Description
In 1932, Irene Scheffler Seiler, a vivacious, young photographer, arrived in Nuremberg from her provincial hometown and rented an apartment from Leo Katzenberger, the wealthy owner of a chain of shoe stores. The two became friends. From time to time he gave her presents of cigarettes and chocolates, and the neighbors began to talk. In ordinary times the rumors would have lead to nothing. But Irene and Leo were not living in ordinary times. The Nazis were in power and Nuremberg was the epicenter of the early promulgation and enforcement of race laws that dictated what Jews could and could not do.The gossip eventually resulted in formal charges and a trial in 1942. The vicious, ambitious presiding Nazi judge, Oswald Rothaug, convicted Irene and sentenced her to two years of labor. Leo Katzenberg was condemned to death, and on June 3, 1942, he was beheaded.The Maiden and the Jew is a minute reconstruction of this human drama and a portrait of everyday life under the Nazi Party. This account, backed by thorough research, details how ordinary citizens behaved as the Nazis consolidated their power.
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IN 1932, IRENE SCHEFFLER, a vivacious, beautiful, young photographer, moved from the provincial town where she’d been raised to the city of Nuremberg. Her father wanted someone to keep an eye on her as she attempted to make her way in the world, and his old friend and business colleague, Leo Katzenberger, an urbane German Jew, agreed to help. He found her an apartment in a building he owned that adjoined the offices where he worked each day.A friendship developed between Irene and the sixty-year-old Leo. Other tenants in the apartment house started to gossip — there was talk of signals at the window and kissing in the stairwell. Soon the neighborhood teemed with rumors. Harmless gossip turned into a death sentence when Nazi judges condemned Katzenberger for racial offenses, and on June 3, 1942, Katzenberger was beheaded. Irene was convicted of perjury and sentenced to two years of labor. After the war, she testified against Oswald Rothaug, the judge who ordered Katzenberger’s execution, at the Nuremberg Trials. (In the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremberg, Judy Garland played the part of Irene and Burt Lancaster the Nazi judge.)The Maiden and the Jew chronicles how, bit by bit and sometimes chunk by chunk, a government, with the full cooperation of many of its citizens, stripped away the most basic rights of others, all in the name of patriotism.
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