RT Review
T1 Kristallnacht 1938, Alan E. Steinweis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 214 pp., cloth 23.95
JF Holocaust and genocide studies
VO 25
IS 1
SP 147
OP 149
A1 Schleunes, Karl
LA English
PB Oxford University Press
YR 2011
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1814480145
AB Is there really a need for yet another book on the Kristallnacht pogrom? Alan E. Steinweis poses this question and proceeds to demonstrate in this short but impressive book that there are “good reasons to take a new look at this old subject” (p. 4). Three elements in the widespread understanding of the pogrom, he suggests, require reassessment: the notion that the pogrom was centrally initiated, organized, and coordinated; the understanding that it began on the evening of November 9th and ended during the course of November 10th; and the belief that the perpetrators “consisted almost exclusively of members of the SA and other Nazi party organizations” (p. 6). Not one of these notions, it turns out, survives Professor Steinweis's reassessment.
K1 Rezension
DO 10.1093/hgs/dcr010