Volume 43, Number 7 · April 18, 1996
How Hell Worked
By Gordon A. Craig
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Knopf, 622 pp., $30.00
Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire: Why So Many German Jews Made the Tragic Decision to Remain in Nazi Germany
by John VH Dippel
BasicBooks, 384 pp., $26.00
In 1743, when Moses Mendelssohn, the son of a Torah scribe in Dessau, came to Berlin, penniless and unable to speak German properly, there were 333 Jewish families resident in the city numbering in all fewer than two thousand persons. The Jews were an underprivileged minority tolerated only because of their economic usefulness. Their rights of residence and movement were restricted, and they were subject to expulsion at the caprice of local authorities. They were excluded from public service; they could not belong to guilds; they were forbidden to engage in certain trades; and they were taxed mercilessly and on every possible occasion—when traveling, when marrying, when buying a house; they were taxed for the right to remain in the city, taxed whenever they left it, taxed for the privilege of being excluded from the armed services, and for much else. And always they were suspected of nefarious practices and secret crimes against the German majority.
Review, 5289 words
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