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Between Dignity and Despair:
Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
By Marion A. Kaplan. Oxford University Press, New York, 1998. 290pp. $30.00
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 the German Jews became pariahs in the country which they and their ancestors had considered home. But this happened gradually, not at once and seen in retrospect this was part of their tragedy, the reason why more had not tried to escape while it was still possible. True, no country wanted them and most had closed their doors almost hermetically but there were still some far away exotic places, of which little, if anything, was known, except the fact that their consuls in Berlin could be persuaded for a consideration to issue papers which might, or might not, be considered valid visas. When the Nazis entered Austria there was no gradualism as far as the persecutions and the ghettoization were concerned and this explains why relatively more people left Austria in five months than Germany in five years.
Anti-Jewish legislation was introduced early in 1933. Jews were dismissed from all positions in the state and local administration (including schools, universities, hospitals and so on), they could not longer perform in the arts, they were gradually expropriated, their shops and businesses were boycotted and they were forced to sell, often at a nominal price. But in the beginning certain exceptions were made, for instance with regard to those who had served as soldiers in World War One and their families or citizens of foreign countries. Hence the early illusions, not only among the German patriots among them, but also among the orthodox believers who had always thought that the Jews should stick to their own kind, and their own culture. There was the hope that the worst was already behind them, that there would be room for a small Jewish community in the Third Reich keeping a very low profile and that there was no particular urgency to emigrate. "Adjustment" was one of the key words in those years.
Gradually the noose tightened and after the Olympic Games of 1936 the situation rapidly deteriorated. The turning point was Kristallnacht (Crystal Night, a night of anti-Jewish rioting and terrorism) in November 1938, however, even then it was by...