ABSTRACT
Baschwitz's last books for a larger audience were all about mass persecution and extermination. They were of course inspired by the mass persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, which later turned out to have indeed led to extermination. But Baschwitz's first monograph on persecution was published (under a pen name) at the beginning of the occupation, in the spring of 1941. Like his friend Presser and other historians, he chose at the time to focus on a comparable but slightly different set of historical events, as it was too risky to deal with the persecution of Jews and the rise of the Nazis directly.
