How far can we ever hope to understand the Holocaust? What can we reasonably say about right and wrong, moral responsibility, praise and blame, in a world where ordinary reasons seem to be excluded? In the century of Nazism, ethical writing in English had much more to say about the meaning of the word `good` than about the material reality of evil. This book seeks to redress the balance at the start of a new century. Despite intense interest in the Holocaust, there has been relatively little exploration of it by philosophers in the analytic tradition. Although ethical writers often refer to Nazism as a touchstone example of evil, and use it as a case by which moral theorising can be tested, they rarely analyse what evil amounts to, or address the substantive moral questions raised by the Holocaust itself. This book draws together new work by leading moral philosophers to present a wide range of perspectives on the Holocaust. Contributors focus on particular themes of central importance, including: moral responsibility for genocide; the moral uniqueness of the Holocaust; responding to extreme evil; the role of ideology; the moral psychology of perpetrators and victims of genocide; forgiveness and the Holocaust; and the impact of the `Final Solution` on subsequent culture. Topics are treated with the precision and rigour characteristic of analytic philosophy. Scholars, teachers and students with an interest in moral theory, applied ethics, genocide and Holocaust studies will find this book of particular value, as will all those seeking greater insight into ethical issues surrounding Nazism, race-hatred and intolerance.

How far can we ever hope to understand the Holocaust? What can we reasonably say about right and wrong, moral responsibility, praise and blame, in a world where ordinary reasons seem to be excluded? In the century of Nazism, ethical writing in English had much more to say about the meaning of the word `good` than about the material reality of evil. This book seeks to redress the balance at the start of a new century. Despite intense interest in the Holocaust, there has been relatively little exploration of it by philosophers in the analytic tradition. Although ethical writers often refer to Nazism as a touchstone example of evil, and use it as a case by which moral theorising can be tested, they rarely analyse what evil amounts to, or address the substantive moral questions raised by the Holocaust itself. This book draws together new work by leading moral philosophers to present a wide range of perspectives on the Holocaust. Contributors focus on particular themes of central importance, including: moral responsibility for genocide; the moral uniqueness of the Holocaust; responding to extreme evil; the role of ideology; the moral psychology of perpetrators and victims of genocide; forgiveness and the Holocaust; and the impact of the `Final Solution` on subsequent culture. Topics are treated with the precision and rigour characteristic of analytic philosophy. Scholars, teachers and students with an interest in moral theory, applied ethics, genocide and Holocaust studies will find this book of particular value, as will all those seeking greater insight into ethical issues surrounding Nazism, race-hatred and intolerance.

The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, interpreted either as a divine mystery or, more commonly, as God's deferral to human freedom. But traditional Judaic obligations of female presence, together with the traditional image of the Shekhinah as a figure of God's 'femaleness' accompanying Israel into exile, seem to contradict such theologies of absence. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, the first full-length feminist theology of the Holocaust, argues that the patriarchal bias of post-Holocaust theology becomes fully apparent only when women's experiences and priorities are brought into historical light. Building upon the published testimonies of four women imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau - Olga Lengyel, Lucie Adelsberger, Bertha Ferderber-Salz and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk - it considers women's distinct experiences of the holy in relation to God's perceived presence and absence in the camps.
God's face, says Melissa Raphael, was not hidden in Auschwitz, but intimately revealed in the female face turned towards the other as a refractive image of God, especially in the moral protest made visible through material and spiritual care for the assaulted other.

'Brilliant and disturbing' Stephen Spender, New York Review of Books The classic work on 'the banality of evil', and a journalistic masterpiece Hannah Arendt's stunning and unnverving report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963. This edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, this classic portrayal of the banality of evil is as shocking as it is informative - an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling issues of the twentieth century. 'Deals with the greatest problem of our time ... the problem of the human being within a modern totalitarian system' Bruno Bettelheim

She found the diary and brought the world a message of love and hope.

