In December 2013, after years of exhaustive search, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum received more than four hundred pages of diary notes written by one of the most prominent Nazis, the Party's chief ideologue and Reich minister for the occupied Soviet territories Alfred Rosenberg. By combining Rosenberg's diary notes with additional key documents and in-depth analysis, this book shows Rosenberg's crucial role in the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish policy. In the second half of 1941 the territory administered by Rosenberg became the region where the mass murder of Jewish men, women, and children first became a systematic pattern. Indeed, months before the emergence of German death camps in Poland, Nazi leaders perceived the occupied Soviet Union as the area where the "final solution of the Jewish question" could be executed on a European scale. Covering almost the entire duration of the Third Reich, these previously inaccessible sources throw new light on the thoughts and actions of the leading men around Hitler during critical junctures that led to war, genocide, and Nazi Germany's final defeat.

This volume sheds light on the transformed post-Holocaust relationship between Catholics and Jews. Once implacable theological foes, the two traditions have travelled a great distance in coming to view the other with respect and dignity. Responding to the horrors of Auschwitz, the Catholic Church has undergone a "reckoning of the soul," beginning with its landmark document Nostra Aetate and embraced a positive theology of Judaism including the ongoing validity of the Jewish covenant. Jews have responded to this unprecedented outreach, especially in the document Dabru Emet. Together, these two Abrahamic traditions have begun seeking a repair of the world. The road has been rocky and certainly obstacles remain. Nevertheless, authentic interfaith dialogue remains a new and promising development in the search for a peace.

The Belated Witness stakes out an original place within the field of recent work on the theory and practice of literary writing after the Holocaust. Drawing in productive and unsettling ways from converging work in history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, the book asks how the events of the Holocaust force us to alter traditional conceptions about human experience, as well as the way we can now talk and write about such experiences. Rather than providing a mere account of an outside or inside reality, literature after the Holocaust sets itself a more radical task: it testifies to unspeakable experiences in a specific mode of address, a call or summons to another in whose sole power resides the possibility of a future response to such testimonies of world-historical trauma.

This is the story of a child, uprooted from a loving and protected home, who was sent to strangers in a strange country to fend for herself. In this memoir, Anne L. Fox has written about her childhood in Nazi Germany and her subsequent departure to England with the Kindertransport. As a 12-year-old girl, she came to live with a Jewish family in London until the outbreak of World War II when she was evacuated to the countryside. Although she missed her parents terribly, her stay in the village of Swineshead in Bedfordshire was a happy one. Her village education came to an end when she turned 14, however, and she was sent to the Bunce Court Boarding School in Shropshire. After graduating, she worked in a public library in Cardiff where she met her husband, a soldier in the US Army. She came to America as a GI bride and has made her home in Philadelphia.

The present volume contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the "XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman" at Comenius University Bratislava in January 2019. The conference was organized against anti-gender narratives and related attacks on academic freedom and women's rights currently all too prevalent in East-Central Europe. The papers presented at the conference and in this volume focus, to a significant extent, on this region. They touch upon numerous points concerning gendered experiences of World War II and the Holocaust. By purposely emphasizing the female experience in the title, we encourage to fill the lacunae that still, four decades after the enrichment of Holocaust studies with a gendered lens, exist when it comes to female experiences.

Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War is a history of art during wartime that analyzes images in various media that circulated widely and were encountered daily by Spaniards on city walls, in print, and in exhibitions. Tangible elements of the nation's past"monuments, cultural property, and art-historical icons"were displayed in temporary exhibitions and museums, as well as reproduced on posters and in print media, to rally the population, define national identity, and reinvent distant and recent history. Artists, political-party propagandists, and government administrators believed that images on the street, in print, and in exhibitions would create a community of viewers, brought together during the staging of public exhibitions to understand their own roles as Spaniards. This book draws on extensive archival research, brings to light unpublished documents, and examines visual propaganda, exhibitions, and texts unavailable in English. It engages with questions of national self-definition and historical memory at their intersections with the fine arts, visual culture, exhibition history, tourism, and propaganda during the Spanish Civil War and immediate post-war period, as well as contemporary responses to the contested legacy of the Spanish Civil War. It will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual and cultural history, history, and museum studies.

