This memoir is about a Jewish baby born in the Krakow ghetto in November 1942, three years after Hitler conquered Poland, and, remarkably, escaping death-one of a mere one half of one percent of Jewish children in Poland who survived during the Nazi era. Her life was saved because her parents hid her with a Catholic family. Just as remarkably, her mother, still alive after suffering terribly through four of Hitler's camps, traveled for weeks back to Poland and found her again. The book also depicts the author's postwar challenges in Germany and America.

The notion of sexual sadism emerged from nineteenth-century alienist attempts to imagine the pleasure of the torturer or mass killer. This was a time in which sexuality was mapped to social progress, so that perversions were always related either to degeneration or decadence. These ideas were internalized in later Freudian views of the drives within the self, and of their repression under the demands of modern European civilization. Sadism was always presented as the barbarous past that lurked within each of us, ready to burst forth into murderous violence, crime, anti-Semitism, and finally genocide. This idea maintained its currency in European thought after the Second World War as Freudian-influenced accounts of the history of philosophy configured the Marquis de Sade as a kind of Kantian "superego" in a framework that viewed the Western Enlightenment as unraveled by its own inner demons. In this way, a straight line was imagined from the late eighteenth century to the Holocaust. These ideas have had an ongoing legacy in debates about sexual perversion, feminism, genocide representation, and historical memory of Nazism. However, recent genocide research has massively debunked assumptions that perpetrators of mass violence are especially sexually motivated in their cruelty. This book considers how the late twentieth-century imagination eroticized Nazism for its own ends, but also how it has been informed by nineteenth-century formulations of the idea of mass violence as a sexual problem.

This volume showcases important new research on World War II memory, both in the Soviet Union and in Russia today. Through an examination of war remembrance in its various forms-official histories, school textbooks, museums, monuments, literature, films, and Victory Day parades-chapters illustrate how the heroic narrative of the war was established in Soviet times and how it continues to shape war memorialization under Putin. This war narrative resonates with the Russian population due to decades of Soviet commemoration, which continued virtually uninterrupted into the post-Soviet period. Major themes of the volume include the use of World War II memory for political legitimation and patriotic mobilization; the striking continuities between Soviet and post-Soviet commemorative practices; the place of Holocaust memorialization in contemporary Russia; Putin's invocation of the war to bolster national pride and international prestige; and the relationship between individual memory and collective remembrance. Authored by an international group of distinguished specialists, this collection is ideal for scholars of Russia across a range of disciplines, including history, political science, sociology, and cultural studies.

This book explores the attitudes of the Spanish army officer corps towards the evolution of warfare during the early decades of the twentieth century, and their influence on the armies of the Spanish Civil War. It examines how the Spanish military coped with technological innovations such as the machine gun and the tank, how it adapted the armys battlefield doctrine to changes in warfare before the Civil War, and the influence of this doctrine on the outcome of the conflict. Of the different armed forces that fought in the Spanish Civil War, it is paradoxically the Spanish army that remains most forgotten - especially its military doctrine. Scholarship on the Spanish military in this period focuses on its politics, ideology and institutional reforms, touching upon 'hard' professional issues only superficially, if at all. Based on original research and using largely unstudied Spanish primary sources, this book fills a major scholarly gap in the history of the Spanish army and the Spanish Civil War.

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, the war was a diversion that Hitler used to draw attention away from his real goal, the Final Solution. 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.

When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, Vera Schiff and her family were sent to Theresienstadt. Touted as the "model ghetto" for propaganda purposes, as well as to deceive Red Cross inspectors, it was in fact a holding camp for famous Jews--in case the world was to inquire. For the rest, however, it was the last stop on the way to the gas chambers. Those "lucky" enough to remain faced slave labor, starvation and disease. Shiff's intimate narrative of endurance recounts her family's three years in Theresienstadt, the challenges of life under postwar communism, and her escape to the nascent and turbulent state of Israel.

