Category: History-world-war-II
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…
Why Did Jews Stay So Long in Nazi Germany?
READERS OF MY HISTORICAL NOVEL, Immigrant Soldier, have asked me why the two main characters remained in Germany after Hitler came to power. Indeed, along with a few kind words, one reader wrote in a review, “I really didn’t like Clara, because she stayed too long in Germany. Why didn’t she leave earlier?” This is…
Books Beyond Auschwitz
When I learned, at seventeen, of my father’s Jewish heritage, I flung myself headlong into reading about Judaism. (see my earlier post, Finding my Jewish Story.) Naturally, this discovery led me to read countless books about the Holocaust and World War II. . . . And finally, to writing two historical novels inspired by family stories…
Remember Kristallnacht
November 9, 2025, is the 87th Anniversary of Kristallnacht In the dark hours of the night of November 9, 1938, a Nazi-instigated pogrom (a violent attack on an ethnic or religious group with the aim of massacre or expulsion) erupted across Germany and Austria. This intense violence against Jews and the destruction of Jewish property lasted…