Götz Aly

The groundbreaking work by Jewish poet, thinker, and historian H. G. Adler on the deportation of Jews from Germany is now available again in bookstores—accompanied by a detailed introduction by historian Götz Aly on the long history of the book’s creation, a little-known work that remains unsurpassed to this day.

After more than four years of imprisonment in various concentration camps, H. G. Adler was liberated by U.S. troops in 1945. He then devoted himself to the task of comprehensively documenting the conditions that made mass murder possible: The workings of the multi-tiered German bureaucracy, from the Reich Security Main Office all the way down to the village mayor, and the overwhelmingly “lukewarm and cowardly” behavior of the Germans, who “participated, often insatiably, in the enjoyment of the benefits freed up by the ‘Solution’ and ‘Final Solution’—
often insatiably.” Looking to the future, Adler warned against treating people merely “as objects,” merely “as statistically analyzable factors”—no longer governing people, but merely administering them.

In his 2025 book *How Could This Have Happened? *,Prof. Dr. Götz Aly described in detail the National Socialists’ methods of rule. This evening, drawing on Adler’s book, he will speak in particular about the deportation of Heidelberg’s Jews.