Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933-1938 (Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context, vol. 1) (review)

This is the first volume in a planned five-volume history and collection of carefully edited and annotated primary source materials on the topic of Jewish responses to Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945. If the first volume is any indication, the series, when completed, will fill a significant gap in the body of published primary-source materials on the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It will provide scholars, teachers, and their students with a unique and comprehensive collection of documents that offer "a firsthand sense of the breadth and diversity of Jewish responses to persecution" (p. xvi). This first volume also reflects an ever-increasing wealth and availability of individual and institutional witness records of the experience and fate of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.

In volume 1, Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman offer the reader a rich collection of primary-source materials from German Jewish organizations and institutions, as well as from individual German Jews, covering the period from Hitler's assumption of power in January 1933 through the upheavals of 1938 and the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom. Each chapter begins with an overview of the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi state, specifically the regime's evolving and ever-intensifying persecution. That persecution took the form of legislation coupled with controlled and spontaneous actions designed to separate Jews from "Aryans." The measures were intended to dispossess Jews while exposing them to unrelenting intimidation and periodic violence, and to force them to leave Germany with little, if any, of their assets. The authors provide the reader with an effective outline of the various actions that German Jews were forced to take in response. The nature of these responses is embodied in the large number of edited, annotated, and hitherto unused photographs and documents from the period, sources that convey the many complex and wrenching dilemmas that the victims faced. Indeed, the point of this and future volumes is to reconstruct the experiences of the victims, something that only primary-source materials such as these can do adequately.

This volume is organized chronologically into four main sections that reflect clearly-defined stages in the intensifying process of the Nazi destruction of Jewish life in Germany from 1933 to the end of 1938. The three chapters in the first section consider only the year 1933. The letters and diary entries of individuals, along with reports of Jewish organizations and institutions, convey the initial shock most German Jews felt over Hitler's appointment as Reich chancellor. This turn of events was soon followed by a flurry of anti-Jewish legislation and the beginning of the "Aryanization" of the civil service, the professions, the arts, and parts of the German economy, as well as officially-sanctioned economic boycotts, intimidation, and violence. The sources presented in the three chapters in the second section deal with the process of adjustment and adaptation to a radically altered environment for Jews in Germany between the "shock" of 1933 and the fallout from the adoption of the Nuremberg Race Laws in September 1935. Three chapters in the third section present institutional letters and reports, as well as letters from ordinary individuals, that generally reflect the impact of the Nuremberg Laws on Jewish life in Germany. Jews' efforts at adjustment and adaptation seemed to give way to resignation, and ultimately to acceptance of the idea that they would have to emigrate from their native Germany. The varied sources contained in the three chapters of the fourth section consider the violent turning point in Jewish life in Germany in 1938. The annexation of Austria that began the initial phase of Hitler's expansion of German Lebensraum in Europe, and the consequent threat of war, led to a dramatic intensification of the regime's existing anti-Jewish...