The war that won't die charts the changing nature of cinematic depictions of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, a significant number of artists, filmmakers and writers - from George Orwell and Pablo Picasso to Joris Ivens and Joan Miro - rallied to support the country's democratically-elected Republican government. The arts have played an important role in shaping popular understandings of the Spanish Civil War and this book examines the specific role cinema has played in this process. The book's focus is on fictional feature films produced within Spain and beyond its borders between the 1940s and the early years of the twenty-first century - including Hollywood blockbusters, East European films, the work of the avant garde in Paris and films produced under Franco's censorial dictatorship. The book will appeal to scholars and students of Film, Media and Hispanic Studies, but also to historians and, indeed, anyone interested in why the Spanish Civil War remains such a contested political topic. -- .

This book offers a survey of the encounter between the Third Reich and European Jewry. Pointing out the difficulties historians face in interpreting the ever-expanding documentary record, it includes treatment of the role of non-Germans in the Holocaust, consideration of the much-debated nexus between the Holocaust and modernity, and discussion on how 'the Holocaust' developed as a distinct historical topic. Fully updated, this new third edition incorporates the latest scholarly findings with expanded treatment of gendered aspects of the Holocaust, the Holocaust's world historical contexts, the long-term history of Jewish-Christian relations, and thinking about the Holocaust's contemporary relevance, as well as additional documents reflecting recent archival discoveries. Offering a concise narration that appeals to both the intellect and the emotions, the book enables students to gain a real understanding of the events of this catastrophic time. Including a useful selection of original documents (many never before anthologised in English), a chronology, glossary, and 'who's who', David Engel's book will be welcomed by anyone trying to get to grips with this complex and far-reaching subject.

The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering leaders

Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one—a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca, and Teheran, talking to each other of war, politics, the burden of command, their health, their wives, and their children.

Born in the nineteenth century and molders of the twentieth and twenty-first, Roosevelt and Churchill had much in common. Sons of the elite, students of history, politicians of the first rank, they savored power. In their own time both men were underestimated, dismissed as arrogant, and faced skeptics and haters in their own nations—yet both magnificently rose to the central challenges of the twentieth century. Theirs was a kind of love story, with an emotional Churchill courting an elusive Roosevelt. The British prime minister, who rallied his nation in its darkest hour, standing alone against Adolf Hitler, was always somewhat insecure about his place in FDR’s affections—which was the way Roosevelt wanted it. A man of secrets, FDR liked to keep people off balance, including his wife, Eleanor, his White House aides—and Winston Churchill.

Confronting tyranny and terror, Roosevelt and Churchill built a victorious alliance amid cataclysmic events and occasionally conflicting interests. Franklin and Winston is also the story of their marriages and their families, two clans caught up in the most sweeping global conflict in history.

Meacham’s new sources—including unpublished letters of FDR’s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few surviving people who were in FDR and Churchill’s joint company—shed fresh light on the characters of both men as he engagingly chronicles the hours in which they decided the course of the struggle.

Hitler brought them together; later in the war, they drifted apart, but even in the autumn of their alliance, the pull of affection was always there. Charting the personal drama behind the discussions of strategy and statecraft, Meacham has written the definitive account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.

Forced labor was a key feature of Nazi anti-Jewish policy and shaped the daily life of almost every Jewish family in occupied Europe. This book systematically describes the implementation of forced labor for Jews in Germany, Austria, the Protectorate, and the various occupied Polish territories. As early as the end of 1938, compulsory labor for Jews had been introduced in Germany and annexed Austria by the labor administration. Similar programs subsequently were established by civil administrations in the German-occupied Czech and Polish territories. At its maximum extent, more than one million Jewish men and women toiled for private companies and public builders, many of them in hundreds of now often-forgotten special labor camps. This study refutes the widespread thesis that compulsory work was organized only by the SS, and that exploitation was only an intermediate tactic on the way to mass murder or, rather, that it was only a facet in the destruction of the Jews.

Jewish Responses to Persecution: 1941-1942 is the third volume in a five-volume set published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that offers a new perspective on Holocaust history. Incorporating historical documents and accessible narrative, this volume sheds light on the personal and public lives of Jews during a period when Hitler's triumph in Europe seemed assured, and the mass murder of millions had begun in earnest. The primary source material presented here, including letters, diary entries, photographs, transcripts of speeches, newspaper articles, and official memos and reports, makes this volume an essential research tool and curriculum companion.

