Review by Choice Review
This is an intriguing examination of how an original, signed copy of Hitler's infamous Nuremberg Laws, which defined German citizenship and categorized Germany's Jewish population as noncitizens, landed in a vault at Southern California's Huntington Library. The library was founded in 1919 by a wealthy entrepreneur, and one of its missions was to collect "books, manuscripts, and pictures illustrating the intellectual development of the English-speaking peoples." In 1945, General George Patton, whose family had close connections to the Huntingtons, gave the library a copy of the Nuremberg Laws found by US GIs in southern Germany; it remained there unacknowledged publicly until 1999. Platt and O'Leary (both, emer., California State Univ., Sacramento) weave a tangled tale of US and German racism, autobiographical introspection, and historical analysis to demonstrate the pervasive anti-semitism and keen interest in eugenics on both sides of the Atlantic. Although repetitive in places, the book nonetheless raises important questions about the uses and abuses of history and memory by piecing together the reasons for the Huntington's secrecy in its retention of the documents, Patton's ideological reasons for giving the Nuremberg Laws to the library, and the authors' own biographical rationale for pursuing the story while on sabbatical (and researching other topics) at the Huntington. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. M. Deshmukh George Mason University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
