Germany, under National Socialist rule, issued thousands of anti-Semitic decrees. Some are well known such as the notorious boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, the quickly followed "Law of the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service," denying employment to Jewish civil servants and restricting the practice of Jewish lawyers and doctors. Paramount, however, were the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that formally stripped Jews of their German citizenship, defined who was an Aryan and prohibited marriages and sexual contact between ethnic Germans and Jews. What did not received headlines was the Nazi policy of Jewish containment, eliminating the Jew from society by taking away means of earning a living, prohibiting children from attending the public schools and universities, limiting freedom of movement and curtailments due to enforced curfews. An even lesser known restriction was The "Law on Tenancies with Jews" imposed on April 30, 1939, forcing the Jewish population to give up their personal residences and crammed into a limited number of specially designated houses throughout Germany, the so-called Judenhaus, the Jews' House, or sometimes called "small ghetto." This book focusses on one such Judenhaus located in the city of Mannheim where some of the author's family resided. The narrative identifies and follows the fate of 80 individuals who were residents of this apartment building, reflecting their experiences during the pogrom of Kristallnacht in November 1938 and the massive October 1940 deportation of all Jews in the area to an internment camp from which most were ultimately transported to death at Auschwitz.
About the Author: Werner L. Frank obtained degrees in Mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois. After service in the U.S. Army. he began his professional career in the aerospace industry programming large-scale digital computers in support of the military's ballistic missile and space exploration programs. In 1962, he co-founded the software company Informatics, Inc. and ended his career as a key executive with Sterling Software, Inc. Capping his career as a software executive, Frank has published technical papers related to numerical analysis and software engineering, written a topical column for a number of computer-oriented periodicals and authored a book dealing with software economics: "Critical Issues in Software Development", published by John Wiley & Sons in 1983. His business career has led to writing the novel "Corporate War: Poison Pills and Golden Parachutes", available from Amazon and in eBook format from Amazon Kindle. Since retirement, he has been active in genealogy having amassed an extended family database of 36,000 names dating to the thirteenth century. This research led to the publication of his family's story in "Legacy: The Saga of a German-Jewish Family Across Time and Circumstance", published by Avotaynu Foundation Inc. in 2003. Next, Frank turned his writing to a little-known event that foreshadowed the Holocaust, chronicling the October 1940 deportation of over six hundred thousand German Jews to the south of France. In the book "Curse of Gurs: Way Station to Auschwitz", Frank identifies seven-hundred family members who were among the victims that ended up in Camp de Gurs located in Vichy France. He follows their fate, most losing their lives in the internment camp or being deported to Auschwitz in 1942. As a sequel to the story of Gurs internment, Frank's current book turns attention to a related topic, the sequestering of German Jewry in dedicated buildings. Such a domicile was called Judenhaus (Jews' House) where scores of Jews were crammed into limited spaces. The book's focus is on one such Judenhaus and follows the fate of its 80 residents.