Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

Although it would be a few more years before the Nazis started systematically exterminating Jews in concentration camps, by the spring of 1938 any official in Switzerland who bothered to read the newspapers knew unsettling scenes like this were occurring with growing regularity, as Hitler set about making the German Reich Judenrein—“cleansed of Jews.” (“The approximately 500,000 Jews still remaining in Germany are supposed to be expelled somehow,” the Swiss foreign envoy in Paris reported after speaking with the German secretary of state, Ernst von Weizsäcker, in 1938. “If, as has been the case up to now, no country is willing to accept them, they face extermination in the short or long term.”)