The survival of Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe has become a major topic in Holocaust studies, both within national historiographies and, more recently, in comparative terms as well. In this book, Richard N. Lutjens Jr. examines the survival strategies adopted by members of the largest Jewish community in Germany: the one in Berlin. In so doing, he relies heavily on the accounts of the Jews who survived “underground” and, where possible, allows the sources to speak for themselves while at the same time providing the necessary background information and analysis along the way. The introduction bears all the hallmarks of the doctoral thesis from which the book derives, and perhaps could have done more to set the scene by discussing the social, economic, and political position of the Jewish community in the German capital in the later 1930s. Likewise, while the trajectory of Nazi anti-Semitic legislation is well known, its cumulative effects altered the circumstances of Berlin's bourgeois Jewish population differentially, leaving some apparently equally placed members of the community much more vulnerable than others. In discussing the period before the deportations began in the autumn of 1942, it might also have been useful to discuss the mechanics of everyday life in terms of the Jews’ relationships to the city's bureaucratic machinery, the provision and nature of its identity card and ration card system, and the myriad other restrictions that limited their later freedom of action.

The book contains four substantive chapters, titled “Submerging,” “Surviving,” “Living,” and “Surfacing,” which provide a more or less chronological approach to the subject. In the chapter on submerging, the author looks at the ways in which those who did try to go underground made their decisions, showing how problematic this could be and how difficult it was to put into action. This is discussed purely in relation to circumstances in Berlin—Lutjens might have related his conclusions to work on Jewish communities elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe, where similar analyses exist on the push and pull involved. The same holds true of Lutjens's discussion of a different form of escape, that of suicide, which has attracted interest from sociologists as well as historians. The stories of how individuals came to “submerging” themselves highlight the uncertainties of what deportation might mean and how the possibilities for going underground were addressed. The author shows clearly how the Gestapo tactics for rounding up the Jews changed from formal call-ups to police raids of known addresses to increase the likelihood of all those slated for removal being found. Lutjens also links this to the arrival of Viennese Gestapo agents in October 1942, who brought with them these “new arrest and deportation ‘methods’ ” (53).

In the chapter on surviving, the author highlights all the issues that would be familiar to scholars of Jewish survival and rescue in other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe, such as finding trustworthy helpers and hiding places, dealing with permanent threat and insecurity, and obtaining ration cards and appropriate identity papers. Added to these myriad problems were those specific to living in Berlin because the capital was a prime target for Allied air raids. The testimonies and records used provide a clear picture of the successful tactics used by the Gestapo in tracking down the Jews hiding out in the city, which included the employment of Jewish informers to betray their coreligionists. This is an under-researched topic, and the stories of the individuals identified here provide us with appropriate comparatives for the cases known to have happened in other countries, as well as to other infamous individuals such as Icek Glogowski in Brussels and Ans van Dijk in Amsterdam.

The chapters on living and surfacing are similarly informative and provide a wealth of detail on how Jews in hiding managed to survive life underground, and in some cases even managed to add an element of normality to their everyday existence. To the author's credit, he also carries his narrative forward, beyond the liberation, to show how some of the Jewish “U-Boats” resurfaced as the war came to an end and how they fared in a shattered and occupied Berlin.

In sum, this is a welcome study of Jewish hiding and survival inside Nazi Germany and one that adds some new dimensions to our understanding of how a small group of Jews managed to survive years of persecution and pursuit in the Nazi heartland. What is missing from the analysis is any real engagement with the existing literature on Jewish survival elsewhere in Europe. Using these sources would have provided a better comparative framework, highlighting the experiences common to Jews in hiding across occupied Europe as well as foregrounding the particularities of being “submerged” in Berlin.