Prague

1940 — 1st edition. Folio. Newspaper. Illustrated throughout. Includes many advertisements and numerous personal family announcements. Following the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938, Jewish life in Germany and Czechoslovakia was even further curtailed and all remaining Jewish newspapers were shut down by the government. In their place, the Nazi Party ordered the creation of a single, new Jewish newspaper, "Das Jüdische Nachrichtenblatt, " that would be directly under Gestapo control. It was published concurrently in Berlin, Vienna and Prague and was occupied to a large extent with announcing the ever-increasing number of anti-Semitic discriminations, orders and exclusions imposed by the Reich government. Over the course of its history, the editors of the Jüdische Nachrichtenblatt were Leo Kreindler (1938-42) and Willi Pless (1942-43) . The Berlin edition ran from the 23rd November, 1938 until the final issue of 4th June 1943. The Prague edition continued until 1945. In a ghoulish twist of Nazi irony, Gentiles were forbidden from reading the Jüdische Nachrichtenblatt yet the newspaper's targeted readership, the Jews, were literally hounded to their deaths by the very authorities who presided over the newspaper's ownership! See Reiner Burger, Von Goebbels Gnaden: "Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt" 1938-1943 (2001) . A mixed collection of 102 issues from Berlin and Prague sold at auction in 2015 for 9225.00 USD. These issues were at one point bound, but the binding was at some point removed. The newsprint is brown and quite fragile, with edgwear and old dampstains, but there is generally little text loss, except to a few letters on the lower outer margins of the final 10 issues. Now housed in an acid-free sleeved portfolio, with each issue in a separate clear sleeve for easy protected viewing. Fair condition, but very rare, very important, and very powerful. (kh-5-47)