LBI London: Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions during the Nazi Takeover – Online Book Talk

Historians have traditionally argued that antisemitic violence in Nazi Germany rose gradually, from low levels during the first years of Hitler’s rule to a high point in the Reich-wide pogrom of November 1938. Before the Holocaust, based on research in more than twenty German archives, demonstrates that this long-held assumption is wrong. During the months-long Nazi takeover of power, beginning a mere five weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, waves of antisemitic violence engulfed large parts of Germany. Before the Holocaust examines the multitude of these hitherto unrecognized antisemitic attacks in the late winter and spring of 1933, as well as the reaction of German elites and institutions to this violence.

Individual protests against violent attacks were already hazardous in March and April 1933, but established German elites were still able to voice their concerns and raise objections. By doing so, they could have stopped a radicalization that eventually led to the Kristallnacht pogrom and the Holocaust. But the elites chose to remain silent and even became complicit, if only passively, in the outrages perpetrated against German and foreign Jews in Germany. This online talk thus revises standard assumptions about antisemitic violence and it throws a powerful and revealing light on the reaction of the German elites.

Hermann Beck is Professor of History at the University of Miami. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles after studying History and Literature at German universities (Mannheim, Freiburg, and Berlin), the London School of Economics, and the Sorbonne. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His publications include books on nineteenth-century Germany, The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia, and the late Weimar and Nazi periods, The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933, and (co-editor), From Weimar to Hitler: Studies on the Dissolution of Weimar Democracy and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1932-34 (with Larry Jones), as well as articles on conservatism, socialism, the Prussian bureaucracy, antisemitism, and the early Nazi period. These were published in British, German, and American journals and in edited collections.

Thursday, February 20th,  2025