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"Holocaust Restitution compiles a group of essays from leading authorities and participants in the Holocaust restitution movement. This book gathers different voices from across the Holocaust restitution movement and does an ex post facto review of the litigation. Holocaust Restitution presents an up-to-date analysis of the Holocaust restitution movement and presents the drama of Holocaust restitution from the perspective of almost all the major players, including plaintiff counsel, defense counsel, judges, diplomats, administrators, corporate defendants, and Jewish representatives. It also includes outside viewpoints from respected commentators, including historians, academics, and Holocaust survivors. It is remarkably comprehensive, does not shy away from controversy, and thoughtfully reflects on the Holocaust and its implications for future international human rights adjudication."
--"Stanford Journal of International Law"

aHolocaust Restitution compiles a group of essays from leading authorities and participants in the Holocaust restitution movement. This book gathers different voices from across the Holocaust restitution movement and does an ex post facto review of the litigation. Holocaust Restitution presents an up-to-date analysis of the Holocaust restitution movement and presents the drama of Holocaust restitution from the perspective of almost all the major players, including plaintiff counsel, defense counsel, judges, diplomats, administrators, corporate defendants, and Jewish representatives. It also includes outside viewpoints from respected commentators, including historians, academics, and Holocaust survivors.It is remarkably comprehensive, does not shy away from controversy, and thoughtfully reflects on the Holocaust and its implications for future international human rights adjudication.a
--"Stanford Journal of International Law"

"Bazyler and Alford have produced an essential tool for understanding the righteous struggle to win restitution for Holocaust victims and their heirs."
--Richard Z. Chesnoff, author of "Pack of Thieves: How Hitler & Europe Plundered the Jews & Committed The Greatest Theft In History"

"This excellent volume makes a significant contribution both to legal studies and to the history of the Holocaust. The editors deserve special praise for including chapters by Holocaust survivors, assuring that their often-forgotten voices are not lost within the great debate about Holocaust restitution."
--Marilyn J. Harran, Stern Chair in Holocaust History, Chapman University

"An invaluable text for students and scholars as well as a fascinating read for all those concerned with Holocaust and genocide issues in all disciplines and on behalf of all victims."
--Israel W. Charny, President, International Association of Genocide Scholars

"This unique collection is important in bringing together the perspectives of legal practitioners, activists, archivists and historians, negotiators, and survivors. It is remarkably comprehensive. . . . The editors have not shied away from controversy."
--David Cesarani, Research Professor in History, Royal Holloway, University of London

"If there is a 'final frontier' in understanding the Holocaust, it is the assessment of international litigation, compensation, and reparations claims. This extraordinary group ofcontributions thoughtfully reflects on the Holocaust, past and present, as well as what many would call 'imperfect justice.'"
--Stephen Feinstein, Professor of History and Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota

"This collection of essays on Holocaust restitution litigation provides a wonderful overview of the subject. Bazyler and Alford have assembled the 'A list' and the result is a most authoritative and complete treatment."
--Professor William A. Schabas, Director, Irish Centre for Human Rights

Holocaust Restitution is the first volume to present the Holocaust restitution movement directly from the viewpoints of the various parties involved in the campaigns and settlements. Now that the Holocaust restitution claims are closed, this work enjoys the benefits of hindsight to provide a definitive assessment of the movement.

From lawyers and state department officials to survivors and heads of key institutes involved in the negotiations, the volume brings together the central players in the Holocaust restitution movement, both pro and con. The volume examines the claims against European banks and against Germany and Austria relating to forced labor, insurance claims, and looted art claims. It considers their significance, their legacy, and the moral issues involved in seeking and receiving restitution.

Contributors: Roland Bank, Michael Berenbaum, Lee Boyd, Thomas Buergenthal, Monica S. Dugot, Stuart E. Eizenstat, Eric Freedman and Richard Weisberg, Si Frumkin, Peter Hayes, Kai Henning, Roman Kent, Lawrence Kill and Linda Gerstel, Edward R. Korman, Otto Graf Lambsdorff, David A. Lash and Mitchell A. Kamin, Hannah Lessing and FiorentinaAzizi, Burt Neuborne, Owen C. Pell, Morris Ratner and Caryn Becker, Shimon Samuels, E. Randol Schoenberg, William Z. Slany, Howard N. Spiegler, Deborah Sturman, Robert A. Swift, Gideon Taylor, Lothar Ulsamer, Melvyn I. Weiss, Roger M. Witten, Sidney Zabludoff, and Arie Zuckerman.

When German troops come to the small village of Belzyce, Poland, in 1939, nine-year-old Jakub Szabmacher's world is forever changed. At first the humiliations inflicted by the Germans seem small, but the conditions worsen until eventually Jakub's family and much of his village are murdered, and he is sent to various concentration camps in Poland and Germany, where he struggles to survive the terrible conditions of camp life. Finally liberated in 1945 from the concentration camp in Flossenburg, Germany, Jakub is befriended by American troops and with their help brought to the United States, where he takes the name Jack Terry. Coauthor Alicia Nitecki, whose grandfather was also imprisoned at Flossenburg, uses Terry's personal memories to tell young Jakub's story, as well as unpublished memoirs, private letters, and interviews with former inmates of the Flossenburg concentration camp and the townspeople of Belzyce and Flossenburg. Part history, part autobiography. "Jakub's World offers an anguished young boy's perspective on the Holocaust.

