Lawyers Without Rights: Jewish Lawyers in Germany Under the Third Reich

The Crime of My Very Existence investigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the conception and perpetration of the Holocaust: the association of Jews with criminality. Drawing from a rich body of documentary evidence, including memoirs and little-studied photographs, Michael Berkowitz traces the myths and realities pertinent to the discourse on "Jewish criminality" from the eighteenth century through the Weimar Republic, into the complex Nazi assault on the Jews, and extending into postwar Europe.

Most books on Nazi Germany focus on the war years. Much less is known about the preceding years although these give important clues with regard to the events after November 1938, which culminated in the Holocaust. This book is based on eyewitness accounts chosen from the many memoirs that Harvard University received in 1940 after it had sent out a call to German-Jewish refugees to describe their experiences before and after 1933. These invaluable documents became part of the Harvard archives where the editors of this volume discovered them fifty years later. These memoirs, written so soon after the emigration when the impressions were still vivid, movingly describe the gradual deterioration of the situation of the Jews, the daily humiliations and insults they had to suffer, and their desperate attempts to leave Germany. An informative introduction puts these accounts into a wider framework.

Based on newly discovered secret documents from German archives, diaries, and newspapers of the time, Gun Control in the Third Reich presents the definitive yet hidden history of how the Nazi dictatorship made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate its power. The countless books on the Third Reich and the Holocaust fail even to mention the laws restricting firearms ownership, which rendered political opponents and Jews defenseless. A skeptic could surmise that a better-armed populace might have made no difference, but the National Socialist regime certainly did not think so -- it ruthlessly suppressed firearm ownership by disfavored groups. The book spans the two decades from the birth of the Weimar Republic in 1918 through Kristallnacht in 1938 and then presents a panorama of pertinent events during World War II regarding the effects of the disarming policies. Citizens across the nation are grappling with how the 2nd Amendment should be interpreted -- or even if it should be disposed of -- and this book provides the perspective of the consequence of disarming a population.

German Jews faced harsh dilemmas in their responses to Nazi persecution, partly a result of Nazi cruelty and brutality but also a result of an understanding of their history and rightful place in Germany. This volume addresses the impact of the anti-Jewish policies of Hitler's regime on Jewish family life, Jewish women, and the existence of Jewish organizations and institutions and considers some of the Jewish responses to Nazi anti-Semitism and persecution. This volume offers scholars, students, and interested readers a highly accessible but focused introduction to Jewish life under National Socialism, the often painful dilemmas that it produced, and the varied Jewish responses to those dilemmas.

An examination of the many unknown attempts by some people to negotiate with the Nazis for the release of Jews in exchange for money, goods or political benefits. Characters are described, both Jews and Nazis, and the moral issues raised by their negotiations.

Published as part of “The Holocaust Series” in eighteen volumes, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1982. Each volume is composed of facsimiles of essential records of the Holocaust, in most of its aspects from 1933 to 1945, arranged both topically and chronologically. The set contains over 330 documents in over 5,200 pages. The documents were carefully chosen from the U.S. National Archives by Dr. John Mendelsohn, a supervisory archivist of the U.S. National Archives, who was the author of numerous finding aids and guides to captured German documents and Holocaust records. Dr. Donald S. Detwiler, an internationally recognized authority on the history of World War II and its documentation, is the Advisory Editor. Each volume contains an Introduction by Dr. Mendelsohn or another distinguished authority. The introductions offer historical perspective on the documents as well as general information about the topic. Each volume contains a detailed table of contents listing each document and providing its source.

See description for "Legalizing the Holocaust: The Early Phase, 1933-1939" above.

The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders. From 1933 to 1939, Nazi public culture was saturated with a blend of racial fear and ethnic pride that Koonz calls ethnic fundamentalism. Ordinary Germans were prepared for wartime atrocities by racial concepts widely disseminated in media not perceived as political: academic research, documentary films, mass-market magazines, racial hygiene and art exhibits, slide lectures, textbooks, and humor. By showing how Germans learned to countenance the everyday persecution of fellow citizens labeled as alien, Koonz makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.