This study investigates the relationship between Lothar-Gunther Buchheim (1918-2007), his bestselling 1973 novel Das Boot (The Boat), and West Germany's Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. As a war reporter during the Battle of the Atlantic, Buchheim benefitted from distinct privileges, yet he was never in a position of power. Almost thirty years later, Buchheim confronted the duality of his own past and railed against what he perceived to be a varnished public memory of the submarine campaign. Michael Rothberg's theory of the implicated beneficiary is used as a lens to view Buchheim and this duality. Das Boot has been retold by others worldwide because many people claim that the story bears an anti-war message. Wolfgang Petersen's critically acclaimed 1981 film and interpretations as a comedy sketch, a theatrical play, and a streamed television sequel have followed. This trajectory of Buchheim's personal memory reflects a process that practitioners of memory studies have described as transnational memory formation. Archival footage, interviews, and teaching materials reflect the relevance of Das Boot since its debut. Given the debates that surrounded Buchheim's endeavors, the question now raised is whether Germany's "mastering the past" serves as a model for other societies analyzing their own histories. Sitting at the intersection of History, Literature and Film Studies, this is an unprecedented case study depicting how the pre- and postwar times affected writers and others caught in the middle of the drama of the era.

This book provides case-studies of how teachers and practitioners have attempted to develop more effective 'experiential learning' strategies in order to better equip students for their voluntary engagements in communities, working for sustainable peace and a tolerant society free of discrimination. All chapters revolve around this central theme, testing and trying various paradigms and experimenting with different practices, in a wide range of geographical and historical arenas. They demonstrate the innovative potentials of connecting know-how from different disciplines and combining experiences from various practitioners in this field of shaping historical memory, including non-formal and formal sectors of education, non-governmental workers, professionals from memorial sites and museums, local and global activists, artists, and engaged individuals. In so doing, they address the topic of collective historical traumas in ways that go beyond conventional classroom methods. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book provides a combination of theoretical reflections and concrete pedagogical suggestions that will appeal to educators working across history, sociology, political science, peace education and civil awareness education, as well as memory activists and remembrance practitioners.

The Jewish Orphanage in Leiden was the last one of eight such care homes to open its doors in the Netherlands before the Second World War. After spending almost 39 years in an old and utterly inadequate building in Leiden's city centre, the inauguration in 1929 of a brand-new building, shown on the front cover, was the start of a remarkably productive and prosperous period. The building still stands there, proudly but sadly, to this day: the relatively happy period lasted less than fourteen years. On Wednesday evening, 17th March 1943, the Leiden police, under German instructions, closed down the orphanage and delivered 50 children and nine staff to the Leiden railway station, from where they were brought to Transit Camp Westerbork in the north-east of the country. Two boys were released from Westerbork thanks to tireless efforts of a neighbour in Leiden; one young woman survived Auschwitz, and one young girl escaped to Palestine via Bergen-Belsen. The remaining 55 were deported to Sobibor - and not one of them survived. Some 168 children lived in the new building at one time or another between August 1929 and March 1943. This book reconstructs life in the orphanage based on the many stories and photographs which they left us. It is dedicated to the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, but also to those who survived. Without them, this book could not have been written.

The Number One International Bestseller. The heartbreaking, inspiring true story of a girl sent to Auschwitz who survived the evil Dr Josef Mengele's pseudo-medical experiments. With a foreword by His Holiness Pope Francis. Lidia Maksymowicz was just three years old when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother, grandparents and foster brother. They were from Belarus, their 'crime' that they supported the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation. Once there, Lidia was picked by Mengele for his experiments and sent to the children's block. It was here that she survived eighteen months of hell. Injected with infectious diseases, desperately malnourished, she came close to death. Her mother - who risked her life to secretly visit Lidia - was her only tie to humanity. By the time Birkenau was liberated her family had disappeared. Even her mother was presumed dead. Lidia was adopted by a woman from the nearby town of Oswiecim. Too traumatised to feel emotion, she was not an easy child to care for but she came to love her adoptive mother and her new home. Then, in 1962, she discovered that her birth parents were still alive. They lived in the USSR - and they wanted her back. Lidia was faced with an agonising choice . . . The Little Girl Who Could Not Cry is powerful, moving and ultimately hopeful, as Lidia comes to terms with the past and finds the strength to share her story - even making headlines when she meets Pope Francis, who kisses her tattoo. Above all she refuses to hate those who hurt her so badly, saying, 'Hate only brings more hate. Love, on the other hand, has the power to redeem.'

