Executive editor: Andrea Löw; English-language edition prepared by: Caroline Pearce, Georg Felix Harsch, and Dorothy Mas

This volume chronicles the situation of the Jews in the German Reich and in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia between the start of the Second World War and September 1941. The German authorities used the start of the war on 1 September 1939 as an opportunity to intensify the campaign against the supposed enemies within primarily the Jews. Thousands of Jews were expelled to Poland and France in initial deportations. Emigration or flight became virtually impossible. In February 1941 a Jewish woman from Vienna feared for her parents: 'We know now that there is no age limit, everyone is being sent away, little children, the very old, even sick people are taken from the hospital and transported somewhere, into uncertainty, into misery.' The volume documents the increasing isolation of the German and Czech Jews and the plans and ambitions of their persecutors in the period leading up to the systematic deportations.

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Autorentext

Andrea Löw, Centre for Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary History; Caroline Pearce, Institute of Contemporary History.

Klappentext

This source edition on the persecution and murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany presents in a total of 16 volumes a thematically comprehensive selection of documents on the Holocaust. The work illustrates the contemporary contexts, the dynamics, and the intermediate stages of the political and social processes that led to this unprecedented mass crime. It can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and all other interested parties. The edition comprises authentic testimony by persecutors, victims, and onlookers. These testimonies are furnished with academic annotations and the vast majority of them are published here for the first time in English. Volume 3 documents the persecution of the Jews in the German Reich after the start of the Second World War and in the 'Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia', created in March 1939, until September 1941. It reveals the increasing isolation of the German and Czechoslovak Jews but also the perpetrators' plans up to the eve of systematic deportations.