My late father, Werner Ludwig Schlesinger, was born in Berlin in 1910. Freshly graduated from university, he was completing his German Law Degree in the courts of Berlin in 1933. On the 1st April, all Jews were expelled from civil service and my father was beaten up. As he had a dual degree (journalism) he then began to work for a Jewish newspaper in Nazi Germany. He wrote these memoirs half a century later, and as I read through them again, I know how important it is for people today to see the parallels between what happened then and what is happening now (2020).
When I was twenty, I asked him to tell me about Germany. My father looked at me, and for the only time in my life, I saw tears run down his face. "I can't," he said.
A decade later, on the 50th anniversary of the anti-Jewish boycott, he sent me these memoirs. It is now just over thirty years, and I still have them. When you read them you will understand why.
You will also be able to make up your own mind whether our times are, indeed, parallel to those of the 30s when a civilized and sophisticated nation descended into a time of war and genocide.
