The Jewish Purging of a Small German Town

The Jewish Purging of a Small German Town

Author: Maria R. Boes

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-11-14

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1350450200

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors

Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors

Author: Rosemary Wenzerul

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2008-10-30

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1844689794

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Rosemary Wenzerul's lively and informative guide to researching Jewish history will be absorbing reading for anyone who wants to find out about the life of a Jewish ancestor. In a clear and accessible way she takes readers through the entire process of research. She provides a brief social history of the Jewish presence in Britain, with descriptions of the principal communities all over the country. She gives a concise account of the history of genealogy and looks at practical issues of research – how to get started, how to organize the work, how to construct a family tree and how to use the information obtained to enlarge upon the social history of the family. She describes, in practical detail, the many sources that researchers can go to for information on their ancestors, their families and Jewish history. Vivid case studies are a feature of her book, for they show how the life stories of individuals can be reconstructed with only a small amount of initial information. Her invaluable handbook will be essential reading and reference for anyone who is trying to gain an insight into the life of an ancestor or is researching any aspect of Jewish history.


Jews and the Civil War

Jews and the Civil War

Author: Jonathan D. Sarna

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2011-09

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 0814771130

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"An erotic scandal chronicle so popular it became a byword... Expertly tailored for contemporary readers. It combines scurrilous attacks on the social and political celebritites of the day, disguised just enough to exercise titillating speculatuion, with luscious erotic tales." —Belles Lettres This story concerns the return of to earth of the goddess of Justice, Astrea, to gather information about private and public behavior on the island of Atalantis. Manley drew on her experience as well as on an obsessive observation of her milieu to produce this fast paced narrative of political and erotic intrigue.


Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

Author: Bryan Mark Rigg

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.


Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War

Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War

Author: David J. Fine

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-04-26

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 3110268167

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War David J. Fine offers a surprising portrayal of Jewish officers in the German army as integrated and comfortably identified as both Jews and Germans. Fine explores how both Judaism and Christianity were experienced by Jewish soldiers at the front, making an important contribution to the study of the experience of religion in war. Fine shows how the encounter of German Jewish soldiers with the old world of the shtetl on the eastern front tested both their German and Jewish identities. Finally, utilizing published and unpublished sources including letters, diaries, memoirs, military service records, press accounts, photographs, drawings and tomb stone inscriptions, the author argues that antisemitism was not a primary factor in the war experience of Jewish soldiers.


Double Threat

Double Threat

Author: Ellin Bessner

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1487533624

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"He died so Jewry should suffer no more." These words on a Canadian Jewish soldier's tombstone in Normandy inspired the author to explore the role of Canadian Jews in the war effort. As PM Mackenzie King wrote in 1947, Jewish servicemen faced a "double threat" - they were not only fighting against Fascism but for Jewish survival. At the same time, they encountered widespread antisemitism and the danger of being identified as Jews if captured. Bessner conducted hundreds of interviews and extensive archival research to paint a complex picture of the 17,000 Canadian Jews - about 10 per cent of the Jewish population in wartime Canada - who chose to enlist, including future Cabinet minister Barney Danson, future game-show host Monty Hall, and comedians Wayne and Shuster. Added to this fascinating account are Jews who were among the so-called "Zombies" - Canadians who were drafted, but chose to serve at home - the various perspectives of the Jewish community, and the participation of Canadian Jewish women.


Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War

Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War

Author: R. Markwick

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-06-26

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0230362540

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is the first comprehensive study in English of Soviet women who fought against the genocidal, misogynist, Nazi enemy on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Drawing on a vast array of original archival, memoir, and published sources, this book captures the everyday experiences of Soviet women fighting, living and dying on the front.


From Coldwar Communism to the Global Emancipatory Movement

From Coldwar Communism to the Global Emancipatory Movement

Author: Peter Waterman

Publisher: eBook Partnership

Published: 2014-12-12

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 178301623X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Boaventura de Sousa Santos says: 'This is an admirable memoir of an intellectual activist who has lived most intensely the progressive struggles of the last sixty years of world history, because despite being born in Europe, Peter, in the best tradition of communist internationalism, participated in struggles and movements, not only in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in Africa and most recently in Latin America. But this is much more than a memoir. It is so well documented that in this personal experience there are reflected some of the most decisive events of contemporary history. It is a living history book. But even more than this, this book is so clearly and vividly written that at times it reads like the script for an imaginary documentary of our times. This book should be read by all concerned with our recent history in order to get a much more complex inside view of what happened while it was happening. In particular it should be read by the youth in order to get a close-up of the difficulties and possibilities in building another possible world at a time where there existed a vibrant international communist movement. It is up to such youth to evaluate whether difficulties are now or more daunting, the possibilities less of more luminous.'


The Camp Fire Girls

The Camp Fire Girls

Author: Jennifer Helgren

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022-12

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1496233670

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As the twentieth century dawned, progressive educators established a national organization for adolescent girls to combat what they believed to be a crisis of girls’ education. A corollary to the Boy Scouts of America, founded just a few years earlier, the Camp Fire Girls became America’s first and, for two decades, most popular girls’ organization. Based on Protestant middle-class ideals—a regulatory model that reinforced hygiene, habit formation, hard work, and the idea that women related to the nation through service—the Camp Fire Girls invented new concepts of American girlhood by inviting disabled girls, Black girls, immigrants, and Native Americans to join. Though this often meant a false sense of cultural universality, in the girls’ own hands membership was often profoundly empowering and provided marginalized girls spaces to explore the meaning of their own cultures in relation to changes taking place in twentieth-century America. Through the lens of the Camp Fire Girls, Jennifer Helgren traces the changing meanings of girls’ citizenship in the cultural context of the twentieth century. Drawing on girls’ scrapbooks, photographs, letters, and oral history interviews, in addition to adult voices in organization publications and speeches, The Camp Fire Girls explores critical intersections of gender, race, class, nation, and disability.