Antisemitism in the Third Reich (review)

Book Reviews 131 years, we still need a theoretical and comparative study that will bridge the forty-ninth parallel. Geoffrey S. Smith Department of History Queen's University Antisemitism in the Third Reich, by Hermann Graml, translated by Tim Kirk. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. 248 pp. n.p.!. The author, a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, has published extensively on the Third Reich. This work, originally published in 1988 in Germany as Reichskristallnacht, has been translated into English by Dr. Tim Kirk, Lecturer in History at Newcastle Polytechnic in the United Kingdom: The English title conveys a better description of the contents than does the German title. The work has three themes: the story of Kristallnacht , the history of antisemitism in Germany, and a description of the Holocaust. "Reichskristallnacht" or "Kristallnacht," usually translated as "the Night of Broken Glass," refers to the events of November 9 and 10, 1938. On those two days, approximately 20,000 Jews were arrested and placed in concentration camps, hundreds were killed, someJewish women raped, several hundred synagogues burned or destroyed, and 7,500 shops looted. The term "Night of Broken Glass" stems from the breakage of store windows , resulting in pieces of glass littering the streets. In a symbolic sense, it also shattered the dreams of the Jewish community that the Nazis would leave German and Austrian Jews alone if Jews continued to accept their separate and unequal status in the Third Reich. The author maintains that this marks a major turning point in the Nazi treatment of Jews and revealed the true attitudes and intentions of the Nazis. Once the barrier of respectability had been shattered and shown to be an illusion, Dr. Graml maintains, the government embarked on a series of policies that laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. Having set this framework, he then presents a history of antisemitism. Spending little time discussing the antisemitism of the Roman Catholic Church or Lutheranism or economic antisemitism, Dr. Graml focuses instead on modern antisemitism, which emerged from the flawed German nationalism of the 1800s and 1900s. Cultural national self-determination meant the right to include all of those of a similar race, people, language. 132 SHOFAR Fall 1993 Vol. 12, No. 1 Political nationalism tried to create a single national government for that group. The effort to define the group was and still is open to different interpretations (witness the current ethnic cleansing in the former republic ofYugoslavia). Racial antisemitism narrowly defined the group and rejected the concept ofassimilation either by religious conversion or naturalization. When Hitler came to power in 1933 as Chancellor, he made racial antisemitism the cornerstone of his governmental policy. Jewish officials were fired from their governmental offices and Jewish stores were boycotted . This policy created a cleavage in German society which persists for many to this day. Two entirely different experiences occurred within the same nation from 1933 to 1938. If you were an Aryan and not a Jew or from other suspect groups, then you witnessed Hitler end the Depression and create a job for you. He also restored German honor, rebuilt the German armed forces, and made Germany a great power again. If you were a Jew, communist, socialist, homosexual, Gypsy, or Jehovah's Witness, you were persecuted, harassed, and possibly killed as a result of Hitler's policies. The cleavage is vividly demonstrated by Dr. Graml in Appendix 1, Document 1, which quotes from the diary of a German Jewish doctor, Hertha Nathorff. The diary entries reveal how she is slowly but surely isolated from the non-Jewish community and made to feel unwanted in Germany. This isolation and alienation took a new twist in 1938. Kristallnacht became the start of a new policy, which led to the Holocaust of 6 million Jews. In slow and careful detail, Dr. Graml describes the road to Auschwitz and the Final Solution. This work is well researched and well argued. It is recommended for the general public and historians interested in German antisemitism, Kristallnacht, and the Holocaust. The appendices are quite useful. Appendix 1 is a series of documents from contemporaries. Appendix 2 is a thoughtful and careful review of the...