It seems as if we are never far from Miep's thoughts....Yours, Anne

For the millions moved by "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, " here at last is Miep's own astonishing story. For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims.

From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a small, red-orange, checkered diary -- Anne's legacy -- in Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity. Each page rings with courage and heartbreaking beauty.

The Holocaust is a pervasive presence in British culture and society. Schools have been legally required to deliver Holocaust education, the government helps to fund student visits to Auschwitz, the Imperial War Museum's permanent Holocaust Exhibition has attracted millions of visitors, and Britain has an annually commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day. What has prompted this development, how has it unfolded, and why has it happened now? How does it relate to Britain's post-war history, its contemporary concerns, and the wider "globalisation" of Holocaust memory? What are the multiple shapes that British Holocaust consciousness assumes and the consequences of their rapid emergence? Why have the so-called "lessons" of the Holocaust enjoyed such popularity in Britain? Through analysis of changing engagements with the Holocaust in political, cultural and memorial landscapes over the past generation, this book addresses these questions, demonstrating the complexities of Holocaust consciousness and reflecting on the contrasting ways that history is used in Britain today.

This new verbatim play is based on the testimony of Hungarian Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack MBE, aged only thirteen when she was sent to the notorious Auschwitz -Birkenau in the summer of 1944. Interwoven with complementary narratives and layered with Holocaust history, this is a powerful new piece for Drama and History teachers alike. Commissioned by Europe's only specialist Holocaust theatre in education company, Kindness offers tremendous challenge to Drama students. It allows the stories of survivors, as well as the voices of some of the millions more who did not survive, to not be lost as living memory increasingly becomes becomes a history that must never be forgotten. "I sincerely felt very moved and grateful that the play so accurately represented my experiences, and the mood and political situation of the time is so accurately shown. It is most wonderful and I give you my legacy most willingly. Thank you so much." Susan Pollack MBE Duration: 60 minutes approximately Cast: 21 female / male, or 2 female and 2 male with multiroling Suitable for: Key Stage 3/4, BTEC, GCSE, A Level

On 1 March, 1943, Chaim Weizmann, the elder statesman of Zionism, addressed a rally in Madison Square Garden to "Stop Hitler Now!." Three months earlier, a public declaration by the Allied governments had acknowledged that the German authorities were implementing Adolf Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. Some 2,000,000 Jews had already been killed since the beginning of World War II by the Third Reich and its collaborators, yet a deafening silence resounded throughout free world corridors of power.
Alas, Weizmann's and similar heartfelt pleas went unanswered. Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury and Arthur Cardinal Hinsley called on that same occasion for speedy deeds to meet the most appalling horror. Faced with the crime of the Holocaust - Christianity and Western humanism abdicated moral responsibility to try to save an innocent people. Without that decay of conscience, already evident in the years between Hitler's advent to power and the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland, European Jewry would not have gone abandoned into the night.
Over the past two decades, access to most of the archives has enabled historians to authenticate this grim truth. Political expediency reigned supreme in the war counsels of those governments which alone could have checked the tempo of Hitler's Final Solution of the Jewish problem.

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were united in a 'brutal friendship'. Both had savage racial laws: both Hitler and Mussolini viciously denounced the 'Jewish menace'. Yet each nation treated the Jews quite differently. Whilst Jews who fell into the arms of the German army were consigned, almost without exception, to concentration camps, not one Jew taken by the Italians suffered the same fate.
Jonathan Steinberg uses this remarkable and poignant story to unravel the motives and forces underpinning both Nazism and Fascism in an attempt to resolve the underlying question: Why?

eBook available with sample pages: 0203356691

Using accessible archival sources, a team of historians reveal how much the USA, Britain, Switzerland and Sweden knew about the Nazi attempt to murder all the Jews of Europe during World War II.

