1st Edition

Legislating The Holocaust The Bernhard Loesenor Memoirs And Supporting Documents

By Karl Schleunes Copyright 2001
    198 Pages
    by Routledge

    199 Pages
    by Routledge

    From April 1933 to early 1943, Bernard Loesener served as the official ?Jewish Expert? in the German Third Reich's Ministry of the Interior, the government body responsible for the Nazi's legislative assault on German Jewry. In that role, he personally drafted much of the legislation, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 preeminently, that gradually dispossessed, disenfranchised, and dehumanized the Jews of Nazi Germany. During the first six years of Nazi rule, the seminal period of government-sponsored anti-Semitism, Loesener kept the minutes of many crucial, high-level, inter-ministerial conferences concerned with the ?Jewish Question.? As observer and participant, his experiences were virtually unparalleled. In 1950, Loesener penned a memoir that sought to explain, and justify, his actions during the ten-year escalation of Nazi oppression that resulted, to Loesener's professed horror, in the Final Solution. It was published in 1961, in German, by the journal Vierteljahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte. It has never before appeared in English, until now - in Legislating the Holocaust.

    Introduction , The Enigma of Bernhard Loesener–Nazi Bureaucrat , At the Desk for Racial Affairs in the Reich Ministry of the Interior , Bernhard Loesener's Testimony before the Nuremberg Tribunal , Nazi Legislation

    Biography

    Karl Schleunes