Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi's reflections on what he called "the gray zone," a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain--lest resolution deceive us--will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible.

Contemporary scholars in all disciplines have long recognized that the Shoah is a critical challenge to Christianity and Western civilization, as well as a watershed event in Jewish history. Steven L. Jacobs has completed two complementary works dealing with contemporary religious responses to the Shoah, one from the Christian perspective, the other from the Jewish perspective. This work focuses on the Christian responses to the Holocaust. Contents: Revisionism and Theology, Harry James Cargas; Evil and Existence: Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited in Light of the Shoah, Alan Davies; Suffering, Theology, and the Shoah, Alice Lyons Eckardt; Mysterium Tremendum: Catholic Grapplings with the Shoah and its Theological Implications, Eugene J. Fisher; In the Presence of Burning Children: The Reformation of Christianity after the Shoah, Douglas K. Huenke; How the Shoah Affects Christian Belief, Thomas A. Idinopulos; A Contemporary Religious Response to the Shoah: The Crisis of Prayer, Michael McGarry; The Shoah: Continuing Theological Challenge for Christianity, John T. Pawlikowski; Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Shoah: Getting Beyond the Victimizer Relationship, Rosemary Radford Reuther; and Asking and Listening, Understanding and Doing: Some Conditions for Responding to the Shoah Religiously, John K Roth.

Since the end of Communism, Jews from around the world have visited Poland to tour Holocaust-related sites. A few venture further, seeking to learn about their own Polish roots and connect with contemporary Poles. For their part, a growing number of Poles are fascinated by all things Jewish. Erica T. Lehrer explores the intersection of Polish and Jewish memory projects in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz in Krakow. Her own journey becomes part of the story as she demonstrates that Jews and Poles use spaces, institutions, interpersonal exchanges, and cultural representations to make sense of their historical inheritances.

Teaching the Holocaust is an important but often challenging task for those involved in modern Holocaust education. What content should be included and what should be left out? How can film and literature be integrated into the curriculum? What is the best way to respond to students who resist the idea of learning about it? This book, drawing upon the latest research in the field, offers practical help and advice on delivering inclusive and engaging lessons along with guidance on how to navigate through the many controversies and considerations when planning, preparing, and delivering Holocaust education. Whether teaching the subject in History, Religious Education, English or even in a school assembly, there is a wealth of wisdom which will make the task easier for you and make the learning experience more beneficial for the student. Chapters include: The aims of Holocaust education Ethical issues to consider when teaching the Holocaust Using film and documentaries in the classroom Teaching the Holocaust through literature The role of online learning and social media The benefits and practicalities of visiting memorial sites With lesson plans, resources, and schemes of work which can be used across a range of different subjects, this book is essential reading for those that want to deepen their understanding and deliver effective, thought-provoking Holocaust education.

The Spanish Civil War is one of the most studied events in modern European history. Its origins, that is to say the politics of the Second Republic (1931-1936), have been much debated. The republican period has been much idealised and in particular the myth of Spanish democracy beset by fascism, of which Franco was its leading figure, has been much cultivated. But was this really the case? Recently historians of the Republic have proposed a new and non-ideological perspective on the 1930s. Spain's path was at once different yet in many ways similar to that of Europe during the inter-war period. The Spanish Second Republic Revisited brings together leading and innovative specialists to analyse the main obstacles to the consolidation of democracy in Spain and to debate the principal stereotypes of the traditional historiography of both left and right. The issues addressed include: the breakdown of democracy; whether the CEDA was an opportunity or a threat; the centrist appeal under the Republic; how the elections were viewed and conducted; the transformation of fascism; new revelations about the Communist party; the politics of exclusion at the local level; the perceived necessity for repression; new perspectives on the Civil Guard; the role of intellectuals in the Republic; and revisionism and sectarian history. The Spanish Second Republic Revisited offers a new and dynamic vision of why Spanish democracy failed to consolidate itself and why it finally fell into the terror of civil war. The book is essential reading for all those interested in modern European history.