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.

Between 1933 and 1945 the Nazi regime in Germany tried to restructure a "class" society along racial lines. This book deals with the ideas and institutions which underpinned this mission, and shows how Nazi policy affected various groups of people, both victims and beneficiaries. The book, first published in 1991, begins with a serious discussion of the origins of Nazi racial ideology, and then demonstrates the thoroughness and purposiveness with which this was translated into official policy. The book deals with the systematic persecution not only of the Jews, the largest group of victims of Nazism, but also with the fate of lesser-known groups such as Sinti and Roma, the mentally handicapped, the "asocial," and homosexuals. Finally, the book examines the racially-motivated social policies of the regime which affected every German "national comrade." The authors argue that the Third Reich was fundamentally different from other totalitarian regimes because of the all-encompassing nature of its racial policies. These were neither exclusively reactionary nor "modern," but were rather an unprecedented form of progress into barbarism.

In a perceptive analysis of diverse source material, the essays of the late Uriel Tal in this volume uncover the dynamics of the secularization of religion, and the sacralization of politics in the Nazi era. Through a process of inversion of meaning, concepts such as race, blood, soil, state, nation and Führer were brought into the realm of faith, mission, salvation, sacredness and myth, thereby acquiring absolute significance. Within this Nazi worldview, the Jew epitomised the arch enemy, both as a symbol and as the concrete embodiment of all that Nazism sought to negate: Western civilisation, monotheism, critical rationalism and humanism.

Early in his political career, Adolf Hitler declared the importance of what he called "an antisemitism of reason." Determined not to rely solely on traditional, cruder forms of prejudice against Jews, he hoped that his exclusionary and violent policies would be legitimized by scientific scholarship. The result was a disturbing, and long-overlooked, aspect of National Socialism: Nazi Jewish Studies. Studying the Jew investigates the careers of a few dozen German scholars who forged an interdisciplinary field, drawing upon studies in anthropology, biology, religion, history, and the social sciences to create a comprehensive portrait of the Jew -- one with devastating consequences. Working within the universities and research institutions of the Third Reich, these men fabricated an elaborate empirical basis for Nazi antisemitic policies. They supported the Nazi campaign against Jews by defining them as racially alien, morally corrupt, and inherently criminal. In a chilling story of academics who perverted their talents and distorted their research in support of persecution and genocide, Studying the Jew explores the intersection of ideology and scholarship, the state and the university, the intellectual and his motivations, to provide a new appreciation of the use and abuse of learning and the horrors perpetrated in the name of reason.

In his classic study, Schleunes meticulously examines the incremental erosion of Jewish Germans' status in Nazi Germany before the deportations began. If we look here for parallels in other national settings, this is where we must begin: in a state that made anti-Semitism appear 'legal' and even 'just' to ordinary Germans. Integrating Nazi persecution and Jewish responses, Schleunes captures the reader in a web of paradox, contradiction, and tragedy. -- Claudia Koonz, author of Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics

This searing book about "Aryanisation," the process by which the Nazis robbed Jews of their economic livelihood, presents a lucid and riveting analysis of a little investigated subject. Compassionate towards the victims of the Third Reich's Aryanisation program and enraged by the perpetrators, Dr. Bajohr has set a new standard for Holocaust scholarship. Integrating several narrative threads -- the Nazi's economic policy, popular reactions, Jewish responses -- this book is about people: people who harmed; who profited; who were robbed and exploited; who watched. Creatively conceived and meticulously documented, [this book] will become a classic work on this subject. -- Deborah Dwork, Clark University

During the past decade, the role of Germany's economic elites under Hitler has once again moved into the limelight of historical research and public debate. This volume brings together a group of internationally renowned scholars who have been at the forefront of recent research. Their articles provide an up-to-date synthesis, which is as comprehensive as it is insightful, of current knowledge in this field. The result is a volume that offers students and interested readers a brief but focused introduction to the role of German businesses and industries in the crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. Not only does this book treat the subject in an accessible manner; it also emerges as particularly relevant in light of current controversies over the nature of business-state relations, corporate social responsibility, and globalization.

