The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933–1945
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In Zusammenarbeit mit:
Yad Vashem
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Herausgegeben von:
German Federal Archives
This landmark collection of primary sources provides unique first-hand insights into the persecution and murder of the Jews of Europe under Nazi rule. The documents, all translated from the language of the original source, range from the police orders and administrative decrees issued by the Nazi apparatus across Germany and occupied Europe to the diaries and letters of Jewish men, women, and children facing discrimination, impoverishment, violent assaults, incarceration, deportation, and death. The observations and reactions of bystanders not directly involved in the crimes – some shocked, some indifferent, some approving - also come across vividly. Substantial introductions, scholarly footnotes, and an extensive thematic index help guide the reader through the rich documentary material and add to the value of the series as a resource for teaching and learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Series edited on behalf of the German Federal Archives, the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, and the Modern History Research Group at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. In cooperation with Yad Vashem.
Explore the documents! Search in categories like "Nuremberg Laws 1935", "Eviction and Disposession" or "November Pogroms 1938" to read and download documents from the published PMJ volumes for free.
See also the corresponding German series Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945.
For more information on the edition, please visit the project website. Follow us on Twitter @PMJ_documents.
- All documents translated from the language of the original source
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Updated and adapted for an English-language readership
Rezensionen
Reactions to the original German edition:
“A large-scale project long overdue”
Eckhard Fuhr, Die Welt
“The documents show a panorama of the antisemitic policies of the Nazi regime, of defamation, violence and denunciation. These are moving testimonies of helplessness and despair, of bitter disappointment, but also of the defiant pride of the persecuted.” Andreas Mix, Berliner Zeitung
“All the sources are edited with care and thoroughly researched annotations are added. … Taking everything into account an impressive source edition is to be expected – in the words of the editorial board – ‘a written monument to the murdered Jews of Europe’.” Manfred Gailus, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
“Reading the first 300 pages, it is difficult to put the volume down. The sources exert a powerful force.” Arno Widmann, Frankfurter Rundschau
“Whoever reads these volumes will get a more vivid impression than any visit to a museum can provide. … If the future volumes maintain this high standard, the publication of the Holocaust source collection will have been worthwhile.” Franziska Augstein, Süddeutsche Zeitung
"It is a tribute to the six million victims of Nazi terror. The collection is also a memorial to the disgrace of the perpetrators who brought death to those millions, along with the thousands who supported and aided the extermination of Jews. For present and future generations, it is a monument to the crime of genocide – its organization, planning and execution. From now on, no study on the history of the Holocaust will be complete without drawing on the most comprehensive collection of documents and testimonies ever published. No academic lecture or lesson in schools will be able to do without this publication, whose abbreviation PMJ, or VEJ in German, should be the foremost reference in the bibliography of any book on the subject." Maciej Stasińsk in: Gazeta Wyborcza, 24./25.6.2023 (translated from Polish)
Fachgebiete
Executive editor: Wolf Gruner; English-language edition prepared by: Caroline Pearce and Dorothy Mas
This volume documents the persecution of the Jews in the German Reich between 1933 and 1937. The documents illustrate the ways in which the Jews in Germany were thrown out of their jobs and excluded from public institutions and public life, and how the Nuremberg Laws reduced the status of German Jews to second-class citizens and set out to sever the ties between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. It documents the political calculations and strategy of the Nazi ruling elite in relation to antisemitic measures, and the local outbreaks of violence and terror against the Jewish population. It also illustrates the widespread indifference of non-Jewish Germans. In 1935 the Berlin rabbi Joachim Prinz described how the circumstances for the Jewish population had changed: ‘The Jew’s lot is to be neighbourless. We would not find it all so painful if we did not have the feeling that we once did have neighbours.’
Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/
Executive editor: Susanne Heim; English-language edition prepared by: Caroline Pearce and Dorothy Mas
This volume documents the persecution of the Jews in the German Reich between January 1938 and the end of August 1939. In the months between the Anschluss of Austria and the start of the Second World War, the Nazi leadership plunged Jewish life further into crisis. ‘Aryanization’, bureaucratically organized expulsions, and ultimately the pogrom in November 1938 meant that for more and more Jews, life was untenable. At the same time, it became increasingly difficult to emigrate. In the aftermath of the pogrom of 9 November 1938, Morris Troper from the Jewish aid organization JDC (Joint Distribution Committee) recorded: ‘What is to become of the Jews in the next few weeks is altogether uncertain. Even if the disorders and arrests come to an end, the basis of the existence of German Jewry has been wiped out.’
Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/
Executive editor: Andrea Löw; English-language edition prepared by: Caroline Pearce, Georg Felix Harsch, and Dorothy Mas
This volume chronicles the situation of the Jews in the German Reich and in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia between the start of the Second World War and September 1941. The German authorities used the start of the war on 1 September 1939 as an opportunity to intensify the campaign against the supposed enemies within – primarily the Jews. Thousands of Jews were expelled to Poland and France in initial deportations. Emigration or flight became virtually impossible. In February 1941 a Jewish woman from Vienna feared for her parents: ‘We know now that there is no age limit, everyone is being sent away, little children, the very old, even sick people are taken from the hospital and transported somewhere, into uncertainty, into misery.’ The volume documents the increasing isolation of the German and Czech Jews and the plans and ambitions of their persecutors in the period leading up to the systematic deportations.
Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/
Executive editor: Klaus-Peter Friedrich; English-language edition prepared by: Elizabeth Harvey, Russell Alt-Haaker, Johannes Gamm, Georg Felix Harsch, Dorothy Mas, and Caroline Pearce
This volume, the first of three in the series focusing on the persecution and murder of the Jews in occupied Poland, documents the developments from the attack on Poland in September 1939 up to July 1941. It covers the territories of western and northern Poland annexed to the Reich as well as the General Government. With the attack on Poland, around two million Polish Jews came under German rule. Jews were immediately subjected to stigmatization and humiliation, exposed to arbitrary acts of violence, deprived of their livelihoods, subjected to forced labour and forcibly displaced. In July 1940, a report by representatives of Polish Jews on the situation in the annexed territories of Poland sent to the US embassy in Berlin described a ‘downcast, stigmatized Jewish population’, terrorized and powerless in face of displacement, expulsions and the increasing incarceration of the Jewish population in ghettos, and it predicted that ‘the process of destruction is not yet complete’. The volume documents the drive by the occupiers systematically to confiscate the property of the Polish Jews, and the different, often chaotic and conflicting strategies for displacing Jews in the annexed territories and in the General Government. The volume shows a range of reactions by the non-Jewish population of Poland to the escalating persecution of the Polish Jews. It also shows the efforts by Jewish organizations to publicize their plight abroad, to withstand the onslaught on their communities and to manage daily life in the increasingly desperate conditions of the ghettos.
Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/
Executive editors: Katja Happe, Michael Mayer, and Maja Peers, with Jean-Marc Dreyfus; English-language edition prepared by: Caroline Pearce, Johannes Gamm, Georg Felix Harsch, and Dorothy Mas
In April-May 1940 the German Wehrmacht invaded Northern and Western Europe. The subsequent occupation of Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France brought the Jewish population of these countries – both established residents and refugees – under German control. From autumn 1941 in Luxembourg and from spring/summer 1942 in Belgium, the Netherlands and occupied France, Jews were required to wear the ‘Jewish star’ and many were subjected to forced labour. By mid-1942, deportations from Luxembourg and France to the ghettos and extermination camps in occupied Eastern Europe had already begun, while in the other occupied countries they were imminent. In April 1942 Alfred Oppenheimer, the Jewish elder in Luxembourg, wrote: ‘A dreadful fate hangs over our community again. The worst that can happen has now happened and the Poland transport is a certainty.’ This volume covers Norway and Western Europe during the period from the German invasion to mid 1942 (developments in Denmark for this period are documented in vol. 12) and records how Jews in these parts of Europe were excluded from society and stripped of their rights, livelihoods, and property. Letters and diary entries by the persecuted Jews detail life under German occupation and the attempts by many Jews to emigrate. The sources show how Jewish organizations sought to alleviate the impact of persecution, and how the German occupiers and local collaborators targeted Jews with increasingly stringent measures and clamped down on any form of resistance.
Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/
This source edition on the persecution and murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany presents in a total of 16 volumes a thematically comprehensive selection of documents on the Holocaust. The work illustrates the contemporary contexts, the dynamics, and the intermediate stages of the political and social processes that led to this unprecedented mass crime. It can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and all other interested parties. The edition comprises authentic testimony by persecutors, victims, and onlookers. These testimonies are furnished with academic annotations and the vast majority of them are published here for the first time in English.
Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/
Executive editor: Klaus-Peter Friedrich; English-language edition prepared by: Elizabeth Harvey, Russell Alt-Haaker, Johannes Gamm, Georg Felix Harsch, Dorothy Mas, and Caroline Pearce
This source edition on the persecution and murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany presents in a total of 16 volumes a thematically comprehensive selection of documents on the Holocaust. The work illustrates the contemporary contexts, the dynamics, and the intermediate stages of the political and social processes that led to this unprecedented mass crime. It can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and all other interested parties. The edition comprises authentic testimony by persecutors, victims, and onlookers. These testimonies are furnished with academic annotations and the vast majority of them are published here for the first time in English.
Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/
Executive editor: Ingo Loose; English-language edition prepared by: Elizabeth Harvey, Russell Alt-Haaker, Johannes Gamm, Georg Felix Harsch, Dorothy Mas, and Caroline Pearce
By 1941, most of the Jews in the Polish territories annexed to the Reich - Danzig-West Prussia, the Wartheland, District Bialystok, Zichenau (Ciechanów) and eastern Upper Silesia - were incarcerated in ghettos and camps: the largest ghettos were Litzmannstadt and Bialystok. This volume documents the situation in the ghettos, the deportations to extermination camps, the Jewish resistance in the ghettos and even at the extermination camp Kulmhof.
Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/
This volume documents the persecution and murder of Jews in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France between June 1942 and the end of the war. The sources describe the experiences of Jews who went into hiding, fled, or who were rounded up and deported to the extermination camps. They also record the strategies of the perpetrators and those who helped them, as well as the varying reactions of the non-Jewish majority.
