Author Description

"In 1939 the Harvard sociologist Edward Hartshorne gathered eyewitness accounts of what became known as '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."--Book jacket. "In August 1939, Harvard University organized a prize competition with the title 'My Life in Germany Before and After 30 January 1933', for which more than 250 submissions were received from all over the world. The bundle of documents has been preserved since 1958 in the Houghton Library at Harvard under the signature bMS Ger 91; the alphabetical list of the 263 authors can be viewed at http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou01275. In 1940, Edward Hartshorne, one of the three initiaters of the competition, made a selection from the reports on the November pogroms to which he gave the title Nazi Madness: November 1938. This work was not published...The bundle of documents was, however, preserved among Hartshorne's papers. Of the 34 manuscripts that Hartshorne chose,... the editors [of this book] have selected 21."--Page vii. "The numbers given at the beginning of each text correspond to the original 1939-40 numbering with which Hartshorne worked, while the numbers between parenthesis refer to the current Harvard numbering."--Page viii. "November 9th, 1938 is widely seen as a violent turning point in Nazi Germany's assault on the Jews. An estimated 400 Jews lost their lives in the anti-Semitic pogrom and more than 30,000 were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps, where many were brutally mistreated. Thousands more fled their homelands in Germany and Austria, shocked by what they had seen, heard and experienced. What they took with them was not only the pain of saying farewell but also the memory of terrible scenes: attacks by mobs of drunken Nazis, public humiliations, burning synagogues, inhuman conditions in overcrowded prison cells and concentration camp barracks. The reactions of neighbours and passers-by to these barbarities ranged from sympathy and aid to scorn, mockery and abuse."--Book jacket.