The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors' accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive's over 1,500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.

Exploring five key texts from the emerging canon of second generation writing, this exciting new study" "brings together theories of autobiography, trauma, and fantasy to understand the how traumatic family histories are represented. In doing so, it demonstrates the continuing impact of familial and community Holocaust trauma, and the need for a precise, clearly developed theoretical framework in which to situate these works. This book will appeal to final year undergraduates and postgraduate students, as well as scholars in literary and Holocaust-related fields, and an audience with personal and professional interests in the 'second generation'.

The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt by Avinoam J. Patt analyzes how the heroic saga of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was mythologized in a way that captured the attention of Jews around the world, allowing them to imagine what it might have been like to be there, engaged in the struggle against the Nazi oppressor. The timing of the uprising, coinciding with the transition to memorialization and mourning, solidified the event as a date to remember both the heroes and the martyrs of Warsaw, and of European Jewry more broadly. The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw includes nine chapters. Chapter 1 includes a brief history of Warsaw from 1939 to 1943, including the creation of the ghetto and the development of the Jewish underground. Chapter 2 examines how the uprising was reported, interpreted, and commemorated in the first year after the revolt. Chapter 3 concerns the desire for first-person accounts of the fighters. Chapter 4 examines the ways the uprising was seized upon by Jewish communities around the world as evidence that Jews had joined the struggle against fascism and utilized as a prism for memorializing the destruction of European Jewry. Chapter 5 analyzes how memory of the uprising was mobilized by the Zionist movement, even as it debated how to best incorporate the doomed struggle of Warsaw's Jews into the Zionist narrative. Chapter 6 explores the aftermath of the war as survivors struggled to come to terms with the devastation around them. Chapter 7 studies how the testimonies of three surviving ghetto fighters present a fascinating case to examine the interaction between memory, testimony, politics, and history. Chapter 8 analyzes literary and artistic works, including Jacob Pat's Ash un Fayer, Marie Syrkin, Blessed is the Match, and Natan Rapoport's Monument to the Ghetto Fighters, among others. As this book demonstrates, the revolt itself, while described as a ""revolution in Jewish history,"" did little to change the existing modes for Jewish understanding of events. Students and scholars of modern Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and European studies will find great value in this detail-oriented study.

How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe's Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.

In Hitler's Shadow War, World War II scholar Donald McKale contends that Hitler's persecution and murder of the Jews, Slavs, and other groups was his primary effort during the war, not the conquest of Europe. According to McKale, Hitler and the Nazi leadership used the military campaigns of the war as a cover for a genocidal program that centered around the Final Solution. Hitler continued to commit extensive manpower and materials to this 'shadow war' even when Germany was losing the battles of the war's closing years. McKale explores the origins of the anti-Semitism that spread like wildfire through Germany before and during the Nazis' rise to power, and the failure of the Allies to perceive and stop the Holocaust even as they were defeating the Germans in combat.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Filming the End of the Holocaust considers how the US Government commissioned the US Signal Corps and other filmmakers to document the horrors of the concentration camps during the April-May 1945 liberation. The evidence of the Nazis' genocidal actions amassed in these films, some of them made by Hollywood luminaries such as John Ford and Billy Wilder, would go on to have a major impact at the Nuremberg Trials; they helped to indict Nazi officials as the judges witnessed scenes of torture, human experimentation and extermination of Jews and non-Jews in the gas chambers and crematoria. These films, some produced by the Soviets, were integral to the war crime trials that followed the Holocaust and the Second World War, and this book provides a thorough, close analysis of the footage in these films and their historical significance. Using research carried out at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the US National Archives and the film collection at the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University, this book explores the rationale for filming the atrocities and their use in the subsequent trials of Nazi officials in greater detail than anything previously published. Including an extensive bibliography and filmography, Filming the End of the Holocaust is an important text for scholars and students of the Holocaust and its aftermath.

Collective memory carries the past into the present. This book traces the influence of collective memory in international relations (IR). It locates the origins of a country's memory within the international environment and inquires how memory guides states through time in world politics. Collective memory, as such, not only shapes countries and their international interactions, but the international sphere also plays an essential role in how countries approach the past. Through in-depth examinations of both domestic and international landscapes in empirical cases, the book explores four ways in which collective memory can manifest in IR: as a country's political strategy; as its public identity; as its international state behaviour; and finally, as a source for its national values. A comparative case study of (West) Germany and Austria illustrates how significantly differing interpretations of the Nazi legacy impacted their respective international policies over time. Taken together, this book investigates whether collective memory influences global outcomes and how and why it matters for IR.

