The end of a community

Karl Mistele's The End of a Community describes the fate of the Jews of the Bavarian city of Bamberg during the Hitler era. In vivid detail, often quoting from surviving documents, it relates the community's story from the pogrom night of November 9-10, 1938 to September 10, 1942 when an eastbound train left Bamberg station with the city's few-score remaining Jews, carrying them first to Theresienstadt and then to the death camps.

Particularly striking in this tragic record is the almost day-by-day account of how German officialdom, through an escalating series of regulations and restrictions, gradually but systematically dehumanized and dispossessed the city's Jews, leaving them stripped of their resources, demoralized and disoriented, unable to resist the end in store for them.

The story is all the more compelling because its main sources are documents drawn from the archives of various branches of Nazi officialdom, which fortuitously were left almost intact at the end of the war. Mistele's work, the first historical study to focus on one city in detailing how German Jewry was destroyed, tells a harrowing story.