In 1973, Leonard and Edith Ehrlich chose to undertake a daunting task that would ultimately become their greatest work: conducting over thirty years of meticulous research to investigate and document Vienna's Jewish community and its leadership during the Holocaust. Inescapably, this path led them to the controversial figure of Benjamin Murmelstein, Viennese rabbi and later Judenrat council elder at Theresienstadt. As a youth in Vienna during the 1930s, Leonard Ehrlich grew up knowing Murmelstein, Ehrlich and his family would flee Vienna for the United States two months after the beginning of World War II; upon hearing postwar accounts of Murmelstein's involvement in Nazi atrocities, Ehrlich attempted to reconcile those accounts with his experience of Murmelstein as a thoughtful, devoted intellectual. Leonard and Edith Ehrlich thus began an intellectual magnum opus that would seek to interrogate a number of basic assumptions of Holocaust scholarship and critical thought. The Ehrlichs would conduct painstaking historical research not only in archives but also in interviews with subjects, not the least of whom was Murmelstein himself. This first volume focuses on the Jewish community of Vienna during the period from 1938 to 1942
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