Jewish Responses To Persecution 19411942 Volume 3 1st Edition Matthus by Matthäus, Jürgen 9780759122581, 075912258X instant download after payment.

Volume Introduction

From Persecution to Annihilation

“A NEW YEAR FOR SAVAGERY,” wrote Warsaw ghetto chronicler Chaim Kaplan on January 2, 1941. “A year ago we expected salvation every day. We did not know our enemy’s strength, just as we did not know our friends’ weakness. Even those who still hope for ultimate victory see now that salvation will be long in coming.”1 Kaplan’s diary entry reminds us that for Jews at the time, Hitler’s demise was anything but certain. Indeed, Germany’s victory in the war appeared ever more likely. From the beginning of the year 1941 until the summer of 1942, the Wehrmacht’s reach expanded into the Balkans, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Soviet Union, as far as the outskirts of Leningrad in the north, and the roadways leading to Stalingrad in the south.

And there was a new quality to the war: unlike the Reich’s 1940 campaign in the West, its belligerent expansion to the southeast and east produced mass murder on a colossal scale, most notably committed by the SS and police, but also by other German agencies and their collaborators.

In the wake of Germany’s “war of annihilation” against the Soviet Union beginning on June 22, 1941, what had been a seemingly random sequence of persecutory actions converged to form a highly destructive, complex, and increasingly coordinated pattern of persecution that, by the end of 1941, had claimed the lives of more than 1 million Jews. With the start of what would become “Aktion Reinhard” in mid-March 1942, the resumption of massive extermination of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union, increasing German pressure on its Axis partners to deliver their Jews, and the beginning of deportations from western Europe directly to death camps in eastern Europe in June 1942, what we now call the Holocaust had truly begun. It expanded from the German Reich and the countries lying to its east to cover what eminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg has called “a vast semicircular arc, extending counterclockwise …