Recently, there has been a major shift in the focus of historical research on World War II towards the study of the involvements of scholars and academic institutions in the crimes of the Third Reich. The roots of this involvement go back to the 1920s. At that time right-wing scholars participated in the movement to revise the Versailles Treaty and to create a new German national identity. The contribution of geopolitics to this development is notorious. But there were also the disciplines of history, geography, ethnography, art history, archeology, sociology, and demography that devised a new nationalist ideology and propaganda. Its scholars established an extensive network of personal and institutional contacts. This volume deals with these scholars and their agendas. They provided the Nazi regime with ideas of territorial expansion, colonial exploitation and racist exclusion culminating in the Holocaust. Apart from developing ideas and concepts, scholars also actively worked in the SS and Wehrmacht when Hitler began to implement its criminal policies in World War II. This collection of original essays, written by the foremost European scholars in this field, describes key figures and key programs supporting the expansion and exploitation of the Third Reich. In particular, they analyze the historical, geographic, ethnographical and ethno-political ideas behind the ethnic cleansing and looting of cultural treasures.

Classroom study of the Holocaust evokes strong emotions in teachers and students. Teaching, Learning, and the Holocaust assesses challenges and approaches to teaching about the Holocaust through history and literature. Howard Tinberg and Ronald Weisberger apply methods and insights of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to examine issues in interdisciplinary teaching, with a focus on the community college setting. They discuss student learning and teacher effectiveness and offer guidance for teaching courses on the Holocaust, with relevance for other contexts involving trauma and atrocity.

Containing an almost entirely new selection of texts, this second edition of The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath presents a critical and important study of the Holocaust. Many of the pieces challenge conventional analyses and preconceived notions about the Holocaust, whether regarding genocidal precedents and the centrality of antisemitism, the relationship between ideological motivation and economic calculations, or the timing of the decision on the Final Solution. Starting with the background of the Holocaust and focusing on colonial violence, antisemitism and scientific racism as being at the root of the Final Solution, the book then examines the context of the decision to unleash the genocide of the Jews. Several powerful texts then provide readers with a close look at the psychology of a perpetrator, the fate of the victims - with a particular emphasis on the role of gender and the murder of children - and the impossible choices made by Jewish leaders, educators, and men recruited into the Nazi extermination apparatus. Finally, there is an analysis of survivors' testimonies and the creation of an early historical record, and an inquiry into post-war tribunals and the development of international justice and legislation with a view to the larger phenomenon of modern genocide before and after the Holocaust. Complete with an introduction that summarises the state of the field, this book contains major reinterpretations by leading Holocaust authors along with key texts on testimony, memory, and justice after the catastrophe. With brief discussions placing each essay in historical and scholarly context, this carefully selected compilation is an ideal introduction to the topic and essential reading for all students of the Holocaust.

Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between "communist falsification" of history and the "repressed authentic" interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe. The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in the communist countries, arguing that the predominance of an antifascist agenda and the acknowledgment of the Jewish catastrophe were far from mutually exclusive. The interactions included acts of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Detailed case studies describe how both individuals and institutions were able to use anti-fascism as a framework to test and widen the boundaries for discussion of the Nazi genocide. The studies build on the new historiography of communism, focusing on everyday life and individual agency, revealing the formation of a great variety of concrete, local memory practices.

This edited collection delves into the horrors of November 1938 and to what degree they portended the Holocaust, demonstrating the varied reactions of Western audiences to news about the pogrom against the Jews. A pattern of stubborn governmental refusal to help German Jews to any large degree emerges throughout the book. Much of this was in response to uncertain domestic economic conditions and underlying racist attitudes towards Jews. Contrasting this was the outrage expressed by ordinary people around the world who condemned the German violence and challenged the policy of Appeasement being advanced by Great Britain and France towards Adolf Hitler's Nazi German government at the time. Contributors employ multiple media sources to make their arguments, and compare these with official government records. For the first time, a collection on Kristallnacht has taken a truly transnational approach, giving readers a fuller understanding of how the events of November 1938 were understood around the Western world.

