Dimensions
152 x 233 x 35mm
In this remarkable personal history of the Third Reich, 3,000 Germans and 500 German Jews tall of their everyday experiences of life under the Nazis in 1930s and 1940s Germany. They describe their brushes with the Gestapo and other organs of terror, and what they knew at the time about the mass murder of German and other European Jews.
What they say is horrifying, moving, and even at this distance from the war often surprising. Jews, many of them now in America, have spoken of their journeys by train to Auschwitz and elsewhere, the harassment they suffered in Nazi Germany, and sometimes of the support and friendship of ordinary German neighbours.
Many ordinary Germans have spoken with remarkable openness too. One, for instance, was a radio operator in the German Army, when over a single weekend, 25,000 Jews from the ghetto in Pinsk were machine-gunned. Another was a reserve policeman who served as a concentration camp guard in Dachau, and later took part in shooting 300 Jewish women and children. About half admit to knowing about the murder of Jews before the end of the Second World War, and, even now, many confess that they admired Hitler and believed in the Nazi movement.