Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [17]
Germany became an important centre for Hebrew literature after Russian writers and academics fled the revolution of 1917. The Weimar Republic brought emancipation for the 500,000-strong Jewish community, but by 1943 Adolf Hitler had declared Germany Judenrein (literally ‘clean of Jews’). This ignored the hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews incarcerated on ‘German’ soil. Around six million Jews died in Europe as a direct result of Nazism and its barbarity.
The number of Jews affiliated with the Jewish community in Germany is currently around 100,000 – the third largest in Europe – but the real number is probably twice that. Many Jews arrived from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.
There are particularly informative Jewish museums in Berlin and Frankfurt.
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The first blow to the new republic came in 1920, when right-wing militants forcibly occupied the government quarter in Berlin in the failed ‘Kapp Putsch’. In 1923 hyperinflation rocked the republic. That same year Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), an Austrian-born volunteer in the German army during WWI, launched the Munich Putsch with members of his National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Hitler wound up in jail for two years, where he wrote his nationalist, anti-Semitic tome, Mein Kampf. Once out, he began rebuilding the party.
Hitler’s NSDAP gained 18% of the vote in the 1930 elections, prompting him to run against Hindenburg for the presidency in 1932, when he won 37% of a second-round vote. A year later, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, with a coalition cabinet of Nationalists (conservatives, old aristocrats and powerful industrialists) and National Socialists (Nazis). When Berlin’s Reichstag mysteriously went up in flames in March 1933, Hitler had the excuse he needed to request emergency powers to arrest all communist and liberal opponents and push through his proposed Enabling Law, allowing him to decree laws and change the constitution without consulting parliament. The Nazi dictatorship had begun. When Hindenburg died a year later, Hitler fused the offices of president and chancellor to become Führer of the Third Reich.
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William Shirer’s definitive 1000-plus-page The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains a powerful reportage. His depiction of the Berlin of those times is the literary equivalent of the brutal north face of the Eiger.
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Nazis in Power
The thumbscrews slowly tightened around Germany. In the 12 short years of what Hitler envisaged as the ‘Thousand Year Reich’, massive destruction would be inflicted upon German and other European cities; political opponents, intellectuals and artists would be murdered or forced to go underground or into exile; a culture of terror and denunciation would permeate almost all of German society; and Europe’s rich Jewish heritage would be decimated.
In April 1933 Joseph Goebbels, head of the well-oiled Ministry of Propaganda, announced a boycott of Jewish businesses. Soon after, Jews were expelled from public service and ‘non-Aryans’ were banned from many professions, trades and industries. The Nuremberg Laws (1935) deprived non-Aryans of German citizenship and forbade them to marry or have sexual relations with Aryans – anyone who broke these race laws faced the death penalty (and had to pay their own trial and execution costs to boot).
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The Colditz Story (1955), directed by Guy Hamilton, is a gripping if sobering watch. Based on the book The Colditz Story (1952) by prison escapee Pat Reid, it portrays the escapes of Allied prisoners of war during WWII from the Nazis’ legendary high-security prison in Western Saxony.
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THE NIGHT OF BROKEN GLASS
Nazi horror escalated on 9 November 1938 with the Reichspogromnacht (often called Kristallnacht or the ‘Night of