Among the many narratives about the atrocities committed against Jews in the Holocaust, the story about the Jews who lived in the eye of the storm—the German Jews—has received little attention. Germans against Germans: The Fate of the Jews, 1938–1945, tells this story—how Germans declared war against other Germans, that is, against German Jews. Author Moshe Zimmermann explores questions of what made such a war possible? How could such a radical process of exclusion take place in a highly civilized, modern society? What were the societal mechanisms that paved the way for legal discrimination, isolation, deportation, and eventual extermination of the individuals who were previously part and parcel of German society? Germans against Germans demonstrates how the combination of antisemitism, racism, bureaucracy, cynicism, and imposed collaboration culminated in "the final solution."

Among the many narratives about the atrocities committed against Jews in the Holocaust, the story about the Jews who lived in the eye of the storm—the German Jews—has received little attention. Germans against Germans: The Fate of the Jews, 1938–1945, tells this story—how Germans declared war against other Germans, that is, against German Jews. Author Moshe Zimmermann explores questions of what made such a war possible? How could such a radical process of exclusion take place in a highly civilized, modern society? What were the societal mechanisms that paved the way for legal discrimination, isolation, deportation, and eventual extermination of the individuals who were previously part and parcel of German society? Germans against Germans demonstrates how the combination of antisemitism, racism, bureaucracy, cynicism, and imposed collaboration culminated in "the final solution."

The creation of the term "anti-Semitism" a century ago signalled a turning point in the history of Jew-hatred, marking the division between the classical, Christian hatred of Jews and the modern, politically-rooted racist attitudes. This is the first biography of radical writer and politician Wilhelm Marr, the man who introduced the term "anti-Semitism" into politics and founded the first "Anti-Semitic League." Marr (1819-1904) began his political career as a democrat and revolutionary, fighting for the emancipation of all oppressed groups including the Jews. But when he became disillusioned with contemporary politics, Jews became the focus of his attack. Drawing on Marr's published and unpublished works, as well as on previously unexamined journals and voluminous correspondence, Zimmermann sets out to discover why an intellectual radical like Marr would become a virulent anti-Semite. As Zimmermann follows Marr's profound influence in the political, literary, and artistic circles of his day and his collaborations with Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, and other radical founders of modern anti-Semitism, he reveals the diverse ways that anti-Semitism came to permeate German thought and illuminates critical moments in the emergence of the German Reich. The book also includes Marr's surprising, never-before-published "Testament of an Anti-Semite," written at the end of his life when he finally turned his back on the movement he helped to create. This is the first volume in a new Oxford series, Studies in Jewish History. The General Editor for the series is Jehuda Reinharz of Brandeis University.