Nazi brutality so effectively silenced all opposition that one British resident, forced to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, reported in The Nineteenth Century and After that it had been left to foreign journalists, mostly American and English, to offer any protest.* ‘Hostile criticism from a German’, he wrote, ‘was suicide – more often economic, sometimes physical.’6 Yet even those most obviously at risk were totally unprepared for the Nazi onslaught. Abraham Plotkin, an American left-wing activist of Russian-Jewish origins, was astonished by the complacency of his German colleagues.
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