Responding to the increasingly influential role of Hannah Arendt's political philosophy in recent years, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance, critically engages with Arendt's understanding of totalitarianism. According to Arendt, the main goal of totalitarianism was total domination; namely, the virtual eradication of human legality, morality, individuality, and plurality. This attempt, in her view, was most fully realized in the concentration camps, which served as the major "laboratories" for the regime. While Arendt focused on the perpetrators' logic and drive, Michal Aharony examines the perspectives and experiences of the victims and their ability to resist such an experiment. The first book-length study to juxtapose Arendt's concept of total domination with actual testimonies of Holocaust survivors, this book calls for methodological pluralism and the integration of the voices and narratives of the actors in the construction of political concepts and theoretical systems. To achieve this, Aharony engages with both well-known and non-canonical intellectuals and writers who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Additionally, she analyzes the oral testimonies of survivors who are largely unknown, drawing from interviews conducted in Israel and in the U.S., as well as from videotaped interviews from archives around the world. Revealing various manifestations of unarmed resistance in the camps, this study demonstrates the persistence of morality and free agency even under the most extreme and de-humanizing conditions, while cautiously suggesting that absolute domination is never as absolute as it claims or wishes to be. Scholars of political philosophy, political science, history, and Holocaust studies will find this an original and compelling book.

This book deals with one of most controversial issues of the Spanish Civil War (1936-9): the 'Red Terror'. Approximately 50,000 Spaniards were extrajudicially executed in Republican Spain following the failure of the military rebellion in July 1936. This mass killing of 'fascists' seriously undermined attempts by the legally constituted Republican government to present itself in foreign quarters as fighting a war for democracy. This study, based on a wealth of scholarship and archival sources, challenges the common view that executions were the work of criminal or anarchist 'uncontrollables'. Its focus is on Madrid, which witnessed at least 8,000 executions in 1936. It shows that the terror was organized and was carried out with the complicity of the police, and argues that terror was seen as integral to the antifascist war effort. Indeed, the elimination of the internal enemy - the 'Fifth Column' - was regarded as important as the war on the front line.

'Today with the Red Army captive and disarmed, the Nationalist [nacionales] troops have achieved their final military objectives. The war is over.' With these two sentences, on 1 April 1939, General Franco announced that his writ ran across the whole of Spain. His words marked a high point for those who had flocked to Franco's side and since the start of the Civil War in July 1936 had carried out what they regarded as the steady occupation of the country. The history of this occupation remains conspicuous by its absence and the term occupation lies discredited for many historians. The danger of leaving the history of the occupation unexplored, however, is that a major process designed to control the conquered population remains in the shadows and, unlike many other European countries, the view of occupation as an imposition by outsiders remains unchallenged. Friend or Foe? explores how Francoist occupation saw members of the state and society collaborate to win control of Spanish society. At the heart of the process lay the challenging task in civil war of distinguishing between supporter and opponent. Occupation also witnessed a move from arbitrary violence towards selecting opponents for carefully graded punishment. Such selection depended upon fine-grained information about vast swathes of the population. The massive scale of the surveillance meant that regime officials depended on collaborators within the community to furnish them with the information needed to write huge numbers of biographies. Accordingly, knowledge as a form of power became as crucial as naked force as neighbours of the defeated helped define who would gain reward as a friend and who would suffer punishment as a foe.

Though it has been nearly seventy years since the Holocaust, the human capacity for evil displayed by its perpetrators is still shocking and haunting. But the story of the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry is not all we should remember. Stealth Altruism tells of secret, non-militant, high-risk efforts by "Carers," those victims who tried to reduce suffering and improve everyone's chances of survival. Their empowering acts of altruism remind us of our inherent longing to do good even in situations of extraordinary brutality. Arthur B. Shostak explores forbidden acts of kindness, such as sharing scarce clothing and food rations, holding up weakened fellow prisoners during roll call, secretly replacing an ailing friend in an exhausting work detail, and much more. To date, memorialization has emphasized what was done to victims and sidelined what victims tried to do for one another. "Carers" provide an inspiring model and their perilous efforts should be recognized and taught alongside the horrors of the Holocaust. Humanity needs such inspiration.

