Legislating the Holocaust

"From April 1933 to early 1943, Bernhard Loesener served as the official "Jewish Expert" in the German Third Reich's Ministry of the Interior, the government body responsible for the Nazi's legislative assault on German Jewry. In that role, he personally drafted much of the legislation, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 preeminently, that gradually dispossessed, disenfranchised, and dehumanized the Jews of Nazi Germany. During the first six years of Nazi rule, the seminal period of government-sponsored anti-Semitism, Loesener frequently kept the minutes of crucial inter-ministerial conferences concerned with the "Jewish Question." As observer and participant, his experiences were virtually unparalleled. In 1950, Loesener penned a memoir that sought to explain, and justify, his actions during the ten-year escalation of Nazi oppression that resulted, to Loesener's professed horror, in the Final Solution. It was published in 1961, in German, by the journal Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte. It has never before appeared in English, until now - in Legislating the Holocaust."--BOOK JACKET.