Waldeck im Dritten Reich

Gerhard Menk’s recent account of Waldeck—part of Prussian Hessen-Nassau since 1929, thereafter a bastion of National Socialism and especially the SS—deserves to be required reading. Menk confronts, with refreshing honesty, almost eighty years after 1933 (he admits too late), very uncomfortable generational truths consciously pushed aside by the locals. Just to page through the brief factual biographical appendix (pp. 276–307) tells the reader more than earlier textbooks. Menk’s critique is, however, a product of patient long-term work, with his fellow senior archivists in the Marburg and Wiesbaden state archives, for the official series of the Commission for the History of the Jews in Hessen. Begun in 1975, with Ernst Noam and the late Wolf Arno Kropat’s documentation, Juden vor Gericht 1933–1945, there are two other noteworthy precursors to Menk: Neun Hundert Jahre Geschichte der Juden in Hessen (vol. 6, 1983), and Kropat’s telling analysis, with selected documents, of Hessen-Nassau’s Reichkristallnacht (vol. 15, 1997). In 1933, the percentage of Jews in Hessen-Nassau was 1.82, and, given their position as village traders, this reached some 10 per cent in several Hessian rural communities

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