As a clerical informer summarised such views for the local Gestapo: ‘Yes, it’s deserved . . . everything avenges itself on earth.’ Thus, many people saw 1938 as the start of the German war against the Jews, which set in motion the chain of escalating mutual retaliation. By the late summer and autumn such hitherto rare admissions of German responsibility and guilt had spread to parts of Germany which had not been bombed at
