A Holocaust Reader

An unflinching insight into the lives of those who experienced the Holocaust.

As the Nazis rose to power, all over Europe, Jews conspired against their persecutors to keep an historical and documentary record. Some records were buried underground; others were hidden in secure and protected places; still others were transmitted to trustworthy non-Jews.

Collected here, in this invaluable work of scholarship, are more than sixty fully-annotated, primary source documents. Selected from both private papers, including hidden archives, and official records, these documents chart the course of the Holocaust and support the author's monumental War Against the Jews: 1933-1945.

All the documents, but one, are contemporary with the events they describe; most appear in English for the first time translated from German, Yiddish, Polish, French, and Hebrew; all are collected and authenticated by Dawidowicz.

Together, this combination of petitions, speeches, legislation and decrees, field reports and secret orders, personal diaries, songs from the ghettoes, and Jewish records of the Holocaust fills out and illustrates the historical narrative of the Holocaust with immediacy and power.

Preface

Introduction: On Studying Holocaust Documents

PART ONE: The Final Solution

1. Preconditions: Conventional Anti-Semitism and Adolf Hitler
2. The First Stage: Anti-Jewish Legislation
3. The Interim Stage: "All Necessary Preparations"
4. The Final Stage: Mass Killings, "Resettlement," Death Camps

1. The First Ordeal: The Jews in Germany 1933-1938
2. The Ordeals of the Ghettos in Eastern Europe
3. The Ordeals of the Judenräte
4. Confronting Death: The Ordeals of Deportation
5. Resistance: The Ordeal of Desperation

Maps

Suggestions for Further Reading

Sources

Index