Through the analysis of 10 oral witness testimonies of local residents and a previously undocumented letter correspondence between a Jewish Holocaust survivor and her gentile friend, The Jewish Purging of a Small German Town provides new insights into how the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people unfolded in small towns and communities around Germany. Incorporating her own personal reflections on growing up in Salmünster, Maria R. Boes uncovers the truth about the Jewish residents who lived there and what happened to them after the Nazis came to power in 1933 – a story which has been silenced and suppressed. Boes charts the town's unsettling trajectory from a harmonious pre-Nazi local community to an environment where, after initial protracted local resistance, Jewish persecution escalated from the boycotting of stores to physical, fiscal and emotional acts against Jewish residents. The book reveals how this culminated in Jewish residents being purged from the town by 1937 without any paramilitary intervention or outside physical force, prior to the 1938 Kristallnacht and long before similar ousters occurred in big cities throughout the country. It also shows how Salmünster, like other neighbouring towns, continued to deny the rightful historical belonging of its Jewish residents long after the war was over and the Nazis had been defeated. This microhistory is an illuminating study of the momentous spectre of Germany's small towns being at the forefront of successfully fulfilling Nazi aims to remove Jewish residents – driving them out of their homes with the ultimate goal of driving them out of existence.

It was late August 1939. Nature’s glorious colors had begun to gradually alter Europe’s picturesque landscape. For those graced with a window to peer through...the peaceful serenity of autumn was time for many to pause for reflective introspection. But Adolph Hitler was poised to alter that landscape. Tracks of Our Tears, the sequel to From Promise to Peril, continues to follow the fortunes of the glamorous Marta, a world-renowned German violin virtuoso, and her intellectually gifted, lifelong best friend, Anna, whose Jewish family has been destroyed by the Nazi Holocaust. Anna’s prodigious intellect, and her deep connection to Marta’s influential family has won her a false identity and an undercover role for German Intelligence. She, and an increasingly disillusioned group of high-ranking officers, begin scheming for Hitler’s downfall. Akin to moving chess pieces, this secretive collaboration skillfully establishes Hitler’s confidence in them and over time, deceptively uses their influence to alter the course of the war. Despite their vastly different religious ancestry, the closeness between Anna and Marta is unshakable, inspiring their remarkable formidability to overcome the tyranny and violence surrounding them. Meanwhile, a poor but precocious young adolescent named Julia, witnesses the genocide of her family during the German invasion of Poland. Instantly she becomes an orphan of war. Now being alone and innocent, but neither helpless nor defeated, Julia begins her inspirational journey. Relying upon keen insight and unshakable courage, Julia awakens her own inherent determination to not only survive her ordeal, but to impactfully avenge the unspeakable tragedy befalling her family. This richly researched tale enfolds fascinating historical characters and incidents into its fictional storyline while painting a vivid and absolutely devastating portrait of WWII, wreaking havoc on Eastern Europe and its peoples. At the same time, however, it deftly weaves the threads of its narrative into a beautiful tapestry illustrating the endurance of the human spirit.

The relationship between Austrians and Jews in the twentieth-century has been tragic. In the age of Franz Joseph, Jews achieved a degree of security, although their position was already being undermined by antisemitism, ethnic conflicts and nationalism. This book examines the relationship between Austrians and Jews which culminated in the 1938 Anschluss and the Holocaust. It also shows how antisemitism survived the War and how the ground was prepared for the international isolation of Austria during the Waldheim Affair.

The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. As this 25th anniversary edition—featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author—makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.

In The Holocaust: History and Memory, New Edition, Jeremy Black revisits his brilliant and wrenching account of the brutal mass slaughter of Jews during World War II and the subsequent remembrance and misremembering of this genocide. Black challenges the prevailing view that separates the Holocaust from Germany's military objectives with compelling evidence that Germany's war on the Allies was deeply intertwined with Hitler's war on Jews. As Hitler expanded his control over more territories, the extermination of Jews became a significant war aim, particularly in the east. Long before the establishment of extermination camps, the German army and collaborators carried out mass shootings, resulting in the deaths of many and the extermination of entire Jewish communities. Notably, Rommel's attack on Egypt was a crucial step toward the larger goal of annihilating 400,000 Jews living in Palestine. Additionally, Hitler interpreted America's initial focus on war with Germany, rather than Japan, as evidence of influential Jewish interests in American policy, which further justified and escalated his war against Jewry through the Final Solution. In chilling detail, Black also unveils compelling evidence that many ordinary Germans must have been aware of the genocide happening around them. The Holocaust: History and Memory, New Edition is an essential, concise, and highly readable history. Now extensively revised and updated, it continues to offer a powerful testimony to those forever silenced by the Holocaust, ensuring that their horrifying fate will never be forgotten.

A provocative and insightful analysis that sheds new light on one of the most puzzling and historically unsettling conundrums Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Countless historians have grappled with these questions, but few have come up with answers as original and insightful as those of maverick German historian Götz Aly. Tracing the prehistory of the Holocaust from the 1800s to the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933, Aly shows that German anti-Semitism was—to a previously overlooked extent—driven in large part by material concerns, not racist ideology or religious animosity. As Germany made its way through the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the difficulties of the lethargic, economically backward German majority stood in marked contrast to the social and economic success of the agile Jewish minority. This success aroused envy and fear among the Gentile population, creating fertile ground for murderous Nazi politics. Surprisingly, and controversially, Aly shows that the roots of the Holocaust are deeply intertwined with German efforts to create greater social equality. Redistributing wealth from the well-off to the less fortunate was in many respects a laudable goal, particularly at a time when many lived in poverty. But as the notion of material equality took over the public imagination, the skilled, well-educated Jewish population came to be seen as having more than its fair share. Aly's account of this fatal social dynamic opens up a new vantage point on the greatest crime in history and is sure to prompt heated debate for years to come.

From the acclaimed author of The Man Without a Face, the previously untold story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia that reveals the complex, strange, and heart-wrenching truth behind the familiar narrative that begins with pogroms and ends with emigration. In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan.The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews—those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan’s Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created. Where the Jews Aren’t is a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan—and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia. (Part of the Jewish Encounters series)