Bristol Hannover Council
Herman Beck: Before the Holocaust . . .
** BHC members were invited, on Thursday February 20, to an online book talk with Herman Beck on Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions during the Nazi Takeover. The event was jointly organised by the Leo Baeck Institute and the Wiener Holocaust Library.
Hermann Beck, a Professor of History at the University of Miami, has spent the best part of 14 years researching the topic in archives all over Germany. He documented a great wave of violence against Jews in the Spring of 1933 when the Nazis came to power.
This violence has previously been underreported at the time and remains under-researched since. It involved mainly grass roots violence from the SA stormtroopers of whom there were more than half a million at the time. It involved widespread violence throughout Germany against people and property, brutal murders, settling of personal scores, theft and destruction, personal humiliation of Jews, mock executions and so-called pillory marches.
The German elites in churches, the judiciary and civil society mostly kept quiet, despite protests from many individual Germans. The reason was a combination of fear for the consequences (Dachau was announced early on as a camp for people who opposed the new regime) combined with genuine enthusiasm for a new authoritarian regime and latent anti-semitism in society as a whole.
Few of the perpetrators were brought to justice either during or after the Third Reich.
IAN TURNER
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