The story that I intend to tell in this book, the story of the Jews of Germany, can only be told backwards. It is a story that must begin at the end. And the end is that singular event in which European Jewry, millions of men, women, and children, were led to their death, gassed, and massacred in all manners of unnatural death. Hitler and his followers may have indeed known all too well how they were going to “solve” the “Jewish question”; or perhaps the “final solution” was crystallized only gradually, out of partial, local action, taking on its true proportions at some later stage. We shall probably never know for sure. But outside the small circle of Nazi leaders and a number of staunch, ruthless antisemites, hardly anyone could imagine that this would be their policy – simple, and total. Many of the Jews in Germany regarded the transformation that their country was undergoing as the Nazis took over the government on January 30, 1933, as a transient affair, disturbing but temporary. But even among those who did understand that “their” Germany would never be the same again, only a few, fewer than it seems in retrospect, anticipated the force of the blow that awaited them.

Signs were abundant. Once the Nazis gained control of the central government in Germany they promptly began imposing restrictions on Jews.