Though it has been nearly seventy years since the Holocaust, the human capacity for evil displayed by its perpetrators is still shocking and haunting. But the story of the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry is not all we should remember. Stealth Altruism tells of secret, non-militant, high-risk efforts by "Carers," those victims who tried to reduce suffering and improve everyone's chances of survival. Their empowering acts of altruism remind us of our inherent longing to do good even in situations of extraordinary brutality. Arthur B. Shostak explores forbidden acts of kindness, such as sharing scarce clothing and food rations, holding up weakened fellow prisoners during roll call, secretly replacing an ailing friend in an exhausting work detail, and much more. To date, memorialization has emphasized what was done to victims and sidelined what victims tried to do for one another. "Carers" provide an inspiring model and their perilous efforts should be recognized and taught alongside the horrors of the Holocaust. Humanity needs such inspiration.

Valencia has traditionally been seen as somewhat exceptional within Spain: a prosperous, agricultural export-oriented economy dominated by small- and medium-sized farmers. This tranquil image of Levante feliz contrasts sharply with those of rebellious, proletarian Barcelona, or impoverished, feudal Andalusia, with which the CNT and the Spanish anarchist movement is most closely associated. However, this new study shows that Valencia in the 1920s and 1930s was anything but tranquil. The vertiginous growth of the CNT between 1918 and 1920 led to the province being a major target of government repression. The situation there was considered by one Interior Minister as more worrying than in Barcelona. Later, in the 1930s, urban Valencia became the focus of a fierce struggle between hard-line revolutionaries linked to the anarchist FAI and more moderate trade unions, whilst numerous local insurrections broke out in rural areas of the province. Eventually, these two factions would form an uneasy truce in time to lead the Valencian left in the battle to overcome the military coup of July 1936 and secure this vital economic region for the Republican side. In providing the first English-language study of this important movement, Dr Purkiss fills a significant gap in the historiography of the Spanish left. Drawing on a wide range of previously underused primary sources, he shows that not only was Valencia a hugely important source of anarchist support, but that the local movement was far more radical than has previously been thought. He thus provides a vital insight into the origins of the revolutionary and anti-clerical violence which swept the province in the early months of Civil War, introducing us to the 'expropriators' and 'men of action' whose activities terrified bourgeois Valencia in the 1930s. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

W. H. Auden and Hannah Arendt belonged to a generation that experienced the catastrophic events of the mid-twentieth century, and they both sought to respond to the enormity of the novel phenomena they witnessed. "Regions of Sorrow" explores the remarkable affinity between their works. As incisive exponents and uncompromising proponents of the insuperable condition of plurality, Auden and Arendt give voice to an unexpected and inconspicuous messianism--a messianism in which contingency, frailty, and faultiness are neither rejected nor scorned but celebrated as the indispensable elements of what Auden calls "anxious hope."
Beginning with an examination of Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" and Auden's "Age of Anxiety," which both conclude with meditations on Nazi terror, the author turns to an unprecedented presentation of Arendt's "Human Condition" in terms of Jewish-German messianism, and concludes with Auden's "In Praise of Limestone," which lays out the frail and faulty space in which messianism breaks free from apocalyptic forecasts.

Meet Renee and Herta, two sisters who faced the unimaginable - together. This is their true story. RENEE: I was ten years old then, and my sister was eight. The responsibility was on me to warn everyone when the soldiers were coming because my sister and both my parents were deaf. I was my family's ears. As Jews living in 1940s Czechoslovakia, Renee, Herta and their parents were in immediate danger when the Holocaust came to their door. As the only hearing person in her family, Renee had to alert her parents and sister whenever the sound of Nazi boots approached their home so they could hide. But soon their parents were tragically taken away, and the two sisters went on the run, desperate to find a safe place to hide. Eventually they, too, would be captured and taken to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Communicating in sign language and relying on each other for strength in the midst of illness, death and starvation, Renee and Herta would have to fight to survive the darkest of times. This gripping memoir, told in a vivid 'oral history' format, is a testament to the power of sisterhood and love, and now more than ever a reminder of how important it is to honour the past, and keep telling our own stories. A memoir of the Holocaust Perfect for those who want to learn more about the experiences of people during this period of time in history Written with Joshua M. Greene, a renowned Holocaust scholar.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"The essays probe the growing vocabulary of Holocaust imagery and address the various ways (in varied venues) that the Holocaust has been remembered, represented, and received."--"American Jewish History"

"This challenging collection of essays which also contains some stunning art work, should find a place in every library that deals with the memory of the Holocaust and its effects that transcend the generation."
--"Conservative Judaism"

"(Makes) a cogent case for a deeper, unmastered engagement with Holocause trauma."--"Journal of Jewish Studies"

Impossible Images brings together a distinguished group of contributors, including artists, photographers, cultural critics, and historians, to analyze the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented in and through paintings, architecture, photographs, museums, and monuments.