A brief, often episodic account of Nazi measures, which proceeded at quite different speeds, and of the Jewish responses. In the beginning of Nazi rule, Jews were encouraged-by various means-to emigrate, but gradually the Nazi state expropriated Jewish property, and ultimately deported those who remained. A rather narrowly conceived study by an Israeli scholar, the book portrays some sense of the deceptively slow deterioration of conditions, as well as the complicity of so many Germans during the years of pauperization and deportation. -- Fritz Stern, Foreign Affairs

Sigmund Stein was a prominent lawyer in the town of Hochburg, a German with deep roots in rural Germany. When fellow Jews urged Stein to leave Germany in the 1930s and after, he refused, arguing that he could best serve his people by acting as a buffer between the Jewish community and the Nazis. From 1933 to 1944 he was methodically stripped of his rights as a citizen and his dignity as a human being. The torment of his Jewish heritage and his proud German upbringing the divided loyalty of a lifetime was finally resolved in Auschwitz. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Justice Imperiled is the story of the brilliant lawyer Max Hirschberg, one of Germany's most courageous defenders of justice in the face of Hitler's rise to power. Hirschberg lived an extraordinary life at a defining moment in German and European history. By the time he fled Nazi Germany in 1934, he had argued a series of cases in Munich's courtrooms that shed light on the history of political justice in pre-Nazi Germany and, by extension, the miscarriage of justice in all Western democracies. Hirschberg was a rare figure: he fought for cases that reflected the new democracy rather than the old monarchy, that valued equality rather than hierarchy, and that showed respect for workers as well as aristocrats. Throughout the Weimar period Hirschberg squared off in court against Munich's conservatives, reactionaries, and Nazis-twice facing Hitler himself. As he litigated politically charged disputes, he also began fighting to reverse the criminal convictions of innocent defendants and to study what mistaken verdicts teach us about the criminal justice system as a whole. In a unique blend of biography and courtroom drama, Justice Imperiled captures the excitement of Hirschberg's actual cases and presents legal battles that still rage, in different circumstances, to this day.

The persecution and mass-murder of the Jews during World War II would not have been possible without the modern organization of division of labor. Moreover, the perpetrators were dependent on human and organizational resources they could not always control by hierarchy and coercion. Instead, the persecution of the Jews was based, to a large extent, on a web of inter-organizational relations encompassing a broad variety of non-hierarchical cooperation as well as rivalry and competition. Based on newly accessible government and corporate archives, this volume combines fresh evidence with an interpretation of the governance of persecution, presented by prominent historians and social scientists.

How could educated professionals have supported the Nazi movement and collaborated with Hitler's inhuman policies? Jarausch examines this fascinating and largely unexplored subject, tracing the social, ideological, and political development of three representative German professions -- law, teaching, and engineering -- from the late Empire to the early Federal Republic. Threatened with the loss of livelihood and frightened by cultural disorientation, many experts embraced neo-conservative ideas and cooperated in Hitler's seizure of power. Welcoming the apparent restoration of their authority in the early Third Reich, professionals collaborated in the racial purges and warping of ethics, practices, and organizations under Nazi rule. During the Second World War, the radicalization of SS terror threatened the very survival of the professions so that most practitioners were only too happy to be rescued by Allied victory. Exploring the reluctant democratization of the post-war professions, Jarausch concludes with a reflection on the lessons of the German experience for the relationship between professionalism and liberty.