In recent years, a lively debate has developed in Poland on the question of what responsibility the Poles share for the mass murder of the Jews, which took place largely on Polish soil. This debate was sparked off by the showing in Poland of Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah , which revealed how deeply-rooted anti-Jewish prejudice could still be found in the Polish countryside. Anti-semitism is something which Poland has preferred to forget. But before the Second World War hostility to the Jews was widespread and this climate of pervasive anti-semitism may have facilitated the Nazis' murderous plans. But Poles now, with great courage, are facing this dark side of their past. This book, translated and edited by a leading British historian of Poland, Antony Polonsky, is a major contribution to the history of the Holocaust. It gathers together the most important contribution to the current debate, revealing the agony many Poles feel about their lack of action during the war.

This interdisciplinary study intergrates historiographical, literary and cultural methodologies in its focus on a little known corpus of testimonial accounts published by French women deported to Nazi camps. Comprising epistemological and literary analyses of the accounts and an examination of the construction of deportee identities, it will interest those working in the fields of modern French literature, genre, women's studies and the Holocaust.

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. -- .

When a military coup provoked civil war in Spain in July 1936, many thousands of people around the world rallied to provide humanitarian aid. Britons were no exception. Collective efforts in Britain to provide aid for the Spanish Republic were vast in both scope and effect. Whilst such enterprise has formed the focus of a few previous studies, some of the most dramatic stories of the Spanish war have yet to be uncovered. This book seeks to shed light on the activities of two separate ventures that played important roles in British medical and humanitarian aid to Spain the Scottish Ambulance Unit and Sir George Young's Ambulance Unit. The volunteer members of these teams (those who went out to Spain and those who supported them in Britain) earned the unstinting praise of the Spanish government for their selfless commitment to the cause, as well as winning the respect and gratitude of the citizens whose welfare they strove so selflessly to protect. Recently discovered documentation reveals previously undisclosed details of these remarkably altruistic and, indeed, heroic enterprises, clarifying the reasoning behind their creation and documenting their endeavours in Spain endeavours of key relevance to the wider history of the conflict. In Spain, the volunteers of the Scottish Ambulance Unit and the George Young Ambulance Unit offered a heartening and inspiring antithesis to the suffering they sought to relieve. They deserve to be remembered for what they embodied during those days of untold cruelty and destruction outstanding examples of man's humanity to man.

Classroom study of the Holocaust evokes strong emotions in teachers and students. Teaching, Learning, and the Holocaust assesses challenges and approaches to teaching about the Holocaust through history and literature. Howard Tinberg and Ronald Weisberger apply methods and insights of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to examine issues in interdisciplinary teaching, with a focus on the community college setting. They discuss student learning and teacher effectiveness and offer guidance for teaching courses on the Holocaust, with relevance for other contexts involving trauma and atrocity.

In the years of Nazi occupation of Hungary, Jews referred to their Gentile rescuers as "angels"--these seemingly ordinary men and women could hardly explain their actions. "I did what I had to do almost unconsciously, " said Lutheran pastor Gabor Sztehlos. Scrawny Mr. Kanalas, a disreputable janitor, could chase away Nazi thugs without hesitation--where did such behavior come from and why? Erzesebet David was a weak and indecisive woman--where did she find the will to forge Christian birth certificates? Charles Fenyvesi and members of his family were helped by these angels. Thousands of others were helped by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish consul whose actions surprised many who knew him. Fenyvesi writes as a historian and beneficiary of these modest angels who, with their actions in a time of absolute terror, soared while others crawled.