The Nazis put a remarkable amount of effort into anti-Semitic propaganda, intending to bring ordinary Germans around to the destructive ideology of the Nazi party. Julius Streicher (1885-1946) spearheaded many of these efforts, publishing anti-Semitic articles and cartoons in his weekly newspaper, Der Sturmer, the most widely read paper in the Third Reich. Streicher won the close personal friendship of Hitler and Himmler, and drew deserved attacks from the world press. Bytwerk's biography examines Streicher's use of propaganda techniques, and the hate literature towards Jews that continued to appear after his death, bearing his influence.

This book analyzes sensationalized Nazi and Holocaust representations in Anglo-American cultural and political discourses. Recognizing that this history is increasingly removed from contemporary life, it explains how irreverent representations can help rejuvenate the story for successive generations of new learners. Surveying seventy-five-years of transatlantic activities, the work erects counterposing categorizes of "constructive and destructive memorializing," providing scholars with a new framework for elucidating both this history and its historicization.

Arguing against the prevailing view that Holocaust survivors (encouraged by a new and flourishing culture of 'witnessing') have come forward only recently to tell their stories,Writing the Holocaust examines the full history of Holocaust testimony, from the first chroniclers confined to Nazi-enforced ghettos to today's survivors writing as part of collective memory. Zoe Waxman shows how the conditions and motivations for bearing witness changed immeasurably. She reveals the multiplicity of Holocaust experiences, the historically contingent nature of victims' responses, and the extent to which their identities - secular or religious, male or female, East or West European - affected not only what they observed but also how they have written about their experiences. In particular, she demonstrates that what survivors remember is substantially determined by the context in which they are remembering.

Gene A. Plunka argues that drama is the ideal art form to revitalize the collective memory of Holocaust resistance. Drama of and about the Holocaust can be staged worldwide, thereby introducing the Shoah to diverse audiences. Moreover, theatre affects audiences emotionally, subliminally, or intellectually (sometimes simultaneously) in a direct way that many other art forms cannot match. This comparative drama study examines a variety of international plays - some quite well-known, others more obscure - that focus on collective or individual defiance of the Nazis.

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando-the "special squads," composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process-buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these "Scrolls of Auschwitz," which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp's liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

"Ambiguous Memory" examines the role of memory in the building of a new national identity in reunified Germany. The author maintains that the contentious debates surrounding contemporary monumnets to the Nazi past testify to the ambiguity of German memory and the continued link of Nazism with contemporary German national identity. The book discusses how certain monuments, and the ways Germans have viewed them, contribute to the different ways Germans have dealt with the past, and how they continue to deal with it as one country. Kattago concludes that West Germans have internalized their Nazi past as a normative orientation for the democratic culture of West Germany, while East Germans have universalized Nazism and the Holocaust, transforming it into an abstraction in which the Jewish question is down played. In order to form a new collective memory, the author argues that unified Germany must contend with these conflicting views of the past, incorporating certain aspects of both views.

Providing a topography of East, West, and unified German memory during the 1980s and the 1990s, this work contributes to a better understanding of contemporary national identity and society. The author shows how public debate over such issues at Ronald Reagan's visit to Bitburg, the renarration of Buchenwald as Nazi and Soviet internment camp, the Goldhagen controversy, and the Holocaust Memorial debate in Berlin contribute to the complexities surrounding the way Germans see themselves, their relationship to the past, and their future identity as a nation. In a careful analysis, the author shows how the past was used and abused by both the East and the West in the 1980s, and how these approaches merged in the 1990s. This interesting new work takes a sociological approach to the role of memory in forging a new, integrative national identity.

For decades, historians have debated how and to what extent the Holocaust penetrated the German national consciousness between 1933 and 1945. How much did "ordinary" Germans know about the subjugation and mass murder of the Jews, when did they know it, and how did they respond collectively and as individuals? This compact volume brings together six historical investigations into the subject from leading scholars employing newly accessible and previously underexploited evidence. Ranging from the roots of popular anti-Semitism to the complex motivations of Germans who hid Jews, these studies illuminate some of the most difficult questions in Holocaust historiography, supplemented with an array of fascinating primary source materials.

Questions shape the Holocaust's legacy. 'What happened to ethics during the Holocaust? What should ethics be, and what can it do after the Holocaust?' loom large among them. Absent the overriding or moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust could not have happened. Its devastation may have deepened conviction that there is a crucial difference between right and wrong; its destruction may have renewed awareness about the importance of ethical standards and conduct. But Birkenau, the main killing center at Auschwitz, also continues to cast a disturbing shadow over basic beliefs concerning right and wrong, human rights, and the hope that human beings will learn from the past. This book explores those realities and the issues they contain. It does so not to discourage but to encourage, not to deepen darkness and despair but to face those realities honestly and in a way that can make post-Holocaust ethics more credible and realistic. The book's thesis is that nothing human, natural or divine guarantees respect for the ethical values and commitments that are most needed in contemporary human existence, but nothing is more important than our commitment to defend them, for they remain as fundamental as they are fragile, as precious as they are endangered.

Commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of "monument fatigue", a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. This book examines the Holocaust via three sites of murder by the Nazis: the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography, the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered, allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present. This leads to an examination of the role of the environment, or, more particularly, the ways in which the natural environment, co-opted in the process of killing, becomes a medium for remembrance.