Prologue to Annihilation: Ordinary American and British Jews Challenge the Third Reich by Stephen H. Norwood

Abstract

Most of the literature on the western liberal democracies and the Jews during the Nazi era is "top down," with the focus on how governments and their state apparatus responded (or failed to respond), especially through refugee policy. A "grassroots" approach, and one focusing especially on the American and British Jewish minorities, is thus greatly to be welcomed. Stephen Norwood is also to be congratulated on the scale of his research, examining a range of archives in the US and the U.K., supplemented by extensive newspaper and contemporary printed sources. There is, for example, recognition in this book of the remarkable role of the Manchester Guardian in reporting in daily detail of the plight of German Jewry during the 1930s. This continued during the Second World War and would merit a full-length study in itself.