Before the Holocaust

Download or read book Before the Holocaust written by Thomas Dunlap and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2011 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Before the Holocaust opens a window on the turbulent history of German Jewry between 1870 and 1939 through three autobiographies: Käte Frankenthal, a physician, health reformer, and social democratic politician from Berlin; Max Moses Polke, a lawyer and Zionist supporter from Breslau; Joseph Benjamin Levy, a teacher and cantor from Frankfurt am Main. These autobiographies reveal some of the lives that were possible for German Jews in the years between the establishment of the Reich in 1871, when they were finally granted full political and civic rights, and the assumption of power by the National Socialists in 1933. They provide insight into the society of Germany during the imperial period and World War I, the unsettled politics and social and economic upheaval of the Weimar years (1919-1933), and the circumstances that led to the rise of the National Socialists. Finally, they chronicle the assault on the Jewish community between 1933 and 1939, a period that paved the way for the systematic genocide that soon followed"--P. [4] of cover.