Before the Nazis took power, Jewish businesspeople in Berlin thrived alongside their non-Jewish neighbors. But Nazi racism changed that, gradually destroying Jewish businesses before murdering the Jews themselves. Reconstructing the fate of more than 8,000 companies, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish economic activity and its obliteration. Rather than just examining the steps taken by the persecutors, it also tells the stories of Jewish strategies in countering the effects of persecution. In doing so, this book exposes a fascinating paradox where Berlin, serving as the administrative heart of the Third Reich, was also the site of a dense network for Jewish self-help and assertion.

In this pioneering volume, a group of "third generation" scholars subject the contested ligature between Finland and the Holocaust to critique. Finland's Holocaust: Silences of History traces the implications of antisemitism in Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through Finland's alliance with the Third Reich during much of World War II, to the complex negotiation with its wartime past. Taking up a range of issues - from cultural history, folklore, the arts, and sports, to the interpretation of military and national history - this collection examines how modern Finnish memory and the writing of history have both engaged and evaded the figure of the Holocaust. As the first English-language introduction to the changing position of Finland in contemporary international Holocaust historiography, Finland's Holocaust is essential reading for any student of antisemitism and the Holocaust, providing a critical perspective on the role of political and cultural historiography in modern Finland.

Originally published in 1946, this volume, based on some of the evidence taken from captured German files and archives, discusses many questions concerning German policy and diplomatic manoeuvre during the Second World War. It offers a fascinating insight into the rise and fall of the Nazi state and represents a record, aimed at both the general reader and student of history of some of the first documents which were available in the aftermath of the World War 2.

Through analyses of three eventful years in Nazi Germany's history - the Kristallnacht pogrom, the invasion of Poland and the invasion of Soviet Russia - this book explores the violence of states. All three events were part of the Nazi colonial project and led to mass killings, eventually resulting in the systematic murder of Jews becoming a major war aim - one that Germany would pursue to the end, even when it became clear that the military conflict could no longer be won. Drawing on voluminous historical and sociological literature, as well as documentary and contemporary evidence, the author presents a new account of the phenomenon of extreme state violence as a special category of violence, in which the armed forces, maintained in a state of readiness, are used unnecessarily and excessively, often on thin pretexts, and, unlike coercive violence, only rarely for the purposes of carrying messages to the public. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, history and anthropology concerned with mass and state violence.

This book-which is based on vast archival research and on a variety of primary sources-has filled a gap in Italy's historiography on Fascism, and in European and world history about concentration camps in our contemporary world. It provides, for the first time, a survey of the different types of internment practiced by Fascist Italy during the war and a historical map of its concentration camps. Published in Italian (I campi del duce, Turin: Einaudi, 2004), in Croatian (Mussolinijevi Logori, Zagreb: Golden Marketing - Tehnicka knjiga, 2007), in Slovenian (Fasisticna taborisca, Ljublana: Publicisticno drustvo ZAK, 2011), and now in English, Mussolini's Camps is both an excellent product of academic research and a narrative easily accessible to readers who are not professional historians. It undermines the myth that concentration camps were established in Italy only after the creation of the Republic of Salo and the Nazi occupation of Italy's northern regions in 1943, and questions the persistent and traditional image of Italians as brava gente (good people), showing how Fascism made extensive use of the camps (even in the occupied territories) as an instrument of coercion and political control.

The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe discusses the "memory wars" in the course of the post-Communist re-narration of history since 1989 and the current authoritarian backlash. The book focuses specifically on how "mnemonic warriors" employ the "Holocaust template" and the concept of genocide in tendentious ways to justify radical policies and externalize the culpability for their international isolation and worsening social and economic circumstances domestically. The chapters analyze three dimensions: 1) the competing narratives of the "universalization of the Holocaust" as the negative icon of our era, on the one hand, and the "double genocide" paradigm, on the other, which focuses on "our own" national suffering under - allegedly "equally" evil - Nazism and Communism; 2) the juxtaposition of post-Communist Eastern Europe and Russia, reflected primarily in the struggle of the Baltic states and Ukraine to challenge Russian propaganda, a struggle that runs the risk of employing similarly distorting and propagandistic tropes; and 3) the post-Yugoslav rhetoric portraying one's own group as "the new Jews" and one's opponents in the wars of the 1990s as (akin to) "Nazis". Surveying major battle sites in this "memory war": memorial museums, monuments, film and the war over definitions and terminology in relevant public discourse, The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe will be of great interest to scholars of genocide, the Holocaust, historical memory and revisionism, and Eastern European Politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

