Bound upon a wheel of fire

by John Van Houten Dippel

Why so many German Jews appeared reluctant to leave their homeland and escape the Nazi terror is one of the great unsolved questions of the Holocaust. Theories abound: the vagaries of Hitler's Jewish policy during the 1930s did not clearly foreshadow the Final Solution; Jews expected to survive this period of German anti-Semitism as they had others throughout the centuries; those who tried to escape were denied immigration visas all over the world. While there is some truth in all these responses, according to John Dippel they are more ex post facto rationalizations than explanations. In this revelatory book he examines diaries, letters, and other documents written before 1939 in an attempt to discover an answer uncolored by hindsight. . Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire is the story of six prominent figures in the German Jewish community who chose to stay on under the Nazis - the chief rabbi of Berlin, the editor of the leading Zionist newspaper, a renowned international financier, a Nobel P