A survey of Jewish-Gentile relations in Frankfurt am Main, Giessen, and Geisenheim on the eve of and during the Nazi dictatorship. Gives a demographic, social, and historical portrait of the three Jewish communities and a picture of Jewish-Gentile interaction in the Weimar years. Even in these years some anti-Jewish tendencies became evident, e.g. hostility toward the "Ostjuden, " broad popular indifference toward the Jews in the of the growing Nazi movement. Ch. 5-7 present a case study of Nazi anti-Jewish policy in Hesse, focusing on Jewish-Gentile relations there in the Nazi period. States that the persecution of Jews was facilitated by the indifference and passivity of ordinary Germans. A latent antisemitism (though not "eliminationist") combined with apathy and acquiescence to a brutal dictatorship in the conditions of war and paved the way to the mass murder. Dwells on the legal exclusion of Jews in 1933-38, on the "Kristallnacht" pogrom, and on the deportations of Hessian Jews in 1941-43.