Category: History-world-war-II
Schlaraffia, A Beacon of Laughter in Nazi Germany
After I wrote my three-part article about Jewish life in Nazi Germany, I began to wonder if there was any way for an assimilated German-Jewish man in the 1930s, a man like my grandfather, Hugo Lang, to escape his worries and concerns for an evening. A way to inject some fun into his serious life.…
The Long Path to Auschwitz – Part 3
Racial Hate Laws One Step at a Time, with Family Notes Part III: 1939 to 1941: Kristallnacht to the Final Solution Kristallnacht: A Nazi Pogrom On the night of November 9–10, 1938, a nationwide anti-Jewish riot swept across Germany. Twenty-four hours of state-sponsored terror ensued. Synagogues were burned while firefighters watched, Jewish-owned shops were vandalized…
The Long Path to Auschwitz – Part 2
Racial Hate Laws One Step at a Time, with Family Notes: An Article in Three Parts Part II: Summer 1935 to 1938: The Nuremberg Laws, Aryanization, Emigration, and the Anschluss. The Nuremberg Laws: A biological solution to assimilation. Less than a month after the closing ceremonies of the Berlin Olympics, the eighth annual Nuremberg Rally…
The Long Path to Auschwitz: A Three-Part Article
Racial Hate Laws One Step at a Time, with Family Notes Prologue WHEN I WROTE ASHES AND RUINS, the historical novel based on the true experiences of my grandmother Clara, I knew some regular readers of Holocaust novels would be puzzled by the absence of terror and misery. The majority of books about the Jewish…
A Question of Suffering and Denial: Pre-war Germany
A FEW WEEKS AGO, I was having tea with a good friend when she said she had some questions about my new book, Ashes and Ruins. Always eager to talk about my work, I assured her that she could ask me anything. “How much of the book is true?” she said. Having been asked this…
Nazi Policy and the Intermarriage and Mischling Dilemma
THE NUREMBERG RACE LAWS OF 1935 (see post, “How German Jews Lost Their Citizenship,” May 16, 2026) continued to be amended and fine-tuned for the next four years. Ever stricter, these laws codified Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy and gave the Nazi regime deadly control over the Jews living in Germany and the occupied countries. One of…
How German Jews Lost Their Birthright Citizenship
Originally published as Loss of Citizenship the Nuremberg Way on May 29, 2015 on my personal blog, this article has been slightly modified to make it more current. Also published on kathrynslattery.substack.com on 05/09/2026 * In the second chapter of Immigrant Soldier, Herman speeds toward home on his motorcycle, his mind a swirl of thoughts.…
How IBM Helped Hitler
Originally published here on April 14, 2015, as An Unexpected Answer Published to Substack on 04/18/2026 * Recently, a reader of Immigrant Soldier asked me an interesting question during an author presentation. “How did the Nazis find all the Jewish people, especially people like Herman’s family who didn’t practice the religion?” My first response was…
Policing a Police State
Some weeks ago, I wrote about the Nazi SA and promised to follow up with a discussion of the SS (the Schutzstaffel) and the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei). * AFTER HITLER CAME TO POWER, Germany became a totalitarian state that used a complex and brutal system of policing to enforce its policies. The SS was soon the…
Thugs in the Street: What was the Nazi SA?
Recently I read an article comparing ICE today with the German Sturmabteilung (SA) in the early years of Hitler’s Nazi government. (For the link, see below.) The content of the article was chilling, and I see the parallels clearly. After reading the article, I wondered if my readers were fully aware of the role the…