ABSTRACT
At all times or history, the synagogue of 1938 was a house of God and a chamber of prayer for the community. Yet since the spring of 1933 and the Nuremberg race laws of 1935 as the Jewish minority became more and more sorely afflicted, the synagogue had been a symbol of Jewish life in Germany, even for those who took no part in religious life. The truth is that 267 synagogues were razed to the ground or destroyed; thousands of shops and dwellings were devastated. The truth is that a great many Germans disapproved of the crimes and wrongs; by the same token, there were a great many others who learned of nothing or almost of nothing at the time. The striking antithesis between the technico-economic modernity of the old imperial Germany on the one hand and its politico-social reactionary spirit on the other had by no means been overcome when that authoritarian state suddenly collapsed in 1918.