A crafted collection detailing western responses to the Balkan War We didn't know. For half a century, Western politicians and intellectuals have so explained away their inaction in the face of genocide in World War II. In stark contrast, Western observers today face a daily barrage of information and images, from CNN, the Internet, and newspapers about the parties and individuals responsible for the current Balkan War and crimes against humanity. The stories, often accompanied by video or pictures of rape, torture, mass graves, and ethnic cleansing, available almost instantaneously, do not allow even the most uninterested viewer to ignore the grim reality of genocide. And yet, while information abounds, so do rationalizations for non-intervention in Balkan affairs-the threshold of real genocide has yet to be reached in Bosnia; all sides are equally guilty; Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia is a threat to the West; it will only end when they all tire of killing each other-to name but a few. In This Time We Knew, Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic have put together a collection of critical, reflective, essays that offer detailed sociological, political, and historical analyses of western responses to the war. This volume punctures once and for all common excuses for Western inaction. This Time We Knew further reveals the reasons why these rationalizations have persisted and led to the West's failure to intercede, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, in the most egregious crimes against humanity to occur in Europe since World War II. Contributors to the volume include Kai Erickson, Jean Baudrillard, Mark Almond, David Riesman, Daniel Kofman, Brendan Simms, Daniele Conversi, Brad Kagan Blitz, James J. Sadkovich, and Sheri Fink.

Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima breaks new ground for history by exploring the relationship between comics as a cultural record, historiography, memory and trauma studies. Comics have a dual role as sources: for gauging awareness of the Holocaust and through close analysis, as testimonies and narratives of childhood emotions and experiences.

Born to fanatical religious zealots, deeply wounded by an unloving mother and a weak father whom he hated, Norman Bethune struggled throughout his life to overcome deep emotional scars. Sexually inhibited, given to outbursts of near psychopathic rage, this wounded doctor healed himself through healing others. In the mid-1930s, Bethune emerged as a renowned surgeon fighting the twin plagues of disease and fascism. When Franco launched his offensive, Bethune travelled quickly to Madrid, organised a mobile transfusion service and, often under fire, brought blood to the wounded at the front. David Lethbridge presents the complex of Bethune's unique activities and personality as they intersected with history: His engagement with medical, political, and military civil war players, and the Communist party; his cadaver blood transfusion work with the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, Hermann Muller; the profound effect that the Malaga atrocity had on him, and the role it played in his attempt to build "children's cities" outside war zones; his meeting with Graham Spry a high-ranking functionary in the Canadian social democratic party, the CCF; the unravelling of Bethune's romantic relationship with the Swedish journalist Kasja Rothman; the implications of his friendship with Henning Sorensen, a possibly secret member of the Communist Party of Canada, and the circumstances of the conspiracy that led to Bethune's ejection from Spain. The book concludes with Bethune's political tour throughout North America raising funds and public awareness on behalf of the Spanish Republic.

Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel prosecuted and jailed dozens of Holocaust survivors who had served as camp kapos or ghetto police under the Nazis. At last comes the first full account of the kapo trials, based on records newly declassified after forty years. In December 1945, a Polish-born commuter on a Tel Aviv bus recognized a fellow rider as the former head of a town council the Nazis had established to manage the Jews. When he denounced the man as a collaborator, the rider leapt off the bus, pursued by passengers intent on beating him to death. Five years later, to address ongoing tensions within Holocaust survivor communities, the State of Israel instituted the criminal prosecution of Jews who had served as ghetto administrators or kapos in concentration camps. Dan Porat brings to light more than three dozen little-known trials, held over the following two decades, of survivors charged with Nazi collaboration. Scouring police investigation files and trial records, he found accounts of Jewish policemen and camp functionaries who harassed, beat, robbed, and even murdered their brethren. But as the trials exposed the tragic experiences of the kapos, over time the courts and the public shifted from seeing them as evil collaborators to victims themselves, and the fervor to prosecute them abated. Porat shows how these trials changed Israel's understanding of the Holocaust and explores how the suppression of the trial records-long classified by the state-affected history and memory. Sensitive to the devastating options confronting those who chose to collaborate, yet rigorous in its analysis, Bitter Reckoning invites us to rethink our ideas of complicity and justice and to consider what it means to be a victim in extraordinary circumstances.

