When Their World Changed: Teaching about German Jewry between 1933-1939

Dr. Götz Aly is a German historian and journalist researching the Holocaust and German history during the Nazi period. He is presently researching the survivors’ return home to Europe after the Holocaust, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research. We would like to express our gratitude to Dr. Aly for agreeing to share his ideas and thoughts with us. Also, we thank Mr. Enno Raschke for his kind assistance during the interview.Can you tell us about yourself?I was born in 1947 in Heidelberg, right after the war. I remember a lot about...

Creating art can be an exhilarating yet painful process for an artist as he grapples with his emotions, his vision, his message, and his limitations. Throughout his artistic life, an artist grows, learns his craft, explores, and matures in a very personal process. However, external factors like war, upheaval, and social change can rob an artist of the ability to freely pursue his inner calling, and cause him to use his art as a vehicle to record and attempt to contextualize the chaos enveloping him.Felix Nussbaum was such an artist: a German Jew caught in the relentless downward spiral of Nazi...

IntroductionThe rise of the Nazi Party in 1933 signaled a turning point for 525,000 German Jews that would take years to unfold in the rest of Europe. The ultimate result was World War II and the Holocaust, but long before the ultimate devastation of world Jewry, German Jews felt their world turn upside-down as the emancipation they had achieved came to an end. In the previous newsletter, we discussed the importance of teaching the history of Jews long before the war, when they thrived in communities all over Europe. This newsletter is more localized, as it focuses specifically on...

IntroductionThe Third Reich entered the annals of history as the most extreme aberration of civilized society. Its benchmark was the murder of millions of people in the name of an elaborate ideology that planned to divide the world into superior and inferior race groupings. From 1933 until 1945, the Nazi leadership planned, organized, and executed their ideas, inflicting relentless misery in the European arena. Nearly seventy years after the war, the singularity of the period still generates more attention than most other episodes in history.This essay, as part of that phenomenon, is the second...