A stunning account of the economic workings of the Third Reich -- and the reasons ordinary Germans supported the Nazi state. In this groundbreaking book, historian Götz Aly addresses one of modern history's greatest conundrums: How did Hitler win the allegiance of ordinary Germans? The answer is as shocking as it is persuasive: by engaging in a campaign of theft on an almost unimaginable scale -- and by channeling the proceeds into generous social programs -- Hitler literally "bought" his people's consent. Drawing on secret files and financial records, Aly shows that while Jews and citizens of occupied lands suffered crippling taxation, mass looting, enslavement, and destruction, most Germans enjoyed an improved standard of living. Buoyed by millions of packages soldiers sent from the front, Germans also benefited from the systematic plunder of conquered territory and the transfer of Jewish possessions into their homes and pockets. Any qualms were swept away by waves of government handouts, tax breaks, and preferential legislation. Gripping and important, Hitler's Beneficiaries makes a radically new contribution to our understanding of Nazi aggression, the Holocaust, and the complicity of a people.

In the second half of the 1990s, Stuart Eizenstat was perhaps the most controversial U.S. foreign policy official in Europe. His mission had nothing to do with Russia, the Middle East, Yugoslavia, or any of the other hotspots of the day. Rather, Eizenstat's mission was to provide justice--albeit belated and imperfect justice--for the victims of World War II. Imperfect Justice is Eizenstat's account of how the Holocaust became a political and diplomatic battleground fifty years after the war's end, as the issues of dormant bank accounts, slave labor, confiscated property, looted art, and unpaid insurance policies convulsed Europe and America. He recounts the often heated negotiations with the Swiss, the Germans, the French, the Austrians, and various Jewish organizations, showing how these moral issues, shunted aside for so long, exposed wounds that had never healed and conflicts that had never been properly resolved. Though we will all continue to reckon with the crimes of World War II for a long time to come, Eizenstat's account shows that it is still possible to take positive steps in the service of justice.

It was the largest organized robbery in history -- the detailed, systematic looting of Europe's Jews by the Nazis and most of the nations of Europe: Axis, Allied, and neutral. Now, for the first time, prizewinning journalist Richard Z. Chesnoff details the full scope of this monumental theft of money, gold, jewels, art, and property that began in Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler, continued through the Holocaust and the Third Reich's occupation of Europe, and culminated in a postwar cloaking campaign that stretched from Scandinavia to the Balkans to Iberia. Chesnoff, who was among the first reporters to break the story that Swiss banks were still hoarding the assets of Holocaust victims, traveled to fourteen countries to research this heartbreaking, compelling story of human greed. With direct access to hitherto classified files and through exclusive interviews with bankers, government and Jewish officials, camp survivors, and the families of victims, Chesnoff tells a tragic tale that will make the headlines of tomorrow's newspapers. Revealing new details that many governments and bankers would prefer to remain secret, he describes the detective work used to trace Holocaust assets that continue to be hidden inside the systems of Allied nations such as France and the Netherlands. With the deftness that comes with a journalist's deep understanding of events, Chesnoff explains why it has taken more than fifty years for the world to even begin to come to terms with the massive pillage and plunder.

The campaign for the restitution of Jewish property stolen during the Holocaust has touched a raw nerve within European society, bringing many nations to confront their wartime past. Together with the end of the Cold War and generational change, the campaign has created a need to reevaluate conventional historical truths. Following an unprecedented media campaign, pressure from Jewish organizations, and public opinion, more than 40 European commissions were established to investigate their fellow countrymen's behavior during the war and to ascertain how stolen property was dealt with in its aftermath. The Plunder of Jewish Property During the Holocaust brings together a range of distinguished international experts to examine the major cases concerning restitution in several countries, covering specific issues such as Nazi gold, wartime theft of works of art, and the ownership of dormant accounts in Swiss banks. The contributors incorporate insights from diverse disciplines such as international law, economics, history, and political science which, taken as a whole, make clear that some chapters of European history will have to be rewritten.

