My Life in Germany Before and After 1933

My Life in Germany Before and After 1933

Author: Karl Löwith

Publisher: Burns & Oates

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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Written in 1939 while in exile in Japan. Includes philosphical-biographical vignettes of leading German intellectual figures - the George circle, Oswald Spengler, Karl Barth, Carl Schmitt as well as his meeting with Martin Heidegger in Rome in 1936.


They Thought They Were Free

They Thought They Were Free

Author: Milton Mayer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-11-28

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 022652597X

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National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.


My Life in Germany Before and After January 30, 1933

My Life in Germany Before and After January 30, 1933

Author: Harry Liebersohn

Publisher: American Philosophical Society

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9780871699138

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This collection of memoirs by refugees from Nazi Germany is a rich source of autobiographical information on the Nazi era. Housed at Houghton Library of Harvard University, it consists of 263 files containing the memoirs of approximately 230 people who lived in Germany or Austria during the 1930s. The stories of the memoirists encompass an almost bewildering range of human experience. The authors come from Danzig and Berlin, from central Germany and the Southwest, from Munich and from Vienna. They are Jews and Catholics and Protestants, and mixtures of these all-too-neat categories in their origins and marriages. They are peddlers and professors, machinists and lawyers, private housewives and public activists. They are conservatives and liberals and Communists. The strongest common bond was their exile.


Germans No More

Germans No More

Author: Margarete Limberg

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2011-08

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0857453157

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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.


Between Dignity and Despair

Between Dignity and Despair

Author: Marion A. Kaplan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1999-06-10

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0195313585

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Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.


Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

Author: Francis R. Nicosia

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2010-07-01

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1845459792

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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.


Life in the Third Reich

Life in the Third Reich

Author: Paul Roland

Publisher: Arcturus Publishing

Published: 2015-06-17

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1784281131

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For Germans in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the allure of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party's promises for a better, brighter future promised so much. The reality was vastly different... Germany was a deeply divided nation when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. As the shadow of the swastika lengthened, its citizens quickly came to realize that the Nazis' brutal programme was not optional. Everyone was expected to play their part in "national revival", especially those chosen as sacrificial victims. Much has been written about daily life during World War II from the perspective of the Allied nations, but little about life in Germany during the Third Reich. With the benefit of hindsight, questions have been raised as to why a civilized, cultured nation stood by and let the Nazi Party impose their rule in such inhumane fashion, and why so few individuals made any attempt to rebel. Life in the Third Reich draws on the recollections of those who actually experienced the rise and fall of this brutal and vicious regime: from the indoctrination of children to the disappearance of family, friends and neighbours and the effect of Kinder, Küche und Kirche [Children, Kitchen and Church] on the female population, to the defiance of the 'swing kids' and the resulting deprivation of the Nazi policy of 'Guns, not butter'. These are the stories of ordinary Germans caught up in an extraordinary time.


The Third Reich in Power

The Third Reich in Power

Author: Richard J. Evans

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-09-26

Total Pages: 980

ISBN-13: 9780143037903

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The acclaimed and comprehensive account of Germany's transformation under Hitler's total rule and the inexorable march to war, by the author of The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich at War. “[Evans's] three-volume history . . . is shaping up to be a masterpiece. Fluidly narrated, tightly organized and comprehensive.” —The New York Times "Mr. Evans's magisterial study should be on our shelves for a long time to come."—The Economist By the middle of 1933, the democracy of the Weimar Republic had been transformed into the police state of the Third Reich, mobilized around the cult of the leader, Adolf Hitler. In The Third Reich in Power, Richard J. Evans chronicles the incredible story of Germany's radical reshaping under Nazi rule. As those who were deemed unworthy to be counted among the German people were dealt with in increasingly brutal terms, Hitler's drive to prepare Germany for the war that he saw as its destiny reached its fateful hour in September 1939. This is the fullest and most authoritative account yet written of how, in six years, Germany was brought to the edge of that terrible abyss.


An American in Hitler's Berlin

An American in Hitler's Berlin

Author: Abraham Plotkin

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0252075595

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An American labor leader's eyewitness perspective on the rise of Nazi power in Weimar-era Berlin