The Road from Kristallnacht: Unlearning the Past Seventy-Five years ago tomorrow, on 12 November 1944, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle laid a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It commemorated the multitudes who had fallen during World War I. Churchill, De Gaulle and many others…
Kristallnacht took place on the nights of November 9 and 10 1938 as a planned act of revenge for the killing of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a seventeen Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan. 200 synagogues were burned to the ground, thousands of Jewish shops and homes ransacked, 30,000 sent to Buchenwald, Dachau and…
Review of The Thirty Year Genocide, by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi This remarkable book by two eminent Israeli historians recalls the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire by the Turks during the First World War and places it in the wider context of how the Turks treated their ethnic minorities. The authors remark…
Eighty years ago, on 1 September 1939, German troops crossed the Polish frontier and ignited a conflagration that claimed the lives of tens of millions of innocents. This descent into the jaws of destruction has been impregnated on our collective memory by the imagery of gleeful Nazis raising the border post in order to enter…
Review of Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, published by Harvard University Press, pp.354 In August 2017, white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting ‘Jews will not replace us!’ They espoused a depressing, if familiar world view: that it is Jews who control the banks and the media, imposing their morality…
Colin Shindler: In your book, Never a Native, you recalled that your parents went to see The Merchant of Venice in Essen in 1932 and were so appalled by the antisemitic comments in the audience that they left halfway through. What do you remember about the rise of Nazism in Germany at that time? Alice Shalvi: I very…
Pope Francis’s announcement that the Vatican will open the archives on the life and times of his predecessor, Pius XII (1939-1958) – some 16 million pages – has answered the call of historians over many decades. The attitude of Pius towards Jews, anti-Semitism and Nazi atrocities has remained a matter of controversy for Jewish and…
Eighty years ago, synagogues in Germany burned. It was Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass — a turning point in National Socialism’s war on the Jews, when Hitler ordered a state-sponsored assault on its Jewish minority, the first step on the road to Auschwitz. A powerful JC editorial commented: “It is the culmination of a process which…
75 years ago, Hitler sent a message to his representative in Copenhagen instructing him to rid Denmark of its 8,000-strong Jewish community. “The Jewish Campaign” was scheduled to begin on Rosh Hashanah 5704 — 1 October 1943. Danish Jews would be rounded up, incarcerated and “deported to the East”. Danish resistance to the German occupation…
Review of Paul Bogdanor’s Kasztner’s Crime (Transaction 2016) pp. 323 Paul Bogdanor has penned a well-researched book on the contentious Kasztner affair – a controversy that commenced in wartime Hungary and has continued until the present day. In the summer of 1944, a minor Jewish figure, Rudolf Kasztner, negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in the…