Prologue To Annihilation, Cold Pogrom Against Jews, Early Third Reich (1930-36) Known By US, Britain
- 'Prologue to Annihilation: An Interview with Stephen Norwood,' History News Network/HNN, George Washington University, Aug. 18, 2021. By Eunice G. Pollack, the author of 'Racializing Antisemitism: Black Militants, Jews, & Israel, 1950 to the Present,' & coeditor (with *Stephen H. Norwood) of the 'Encyclopedia of American Jewish History.'
EUNICE G. POLLACK: In your just-published book, Prologue to Annihilation: Ordinary American and British Jews Challenge the Third Reich (Indiana University Press), you focus on the period 1930 to 1936, with an epilogue covering 1936 to 1939. This is an unusual period on which to focus in Holocaust studies.
NORWOOD: Yes, most Holocaust scholars, in determining how and when the Hitler regime decided to annihilate the Jews, concentrate on the period from the Kristallnacht pogroms (November 1938) through the early years of World War II. Other scholars, who study the West’s responses to the plight of European Jewry, also dwell largely on the years after Kristallnacht. My book, by contrast, focuses on the period immediately before the Nazis assumed control in Germany and on the critically important early years of the Third Reich.
POLLACK: Why are these years critical?
NORWOOD: I demonstrate that much more was known in the United States and Britain about the Nazi persecution of—and atrocities against—Jews in these early years than is generally understood today. This was the time when Western action could still have prevented the ensuing catastrophe.
POLLACK: What were American and British people learning about Nazi treatment of the Jews in the first few years of Nazi rule, and about Nazi intentions?
NORWOOD: A number of journalists who were highly conversant with what was taking place in Germany in 1933 and 1934, and who were widely read in the United States and Britain, warned from the time Hitler took power that the Nazis were waging a “cold pogrom” against the Jews. Nazi policies were severely strangling Jews’ economic life and educational opportunity, and would force the vast majority, who would be unable to emigrate, into starvation within a generation.
POLLACK: How did people in the United States and Britain react to their reports?
NORWOOD: American and British Jews at the grassroots were outraged and demanded that their governments take immediate action against the Hitler regime. In April 1933, a little more than two months after Hitler became chancellor, newspapers across the United States published a photograph smuggled out of Germany that showed grinning Nazi storm troopers parading a Jewish man around Chemnitz, Germany, in a garbage wagon. The caption stated that the storm troopers had rounded up Chemnitz’s Jews and forced them to scrub the town’s walls before jeering crowds. Upon seeing the story and photo in her local newspaper, a Jewish woman in a small Montana town immediately wrote to her two US senators appealing to them to urge the US government to pressure the Hitler regime to stop what she called the unspeakable humiliation of Germany’s Jews...
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