Prologue to Annihilation

"Stephen H. Norwood reveals that tolerating territorial aggression was not the only way in which the United States and Great Britain appeased Nazi Germany. Norwood chronicles the myriad ways the two nations accepted Germany's persecution of its Jewish citizens, and thus enabled the policies that eventually lead to their extermination."—Laurel Leff, Northeastern University, author of Buried by the Times

"In this meticulously researched and eloquently written study, Stephen H. Norwood shows how the persecution of Jews in Germany in the 1930s was much more severe than is commonly understood today, that much more was known in America and England about the persecution of the Jews than is generally realized, and that the American and British governments both chose to pursue appeasement rather than face up to the dangers of Hitler. Once again, Norwood has broken important new ground in the study of international responses to the Holocaust."—Rafael Medoff, The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, author of FDR and the Holocaust

"The American and British Jewish communities have often been castigated for their timidity in the face of Nazis. During the 1930s, however, many thousands of American and British Jews participated in demonstrations and boycotts and demanded that their political representatives take some action against Nazism.  These efforts were, for the most part, futile but this is a story that deserves to be told and Stephen Norwood tells it brilliantly in all its melancholy detail."—Benjamin Ginsberg, David Bernstein Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Author of How the Jews Defeated Hitler

"Norwood's reader-friendly volume richly details how the US and Great Britain's appeasement of Hitler led to WW II and laid the foundation for the Holocaust"—Choice

"Prologue to Annihilation is a compelling account of the early anti-Jewish actions of Ger- many's Third Reich and the efforts in the United States and Great Britain to counter those abuses."—Allan M. Winkler, The Journal of American History

"Prologue to Annihilation is the first to provide such sustained detail and is thus an extremely valuable contribution to the historiography."—Tony Kushner, American Jewish History