'Practical work for our Führer'—Daily life during the Holocaust Summary and Analysis

Chapter 8 includes three sections and is brief. The first section, "Letters by Gendarmerie chief Fritz Jacob" presents four letters from Fritz Jacob to Lieutenant-General Querner, dated from April, 1941, through June, 1942. In essence, the letters are from a younger man seeking to maintain a friendship and relationship with an older, more-established man. The letters reveal certain details of typical life and also mention the mass executions of Jews. Jacob is full of hatred for Jews, whom he describes as "ape people" (p. 159). The letters are shocking in their casual juxtaposition of the facts of genocide with mentions of things such as a girlfriend's pay raise. Section 2, "A Gendarmerie Oberwachtmeister's photographs" presents five photographs of mass executions, four of them mass...