The chapter begins with a description of the multiple discriminatory legislation against the Jews enacted soon after the Nazi takeover in 1933. It then considers the ambivalent situation of the Jews in the following years, as told in the autobiography of the historian Peter Gay (Fröhlich), by then a high-school pupil in Berlin. While he and his family were only marginally affected by the Nazi acts of discrimination, most other Jews greatly suffered under this policy, as well as from the social exclusion associated with it and finally from the general economic hardship at the time. In fact, by the November (1938) Pogrom, Jews could no longer be seen as Germans. Could they still reflect German history – as they did throughout previous periods, according to this book? The chapter tries to handle this question by first briefly describing the history of the Holocaust and then dealing more fully with the historiography of this period, written since the end of the war till today.

Chapter 10 offers a wide-ranging examination of developments inside Germany from early 1943 to the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. After the major German defeat at Stalingrad, the Nazi regime announced a transition to a “Total War” footing, which involved a more thorough mobilization of women, university students, and youth for the war effort. The Allied air war against Germany intensified, inflicting widescale damage on German cities, and forcing German authorities to scramble to clear rubble and keep society functioning. Domestic resistance efforts intensified along a broad ideological spectrum but had little effect. The most notable instance of resistance was the failed attempt on July 20, 1944 to assassinate Hitler and have the army seize power. The end phase of the Nazi regime was characterized by the intensification of internally directed violence, the victims of which included foreign workers, Germans who wished to cooperate with the invading Allied armies in the West, and Jews who had managed to survive the Final Solution. The Volkssturm, a national militia created to help repel the invading forces, proved ineffectual. As Berlin was falling to the Red Army, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. The German surrender followed in early May.

In 1935, many Jews who self-identified as German found they were no longer classified as such under the Nuremberg Laws, which specified that all four grandparents must be Aryan and deprived Jews of the right to own wealth, to work in various professions, and to marry non-Jews. Kálmán, Straus, Gilbert, and Abraham all left Germany to avoid Nazi persecution. Others who faced no immediate threats were not unaffected by events: Künneke found that his wife was categorized as a ‘Mischling’ (a German-Jew hybrid in the Nazi pseudoscience of race) and was dismissed from his post for being unwilling to divorce her. Several well-known artists involved with operetta perished in concentration camps. Operettas of the Third Reich era did not travel to Britain and America the way they had done in the past.