The robbery and restitution of Jewish property are two inextricably linked social processes. It is not possible to understand the lawsuits and international agreements on the restoration of Jewish property of the late 1990s without examining what was robbed and by whom. In this volume distinguished historians first outline the mechanisms and scope of the European-wide program of plunder and then assess the effectiveness and historical implications of post-war restitution efforts. Everywhere the solution of legal and material problems was intertwined with changing national myths about the war and conflicting interpretations of justice. Even those countries that pursued extensive restitution programs using rigorous legal means were unable to compensate or fully comprehend the scale of Jewish loss. Especially in Eastern Europe, it was not until the collapse of communism that the concept of restoring some Jewish property rights even became a viable option. Integrating the abundance of new research on the material effects of the Holocaust and its aftermath, this comparative perspective examines the developments in Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Robbing the Jews reveals the mechanisms by which the Nazis and their allies confiscated Jewish property; the book demonstrates the close relationship between robbery and the Holocaust. The spoliation evolved in intensifying steps. The Anschluss and Kristallnacht in 1938 reveal a dynamic tension between pressure from below and state-directed measures. In Western Europe, the economic persecution of the Jews took the form of legal decrees and administrative measures. In Eastern Europe, authoritarian governments adopted the Nazi program that excluded Jews from the economy and seized their property, based on indigenous antisemitism and plans for ethnically homogenous nation-states. In the occupied East, property was collected at the killing sites -- the most valuable objects were sent to Berlin, whereas items of lesser value supported the local administration and rewarded collaborators. At several key junctures, robbery acted as a catalyst for genocide, accelerating the progression from pogrom to mass murder.

Stolen Legacy is a non-fiction historical narrative centered on a Jewish family's legal battle to reclaim ownership of a building stolen from them by the Nazis in the 1930s. The building at Krausenstrasse 17/18 in Berlin was seized by a German businessman with direct ties to the very top of the Nazi Party hierarchy and German Railways the state-owned organization that transported millions of Jews across Europe to the death camps. He was the head of the Victoria Insurance Company, then and now one of Germany's top insurance companies which, according to the book, played a role in insuring the Auschwitz death camp during World War Two. The book, written by the daughter of one of the original owners of the building, details the history of the Wolff family's ownership of the building, its confiscation by the Nazis, and the family's legal fight to reclaim it. There has been no previous written account of a successful claim of a property seized by the Nazis in Germany. The U.S. Special Adviser on Holocaust Issues, Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, has written the book's foreword.

Stolen Words is an epic story about the largest collection of Jewish books in the world -- tens of millions of books that the Nazis looted from European Jewish families and institutions. Nazi soldiers and civilians emptied Jewish communal libraries, confiscated volumes from government collections, and stole from Jewish individuals, schools, and synagogues. Early in their regime the Nazis burned some books in spectacular bonfires, but most they saved, stashing the literary loot in castles, abandoned mine shafts, and warehouses throughout Europe. It was the largest and most extensive book-looting campaign in history. After the war, Allied forces discovered these troves of stolen books but quickly found themselves facing a barrage of questions. How could the books be identified? Where should they go? Who had the authority to make such decisions? Eventually the military turned the books over to an organization of leading Jewish scholars called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. -- whose chairman was the acclaimed historian Salo Baron and whose on-the-ground director was the philosopher Hannah Arendt -- with the charge of establishing restitution protocols. Stolen Words is the story of how a free civilization decides what to do with the material remains of a world torn asunder, and how those remains connect survivors with their past. It is the story of Jews struggling to understand the new realities of their post-Holocaust world and of Western society's gradual realization of the magnitude of devastation wrought by World War II. Most of all, it is the story of people -- of Nazi leaders, ideologues, and Judaica experts; of Allied soldiers, scholars, and scoundrels; and of Jewish communities, librarians, and readers around the world.