The Jewish Purging of a Small German Town: Personal Recollection, Private Letters and Oral Testimony

Through the analysis of 10 oral witness testimonies of local residents and a previously undocumented letter correspondence between a Jewish Holocaust survivor and her gentile friend, The Jewish Purging of a Small German Town provides new insights into how the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people unfolded in small towns and communities around Germany. Incorporating her own personal reflections on growing up in Salmünster, Maria R. Boes uncovers the truth about the Jewish residents who lived there and what happened to them after the Nazis came to power in 1933 - a story which has been silenced and suppressed.

Boes charts the town’s unsettling trajectory from aharmonious pre-Nazi local community to an environment where, after initial protracted local resistance, Jewish persecution escalated from the boycotting of stores to physical, fiscal and emotional acts against Jewish residents. The book reveals how this culminated in Jewish residents being purged from the town by 1937 without any paramilitary intervention or outside physical force, prior to the 1938 Kristallnacht and long before similar ousters occurred in big cities throughout the country. It also shows how Salmünster, like other neighbouring towns, continued to deny the rightful historical belonging of its Jewish residents long after the war was over and the Nazis had been defeated.

This microhistory is an illuminating study of the momentous spectre of Germany’s small towns being at the forefront of successfully fulfilling Nazi aims to remove Jewish residents - driving them out of their homes with the ultimate goal of driving them out of existence.

Maria R. Boes is Professor Emerita of West Chester University, USA. She is the author of Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany (2013).