Human Rights after Hitler reveals thousands of forgotten US and Allied war crimes prosecutions against Hitler and other Axis war criminals based on a popular movement for justice that stretched from Poland to the Pacific. These cases provide a great foundation for twenty-first-century human rights and accompany the achievements of the Nuremberg trials and postwar conventions. They include indictments of perpetrators of the Holocaust made while the death camps were still operating, which confounds the conventional wisdom that there was no official Allied response to the Holocaust at the time. This history also brings long overdue credit to the United Nations' War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), which operated during and after World War II. Dan Plesch describes the commission's work and Washington's bureaucratic obstruction to a 1944 proposal to prosecute crimes against humanity before an international criminal court. From the 1940s until a recent lobbying effort by Plesch and colleagues, the UNWCC's files were kept out of public view in the UN archives under pressure from the US government. The book answers why the commission and its files were closed and reveals that the lost precedents set by these cases have enormous practical utility for prosecuting war crimes today. They cover US and Allied prosecutions of torture, including "water treatment," wartime sexual assault, and crimes by foot soldiers who were "just following orders." Plesch's book will fascinate anyone with an interest in the history of the Second World War as well as provide ground-breaking revelations for historians and human rights practitioners alike.

Using accessible archival sources, a team of historians reveal how much the USA, Britain, Switzerland and Sweden knew about the Nazi attempt to murder all the Jews of Europe during World War II.

Sparing the Child examines young reader's narratives about Nazism and the Holocaust in terms of the official as well as the understated motivations of their authors. Officially, the narratives intended to shape the young readers' acquired collective memory. However, as the narrators recollect personally experienced excesses of Nazism or the horrors of Auschwitz, they use the medium of children's literature to meliorate atrocity and thus spare the child and themselves.

Where was God when six million died? Over the last few decades this question has haunted both Jewish and Christian theologians. If God is all-good and all-powerful, how could he have permitted the Holocaust to take place? Holocaust Theology: A Reader provides a panoramic survey of the responses of over one hundred leading Jewish and Christian Holocaust thinkers. Beginning with the religious challenge of the Holocaust, the collection explores a wide range of thinking which seek to reconcile God's ways with the existence of evil. In addition, the book addresses perplexing questions regarding Christian responsibility and culpability during the Nazi era. Designed for general readers and students, the readings are arranged thematically and each one is divided into separate topics. For anyone who is troubled by the religious implications of the tragedy of the Holocaust, this collection of Holocaust theology provides a basis for discussion and debate: each reading is followed by several questions designed to stimulate this.

Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that "hidden" Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.

The Sonderkommando-the "special squad" of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau-comprise one of the most fascinating and troubling topics within Holocaust history. As eyewitnesses to and unwilling abettors of the murder of their fellow Jews, they are the object of fierce condemnation even today. Yet it was a group of these seemingly compromised men who carried out the revolt of October 7, 1944, one of the most celebrated acts of Holocaust resistance. This interdisciplinary collection assembles careful investigations into how the Sonderkommando have been represented-by themselves and by others-both during and after the Holocaust.

The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewryis a collection of eyewitness testimonies, letters, diaries, affidavits, and other documents on the activities of the Nazis against Jews in the camps, ghettoes, and towns of Eastern Europe. Arguably, the only apt comparism is to The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This definitive edition of The Black Book, including for the first time materials omitted from previous editions, is a major addition to the literature on the Holocaust. It will be of particular interest to students, teachers, and scholars of the Holocaust and those interested in the history of Europe.

By the end of 1942, 1.4 million Jews had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army eastward; by the end of the war, nearly two million had been murdered in Russia and Eastern Europe. Of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, about one-third fell in the territories of the USSR. The single most important text documenting that slaughter is The Black Book, compiled by two renowned Russian authors Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman. Until now, The Black Book was only available in English in truncated editions. Because of its profound significance, this new and definitive English translation of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry is a major literary and intellectual event.

