully referenced and indexed, and appended with a selection of contemporary documents, a guide to primary and secondary sources, and a chronology.

Herman Graml has been a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich since 1953. He has published extensively on the Third Reich and the course of the Second World War, focusing particularly on German resistance to Hitler and the Nazis both before and during the war.