In continuation of a long-standing national self-image, Switzerland saw itself after 1945 as a "small neutral state," which because of its will to resist and a clever policy managed not to be drawn into the Second World War. However, this self-image has been the subject of an increasingly heated debate since the 1970s. The argument that Switzerland had above all been a "victim of developments in world politics," was increasingly confronted with the counter-argument that this country had aided the perpetrators in important - mainly economic - areas. More recently, dealings in looted gold and the issue of dormant bank accounts and stolen cultural assets have come into focus, in addition to inquiries into the mysterious disappearance of the assets of victims of persecution and extermination. In this situation, the Swiss Parliament and Government set up, at the end of 1996, an internationally composed Independent Commission of Experts whose five-year assignment was to investigate these allegations in their historical and legal context. Thanks to the unique privilege of access to archives, it was possible for the first time to overcome the obstacle of Swiss banking secrecy - believed to be insurmountable until then - and to extend the research to the archives of banks and other companies. A crucial document on 20th-centruy European history, this volume presents the full and final report of the Commission, illustrating Switzerland's predicament as a country not only with strong economic, but also close cultural ties to Germany, the neighbor that threatened the country's very survival. A multifaceted picture emerges of the challenges of those dark years - challenges that Switzerland met with varying degrees of success. Distributed for Pendo Verlag, Switzerland

The Holocaust and Representations of Jews examines how prominent national exhibitions in Europe represent the Jewish minority and its cultural and religious self-understandings, historically and today, in particular in the context of the Holocaust. Insights from the New Museology are brought to the field of Jewish Studies through an exploration of the visual representation of Jewish history and Jewish identifications in the display of photographs. Drawing on case studies which focus on the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London and the permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin, these themes become the prism through which aspects of historiography and the display of the 'otherness' of minorities are addressed. Casting new light on the issues surrounding the visual representation of Jews, the work of museum practitioners in relation to historical presentations and to the use of photographs in exhibitions, this book is an important contribution not only to the fields of Jewish Studies, Religion and History, but also to the study of the representation of minority-majority relations and the understanding of exhibition visits as an educational tool.

Atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust were photographed extensively. These images have been subjected to a perplexing variety of treatments: variously ignored, suppressed, distorted and--above all--exploited for propaganda purposes or political interest. This book examines the history of this aspect of the Holocaust--its aftermath and afterlife. Whether taken by Nazis or their collaborators, by Jews themselves, their sympathizers and the resistance movements in the occupied territories, or by Allied forces at the end of the war, Struk suggests that the provenance of these images has been seen as of secondary importance to their meaning and the political ends they have been used for--from the desperate attempts of the war-time underground, to the memorial museums of Europe, the US and Israel today. Struk recounts the history of the use and abuse of Holocaust photographs and asks whether or not these images can serve as "evidence," as true representations of the events they depict. The book is illustrated with a wide range of photographs, including some never before seen.

In the 1930s, the British public's emotional response to the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, including the bombing of Guernica, shaped the mass-politics of the age. Similarly, alleged German atrocities in World War I against the Belgians and the French had led to campaigns in Britain for donations to support the victims. Why then, was the British public seemingly less concerned with the treatment of Jews in Hitler's Germany? Outlining a 'hierarchy of compassion', Russell Wallis seeks to show how and why the Holocaust met initially with such a muted response in Britain. Drawing on primary source material, Wallis shows why the Nuremberg laws were reported without great protest, along with Kristallnacht and the creation of the Prague Ghetto. Even after the reality of the 'Final Solution' was announced by Antony Eden to the British Parliament in 1942, the Holocaust remained a footnote to the war effort. "Britain, Germany and the Road to the Holocaust" is a study of the British relationship with Germany in the period, and a dissection of British attitudes towards the genocide in Europe.