From the time of the outbreak of the war, Ehrenburg and Grossman collected the eyewitness testimonies that went into The Black Book. As early as 1943 they were planning its publication; the first edition appeared in 1944. During the years immediately after the war, Grossman assisted Ehrenburg in compiling additional materials for a second edition, which appeared in 1946 (in English as well as Russian).

Since the fall of the Soviet regime, Irina Ehrenburg, the daughter of Ilya Ehrenburg, has recovered the lost portions of the manuscript sent to Yad Vashem. The texts recovered by Ms. Ehrenburg include numerous documents that had been censored from the original manuscript, as well as items that had been hidden by the Grossman family. In addition, she verified and, where appropriate, corrected the accuracy of documents that had already appeared in earlier editions of The Black Book.

German Reparations and the Jewish World" has become a standard reference work since it was first published. Based extensively on archival sources, the author examines the difficult debate within the Jewish world whether it was possible to reach a material settlement with Germany so soon after Auschwitz. Concentrating on how the money was spent in rebuilding Jewish life, he also analyzes how the reparations payments transformed the relations bteween Israel and the diaspora, and between different Jewish political and ideological groups. This revised and expanded edition includes material on sensitive relief programmes from archives that have only recently been opened to researchers. In a new, extensive introductory essay the author reexamines the reparations, restitution and indemnification processes from the perspective of 50 years later.

In this book, Morris explores the intersection of curriculum studies, Holocaust studies, and psychoanalysis, using the Holocaust to raise issues of memory and representation. Arguing that memory is the larger category under which history is subsumed, she examines the ways in which the Holocaust is represented in texts written by historians and by novelists. For both, psychological transference, repression, denial, projection, and reversal contribute heavily to shaping personal memories, and may therefore determine the ways in which they construct the past. The way the Holocaust is represented in curricula is the way it is remembered. Interrogations of this memory are crucial to our understandings of who we are in today's world. The subject of this text--how this memory is represented and how the process of remembering it is taught--is thus central to education today.

The first in-depth work to explore this topic, this collection challenges commonly-held assumptions about the 'recent increase' of domestic violence in the United States, revealing widespread patterns of abuse across two centuries of American history. It provides new insights into the causes and consequences of personal violence, and offers perspectives for possible solutions.

Contents:
Table of Contents: Preface Introduction Now vee my perhaps to begin. Yes? Chapter One The Ghost Writer Chapter Two Abraham and Isaac Chapter Three Portnovian Dilemmas Chapter Four Holocaust Writing Chapter Five You Must Not Forget Anything Chapter Six It's All One Book You Write, Anyway Postscript Obligingly Yours Works Cited Index

"The Papon Affair" is the definitive English-language work on a trial that is now considered to be the most significant in late twentieth-century France. Papon, who served as a Vichy bureaucrat, was charged with assisting in the deportation of several trainloads of Jews from the Bordeaux region to Nazi death camps between 1942 and 1944. After the War, his career included both a stint as Prefect of Paris Police and as a cabinet finance minister. The inconclusiveness of the verdict which, even after six months of testimony, left unresolved not only important legal and historical issues, but political, philosophical and moral issues as well. Richard Golsan has brought together the crucial French journalistic pieces on the trial along with several essays by leading American and British scholars to help contextualize the trial for an English-speaking audience. The book delves deeply into the fascinating debates about the nature of French complicity in the Final Solution and of memory itself.
Contributors: " Nathan Bracher, Philippe Bernard, Philippe Burin, Michel Dubec, Jean-Luc Einaudi, Alain Finkielkraut," "Christopher G. Flood, Richard J. Golsan, Eberhard Jackel, Van Kelly, Francois Maspero, Robert O. Paxton, Acacio Pereira, Henry Rousso, Zeev Sternhell, Benjamin Stora, Tzvetan Todorov, Jean-Marc Varaut, Nancy Wood, Michael Zaoui."

To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered? In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the "ethics of Never Again."