This anthology brings together eight chapters which examine the life of Jews in Southeast Europe through political, social and cultural lenses. Even though the Holocaust put an end to many communities in the region, this book chronicles how some Holocaust survivors nevertheless tried to restore their previous lives. Focusing on the once flourishing and colorful Jewish communities throughout the Balkans - many of which were organized according to the Ottoman millet system - this book provides a diverse range of insights into Jewish life and Jewish-Gentile relations in what became Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria after World War II. Further, the contributors conceptualize the issues in focus from a historical perspective. In these diachronic case studies, virtually the whole 20th century is covered, with a special focus paid to the shifting identities, the changing communities and the memory of the Holocaust, thereby providing a very useful parallel to today's post-war and divided societies. Drawing on relevant contemporary approaches in historical research, this book complements the field with topics that, until now in Jewish studies and beyond, remained on the edge of the general research focus. This book was originally published as a special issue of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.

Throughout the Second World War, the term 'Europe' featured prominently in National Socialist rhetoric. This book reconstructs what Europe stood for in National Socialist Germany, analyses how the interplay of its defining elements changed dependent on the war, and shows that the new European order was neither an empty phrase born out of propaganda, nor was it anti-European. Tying in with long-standing traditions of German European, voelkisch, and economic thinking, imaginations of a New Order became a central category in contemporary political and economic decision-making processes, justifying cooperation as well as exploitation, violence, and murder.

Combining accessible prose with scholarly rigor, The Participants presents fascinating profiles of the all-too-human men who implemented some of the most inhuman acts in history. On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior German government officials attended a short meeting in Berlin to discuss the deportation and murder of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite lasting less than two hours, the Wannsee Conference is today understood as a signal episode in the history of the Holocaust, exemplifying the labor division and bureaucratization that made the "Final Solution" possible. Yet while the conference itself has been exhaustively researched, many of its attendees remain relatively obscure. From the introduction: Ten of the fifteen participants had been to university. Eight of them had even been awarded doctorates, although it should be pointed out that it was considerably easier to gain a doctorate in law or philosophy in the 1920s than it is today. Eight of them had studied law, which, then as now, was not uncommon in the top positions of public administration. Many first turned to radical politics as members of Freikorps or student fraternities. Three of the participants (Freisler, Klopfer and Lange) had studied in Jena. In the 1920s, the University of Jena was a fertile breeding ground for nationalist thinking. With dedicated Nazi, race researcher and later SS-Hauptsturmbannfuhrer Karl Astel as rector, it developed into a model Nazi university. Race researcher Hans Gunther also taught there. Others, such as Reinhard Heydrich, joined the SS because they had failed to launch careers elsewhere, and only became radical once they were members of the self-acclaimed Nazi elite order.

Originally published in 1985, this book provides an important insight into the principal aspects of the history of the policy and practice of political re-education from its origins to 1951. 'Political re-education' was the British alternative to the ideas put forward by the USA and the USSR in the common search for a post-war policy which would permanently prevent the resurgence of Germany for a third time as a hostile military power. It was adopted as Allied policy and remains one of the boldest and most imaginative policies in history for securing lasting peace. This book discusses the question of the place of this policy in the preservation of peace and the integration of Germany and Japan into the community of their historical enemies.

Combining accessible prose with scholarly rigor, The Participants presents fascinating profiles of the all-too-human men who implemented some of the most inhuman acts in history. On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior German government officials attended a short meeting in Berlin to discuss the deportation and murder of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite lasting less than two hours, the Wannsee Conference is today understood as a signal episode in the history of the Holocaust, exemplifying the labor division and bureaucratization that made the "Final Solution" possible. Yet while the conference itself has been exhaustively researched, many of its attendees remain relatively obscure. From the introduction: Ten of the fifteen participants had been to university. Eight of them had even been awarded doctorates, although it should be pointed out that it was considerably easier to gain a doctorate in law or philosophy in the 1920s than it is today. Eight of them had studied law, which, then as now, was not uncommon in the top positions of public administration. Many first turned to radical politics as members of Freikorps or student fraternities. Three of the participants (Freisler, Klopfer and Lange) had studied in Jena. In the 1920s, the University of Jena was a fertile breeding ground for nationalist thinking. With dedicated Nazi, race researcher and later SS-Hauptsturmbannfuhrer Karl Astel as rector, it developed into a model Nazi university. Race researcher Hans Gunther also taught there. Others, such as Reinhard Heydrich, joined the SS because they had failed to launch careers elsewhere, and only became radical once they were members of the self-acclaimed Nazi elite order.