Exploring frequently neglected aspects of contemporary art after the Holocaust, the volume demonstrates how visual culture informs Jewish memory, and makes clear that art matters in contemporary Jewish studies. Accepting that knowledge is culturally constructed, Impossible Images makes explicit the ways in which context matters. It shows how the places where an artist works shape what is produced, in what ways the space in which a work of art is exhibited and how it is named influences what is seen or not seen, and how calling attention to certain details in a visual work, such as a gesture, a color, or an icon, can change the meaning assigned to the work as a whole.

Written accessibly for a general readership and those interested in art and art history, the volume also includes 20 colorplates from leading artists Alice Lok Cahana, Judy Chicago, Debbie Teicholz, and Mindy Weisel.

Christopher R. Browning's shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews-now with a new afterword and additional photographs. Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever. While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition. Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today. "A remarkable-and singularly chilling-glimpse of human behavior...This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."-Newsweek

Holocaust Education in Lithuania is based on a six-year, multi-sited ethnographic research project that was conducted to analyze the effects of the controversial policies of Holocaust education which were introduced as conditions of membership for access into post-Soviet western alliances. In order to understand how individuals take up transnational policies and programs intended to support democratization, Beresniova delves into rarely discussed issues. She looks at the means through which inherent cultural and political assumptions have had an impact on the ways in which memory and history are used in educational programs. She also scrutinizes the motivating factors for involvement in Holocaust education, such as the importance of community building, civic activism beyond the topic of the Holocaust, and the perceived power of the international community in dictating domestic education policy guidelines. Beresniova contends that educators must acknowledge the political and cultural elements in Holocaust education programs and policies, or risk undermining their own efforts. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, education, history, political science, and European studies.

Among the different Luftwaffe units that formed the Legion Condor, one in particular stands out for its important Naval Air contribution: the Aufklarungsstaffel See/88 (AS./88 or the Maritime Reconnaissance Squadron), although it was also officially designated the Seefliegerstaffel AS./88 or Naval Air Squadron AS./88. AS./88 Squadron employed the following aircraft during the Spanish campaign: Heinkel He 59 bomber, torpedo and reconnaissance seaplanes; He 60 close reconnaissance/bomber seaplanes; He 115 A-0 reconnaissance/torpedo seaplanes; and float-fitted Junkers Ju 52s. Presented here are previously unpublished aspects regarding the operations and war service of both the personnel and aircraft of AS./88, which, during a period of three years, participated directly in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 on the Nationalist side.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Merce Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish history.

How did the Nazis imagine their victory and the subsequent 'Thousand-Year Reich'? Between 1939 and 1943, the Nazi imperial Utopia started to take shape in the conquered areas of Eastern Europe, brutally emptied of their inhabitants, who were displaced, reduced to slavery and, in the case of the Jews and a considerable number of Slavs, murdered. This Utopia had its engineers, its agencies and its pioneers (no fewer than 27,000 Germans, most of them young). It aroused fervent support. In the Thousand-Year Reich, with its borders extended by conquest, a racially pure community would soon live a life of peace and prosperity, in total harmony. In this book, renowned historian Christian Ingrao draws on extensive archival material to shed new light on this movement and explain how it could prove so appealing, examining the coherence and the inner contradictions of the activities undertaken by the different institutions, the careers of the women and men who played a part in them, and the ambitious plans that were drawn up. Ingrao adopts a social anthropological point of view to investigate the emotions aroused by the Nazi dream, and describes not just the hatred and the anxieties it fed on but also the joys and expectations it created - two sides of a single reality. As we learn from the terrible violence unleashed across the region of Zamosc, on the border between Poland and Ukraine, the hopes of the Nazis became a nightmare for the native populations. This important work reveals an aspect of Nazism that is often overlooked and greatly extends our understanding of the general framework in which the Holocaust was realized. It will find a wide audience among students and scholars of modern German history and among a broad general readership.