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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.

Convinced before the onset of Operation "Barbarossa" in June 1941 of both the ease, with which the Red Army would be defeated and the likelihood that the Soviet Union would collapse, the Nazi regime envisaged a radical and far-reaching occupation policy which would result in the political, economic and racial reorganization of the occupied Soviet territories and bring about the deaths of 'x million people' through a conscious policy of starvation. This study traces the step-by-step development of high-level planning for the occupation policy in the Soviet territories over a twelve-month period and establishes the extent to which the various political and economic plans were compatible.

A graduate of the Universities of Huddersfield and Sheffield in the UK, Alex J. Kay obtained his doctorate in Modern and Contemporary History in 2005 from Berlin's Humboldt University, where he has also given courses on early modern British history. Based in Berlin, he is currently working on a new book on anti-Semitism in late Weimar parliamentary politics.

Through case studies of prominent cultural products, this book takes a longitudinal approach to the influence and conceptualization of the Civil War in democratic Spain. Stafford explores the stories told about the war during the transition to democracy and how these narratives have morphed in light of the polemics about historical memory.

Holocaust education is a controversial and rapidly evolving field. This book, which critically analyses the very latest research, discusses a number of the most important debates which are emerging within it. Adopting a truly global perspective, it explores both teachers' and students' levels of Holocaust knowledge as well as their attitudes and approaches towards the subject.

'That nickname . . .' '"Little bird." It wasn't mine. I found out later he gave it to every little girl that came in to be injected. "Little Bird" didn't mean anything. It was a trick. There were thousands of "little birds", just like me, all thinking they were the only one.' As a reporter, Jacques Peretti has spent his life investigating important stories. But there was one story, heard in scattered fragments throughout his childhood, that he never thought to investigate. The story of how his mother survived Auschwitz. In the few last months of the Second World War, thirteen-year-old Alina Peretti, along with her mother and sister, was one of thirteen thousand non-Jewish Poles sent to Auschwitz. Her experiences there cast a shadow over the rest of her life. Now ninety, Alina has been diagnosed with dementia. Together, mother and son begin a race against time to record her memories and preserve her family's story. Along the way, Jacques learns long-hidden secrets about his mother's family. He gains an understanding of his mother through retracing her past, learning more about the woman who would never let him call her 'Mum'.

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'.

This book analyses four case studies of Holocaust memory activism in Poland, contextualized within recent debates about Polish-Jewish relations and approached through a theoretical framework informed by critical theory. Three cases are advocacy groups, each located in a different region of Poland-Lublin, Krakow, and Sejny-and each group is presented with attention to the local context and specific dynamics of its vision and strategy. The fourth case study is the state, which has emerged as a powerful memory actor. Using research based on extensive fieldwork, including interviews and direct observation, the author argues that memory activism must grapple with emotional attachments to identity if it is to move beyond a reconciliation paradigm. Drawing on works from semiotics and critical trauma studies, the volume analyzes the assumptions each memory actor makes about three dimensions of Holocaust memory: 1) the relationship of the individual to Polish national identity; 2) the possibility of a reconciled Polish-Jewish history; and 3) the assignment of traumatic suffering to a particular group or event.

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.

Medical experimentation on human subjects during the Third Reich raises deep moral and ethical questions. This volume features prominent voices in the filed of bioethics reflecting on a wide rang of topics and issues. Amid all contemporary discussions of ethical in science, many ethicists, historians, Holocaust specialists and medical professionals strongly feel that we should understand the past in order to make more enlightened ethical decisions.

"Brief and synthetic as the essays are, they will . . . be of most use to students or to those new to the field. However, they provide engaging reading for those with more in-depth knowledge too." . Journal of Modern History "Educators and students owe a debt of gratitude . . . all of the articles in this anthology are readily accessible to the non-specialist without compromising the cutting-edge scholarship that informs them." . ISIS "This in an engrossing book . . . morally challenging to all physicians." . Journal of the American Medical Association ." . . extraordinarily valuable essays combine perspectives from history, sociology, demography, and anthropology." . Choice ." . . excellent orientation for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as physicians and the general public . . . All in all, this is a stimulating set of essays that deserves a wide readership." . H-German The participation of German physicians in medical experiments on innocent people and mass murder is one of the most disturbing aspects of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Six distinguished historians working in this field are addressing the critical issues raised by these murderous experiments, such as the place of the Holocaust in the larger context of eugenic and racial research, the motivation and roles of the German medical establishment, and the impact and legacy of the eugenics movements and Nazi medical practice on physicians and medicine since World War II. Francis R. Nicosia is professor of History at Saint Michael's College in Vermont where he teaches courses on modern German and European history and the Holocaust. Jonathan Huener is assistant professor of History at the University of Vermont where he teaches courses on the Holocaust, German history, and Polish history."

Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis' genocidal vision of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the "Final Solution," Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: "How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?" This book explores the question by analyzing the victims' experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.

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 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.

Catastrophic scenarios dominate our contemporary mindset. Catastrophic events and predictions have spurred new interest in re-examining the history of earlier disasters and the social and conceptual resources they have mobilized. The essays gathered in this volume reconsider the history and theory of different catastrophes and their aftermath. The emphasis is on the need to distance this process of reconsideration from previous teleological representations of catastrophes as an endpoint, and to begin considering their "operative" aspects, which unmask the nature of social and political structures. Among the essays in this volume are analyses, by leading scholars in their respective fields, concerning the role of catastrophes in theology, in the history of industrial accidents, in theory of history, in the history of law, in "catastrophe films", in the history of cybernetics, in post-Holocaust discussions of reparations, and in climate change.

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.

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.

"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.

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction examines texts that portray the inner experience of Holocaust perpetrators and thus transform them from archetypes of evil into complex psychological and moral subjects. Employing relevant methodological tools of narrative theory, Erin McGlothlin analyzes these unsettling depictions, which manifest a certain tension regarding the ethics of representation and identification. Such works, she asserts, endeavor to make transparent the mindset of their violent subjects, yet at the same time they also invariably contrive to obfuscate in part its disquieting character. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction contains two parts. The first focuses on portraits of real-life perpetrators in nonfictional interviews and analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. These works provide a nuanced perspective on the mentality of the people who implemented the Holocaust via the interventional role of the interviewer or interpreter in the perpetrators' performances of self-disclosure. In part two, McGlothlin investigates more recent fictional texts that imagine the perspective of their invented perpetrator-narrators. Such works draw readers directly into the perpetrator's experience and at the same time impede their access to the perpetrator's consciousness by retarding their affective connection. Demonstrating that recent fiction featuring perpetrators as narrators employs strategies derived from earlier nonfictional portrayals, McGlothlin establishes not only a historical connection between these two groups of texts, whereby nonfictional engagement with real-life perpetrators gradually gives way to fictional exploration, but also a structural and aesthetic one. The book bespeaks new modes of engagement with ethically fraught questions raised by our increasing willingness to consider the events of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrator. Students, scholars, and readers of Holocaust studies and literary criticism will appreciate this closer look at a historically taboo topic.