Over the last seventy years, memories and narratives of the Holocaust have played a significant role in constructing Jewish communities. The author explores one field where these narratives are disseminated: Holocaust pedagogy in Jewish schools in Melbourne and New York. Bringing together a diverse range of critical approaches, including memory studies, gender studies, diaspora theory, and settler colonial studies, Anxious Histories complicates the stories being told about the Holocaust in these Jewish schools and their broader communities. It demonstrates that an anxious thread runs throughout these historical narratives, as the pedagogy negotiates feelings of simultaneous belonging and not-belonging in the West and in Zionism. In locating that anxiety, the possibilities and the limitations of narrating histories of the Holocaust are opened up once again for analysis, critique, discussion, and development.

"A meticulous and shattering investigation of eight horrific pictures..."-L'Arche In December 1941, on a shore near the Latvian city of Liepaja, Nazi death squads (the Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators murdered in three days more than 2,700 Jews. The majority were women and children, most men having already been shot during the summer. The perpetrators took pictures of the December killings. These pictures are among the rare photographs from the first period of the extermination, during which over 800 000 Jews from the Baltic to the Black Sea were shot to death. By showing the importance of photography in understanding persecution, Nadine Fresco offers a powerful meditation on these images while confronting the essential questions of testimony and guilt. From the forward by Dorota Glowackay: Straddling the boundary between historical inquiry and personal reflection, this extraordinary text unfolds as a series of encounters with eponymic Holocaust photographs. Although only a small number of photographs are reproduced here, Fresco provides evocative descriptions of many well-known images: synagogues and Torah scrolls burning on the night of Kristallnacht; deportations to the ghettos and the camps; and, finally, mass executions in the killing fi elds of Eastern Europe. The unique set of photographs included in On the Death of Jews shows groups of women and children from Liepaja (Liepaja), shortly before they were killed in December 1941 in the dunes of Shkede (Skede) on the Baltic Sea. In the last photograph of the series, we see the victims' bodies tumbling into the pit.

Between 1935 and 1940, the Nazis incorporated large portions of Europe into the German Reich. The contributors to this volume analyze the evolving anti-Jewish policies in the annexed territories and their impact on the Jewish population, as well as the attitudes and actions of non-Jews, Germans, and indigenous populations. They demonstrate that diverse anti-Jewish policies developed in the different territories, which in turn affected practices in other regions and even influenced Berlin's decisions. Having these systematic studies together in one volume enables a comparison - based on the most recent research - between anti-Jewish policies in the areas annexed by the Nazi state. The results of this prizewinning book call into question the common assumption that one central plan for persecution extended across Nazi-occupied Europe, shifting the focus onto differing regional German initiatives and illuminating the cooperation of indigenous institutions.

Western Europe is in a strangely neurotic condition of being smug and terrified at the same time. On the one hand, Europeans believe they have at last created an ideal social and political system in which man can live comfortably. In many ways, things have never been better on the old continent. On the other hand, there is growing anxiety that Europe is quickly falling behind in an aggressive, globalized world. Europe is at the forefront of nothing, its demographics are rapidly transforming in unsettling ways, and the ancient threat of barbarian invasion has resurfaced in a fresh manifestation. In The New Vichy Syndrome, Theodore Dalrymple traces this malaise back to the great conflicts of the last century and their devastating effects upon the European psyche. From issues of religion, class, colonialism, and nationalism, Europeans hold a "miserablist" view of their history, one that alternates between indifference and outright contempt of the past. Today's Europeans no longer believe in anything but personal economic security, an increased standard of living, shorter working hours, and long vacations in exotic locales. The result, Dalrymple asserts, is an unwillingness to preserve European achievements and the dismantling of western culture by Europeans themselves. As vapid hedonism and aggressive Islamism fill this cultural void, Europeans have no one else to blame for their plight.