In 1939 the Harvard sociologist Edward Hartshorne gathered eyewitness accounts of the Kristallnacht from hundreds of Jews who had fled, but Hartshorne joined the Secret Service shortly afterwards and the accounts he gathered were forgotten - until now. These eyewitness testimonies - published here for the first time, with a foreword by Saul Friedländer, the Pulitzer Prize historian and Holocaust survivor - paint a harrowing picture of everyday violence in one of Europe's darkest moments.
This unique and disturbing document will be of great interest to anyone interested in modern history, Nazi Germany and the historical experience of the Jews.
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"An exceptional array of eyewitness accounts ... this fascinating collection honours the Holocaust's victims, as well as the sociologist who preserved their memories."
Times Literary Supplement
"A fantastic asset for Holocaust historiography."
European Review of History
"This riveting book prints a collection of 21 eyewitness accounts by German Jews. The value of these testimonies lies above all in their detail and immediacy. Mostly they confirm the picture we already have from other sources, though few are as vivid as these."
The Guardian
"Provides heartrending testimony of Nazi racial hatred."
Tribune
"Taken together, these survivors’ voices bring the focus back onto what is essential: human lives, their preservation and loss."
Forward Magazine
"There are few more powerful or moving collections of testimonies from the Jewish victims of the Nazi pogrom of 9-10 November 1938. This is an extraordinary collection that conveys the full extent of Nazi brutality towards Jews even before the 'Final Solution' had begun."
Richard J Evans, Regius Professor of history at the University of Cambridge and author of The Third Reich at War
"The testimonies about the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938 and its sequels, assembled in this volume, describe what the authors deemed to be the height of Nazi barbarism. In reality, these events were but the faintest of preludes to what was about to happen to the Jews in Germany and in occupied Europe. Nonetheless, these reports carry a poignancy of their own that overwhelmingly evokes the suffocating and terror filled atmosphere of Jewish everyday existence in the Reich during those November days and the immediate pre-war months."
Saul Friedlander, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
