This book is an original and comparative study of reactions in West and East Africa to the persecution and attempted annihilation of Jews in Europe and in former German colonies in sub-Saharan Africa during the Second World War. An intellectual and diplomatic history of World War II and the Holocaust, Africans and the Holocaust looks at the period from the perspectives of the colonized subjects of the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, as well as the sovereign peoples of Liberia and Ethiopia, who wrestled with the social and moral questions that the war and the Holocaust raised. The five main chapters of the book explore the pre-Holocaust history of relations between Jews and Africans in West and East Africa, perceptions of Nazism in both regions, opinions of World War II, interpretations of the Holocaust, and responses of the colonized and sovereign peoples of West and East Africa to efforts by Great Britain to resettle certain categories of Jewish refugees from Europe in the two regions before and during the Holocaust. This book will be of use to students and scholars of African history, Holocaust and Jewish studies, and international or global history.

This extraordinary wartime diary provides a rare glimpse into the daily life of French and foreign-born Jewish refugees under the Vichy regime during World War II. Long hidden, the diary was written by Lucien Dreyfus, a native of Alsacewho was a teacher at the most prestigious high school in Strasbourg, an editor of the leading Jewish newspaper of Alsace and Lorraine, the devoted father of an only daughter, and the doting grandfather of an only granddaughter. In 1939, after the French declaration of war on Hitler's Germany, Lucien and his wife, Marthe, were forced by the French state to leave Strasbourg along with thousands of other Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the city. The couple found refuge in Nice, on the Mediterranean coast in the south of France. Anti-Jewish laws prevented Lucien from resuming his teaching career and his work as a newspaper editor. But he continued to write, recording his trenchant reflections on the situation of France and French Jews under the Vichy regime. American visas allowed his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter to escape France in the spring of 1942 and establish new lives in the United States, but Lucien and Marthe were not so lucky. Rounded up during an SS raid in September 1943, they were deported and murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau two months later. As the only diary by an observant Jew raised bi-culturally in French and German, Dreyfus's writing offers a unique philosophical and moral reflection on the Holocaust as it was unfolding in France.

Based on original sources, this important book on the Holocaust explores regional variations in civilians' attitudes and behavior toward the Jewish population in Romania and the occupied Soviet Union. Gentiles' willingness to assist Jews was greater in lands that had been under Soviet administration during the inter-war period, while gentiles' willingness to harm Jews occurred more in lands that had been under Romanian administration during the same period. While acknowledging the disasters of Communist rule in the 1920s and 1930s, this work shows the effectiveness of Soviet nationalities policy in the official suppression of antisemitism. This book offers a corrective to the widespread consensus that homogenizes gentile responses throughout Eastern Europe, instead demonstrating that what states did in the interwar period mattered; relations between social groups were not fixed and destined to repeat themselves, but rather fluid and susceptible to change over time.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War was central to Nazi plans for territorial expansion and genocidal demographic revolution. To create 'living space', Nazi Germany pursued two policies. The first was the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other groups that the Nazis found undesirable on racial, religious, ethnic, ideological, hereditary, or behavioral grounds. It also pursued a parallel, albeit smaller, program to mobilize supposedly Germanic residents of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - so-called Volksdeutsche or ethnic Germans - as the vanguard of German expansion. This study recovers the intersection of these two projects in Transnistria, a portion of southern Ukraine that, because of its numerous Volksdeutsche communities, became an epicenter of both Nazi Volksdeutsche policy and the Holocaust in conquered Soviet territory, ultimately asking why local residents, whom German authorities identified as Volksdeutsche, participated in the Holocaust with apparent enthusiasm.

Educators and students face many questions when exploring the history of the Holocaust. Both the harrowing historical narrative and its wider contemporary implications make the Holocaust an essential part of our education, whilst simultaneously bringing to the fore challenging questions of how best to recount such an event. This book addresses these crucial questions by exploring the way in which we teach and learn about the Holocaust. It demonstrates how we can dignify memories of the Holocaust by joining with resilient survivors, as well as how careful discussion and interpretation of definitions and appropriate representations can link the Holocaust to human rights and international law. It also highlights that understanding the Holocaust serves as a catalyst for the expansion of human rights and for genocide prevention. Throughout, Polgar applies sociological concepts that can help all of us to understand how the Holocaust has become both a particular concern for Jewish and European groups and also a basis for laws and practices that support universal human rights. Advocating for the inclusion of the Holocaust in multicultural education, this text will prove invaluable to students, researchers and educators alike.

For the sizeable Jewish community living in Greece during the 1940s, German occupation of Greece posed a distinct threat. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered around ninety percent of the Jewish population through the course of the war. This new account presents cutting edge research on four elements of the Holocaust in Greece: the level of antisemitism and question of collaboration; the fate of Jewish property before, during, and after their deportation; how the few surviving Jews were treated following their return to Greece, especially in terms of justice and restitution; and the ways in which Jewish communities rebuilt themselves both in Greece and abroad. Taken together, these elements point to who was to blame for the disaster that befell Jewish communities in Greece, and show that the occupation authorities alone could not have carried out these actions to such magnitude without the active participation of Greek Christians.

In the heart of the twentieth century, the game of soccer was becoming firmly established as the sport of the masses across Europe, even as war was engulfing the continent. Intimately woven into the war was the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, genocide on a scale never seen before. For those victims ensnared by the Nazi regime, soccer became a means of survival and a source of inspiration even when surrounded by profound suffering and death. In Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust, Kevin E. Simpson reveals the surprisingly powerful role soccer played during World War II. From the earliest days of the Nazi dictatorship, as concentration camps were built to hold so-called enemies, captives competed behind the walls and fences of the Nazi terror state. Simpson uncovers this little-known piece of history, rescuing from obscurity many poignant survivor testimonies, old accounts of wartime players, and the diaries of survivors and perpetrators. In victim accounts and rare photographs-many published for the first time in this book-hidden stories of soccer in almost every Nazi concentration camp appear. To these prisoners, soccer was a glimmer of joy amid unrelenting hunger and torture, a show of resistance against the most heinous regime the world had ever seen. With the increasing loss of firsthand memories of these events, Soccer under the Swastika reminds us of the importance in telling these compelling stories. And as modern day soccer struggles to combat racism in the terraces around the world, the endurance of the human spirit embodied through these personal accounts offers insight and inspiration for those committed to breaking down prejudices in the sport today. Thoughtfully written and meticulously researched, this book will fascinate and enlighten readers of all generations.

'The last great, untold story of WWII... highly compelling' Daily Mail Fleeing Nazi persecution for America in the 1930s, the young German-born Jews who would come to be known as The Ritchie Boys were labelled 'enemy aliens' when war broke out. Although of the age to be inducted into the U.S. military, their German accents made them distrusted. Until one day in 1942, when the Pentagon woke up to the incredible asset they had in their ranks, and sent these young recruits to a secret military intelligence training centre at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. These men knew the language, culture and psychology of the enemy better than anyone, and had the greatest motivation to fight Hitler's anti-Semitic regime. And so they were trained and sent back into the belly of the beast, Jews returning to the frontlines of battlefields across Nazi-occupied Europe to defeat the enemy that persecuted them and their families. In an epic story of heroism, courage, and patriotism, bestselling author Bruce Henderson draws on personal interviews with many surviving veterans and extensive archival research to finally bring this never-before-told chapter of the Second World War to light. Previously published as Sons and Soldiers

Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History is a brief but comprehensive survey of the Third Reich based on current research findings that provides a balanced approach to the study of Hitler's role in the history of the Third Reich. The book considers the economic, social, and political forces that made possible the rise and development of Nazism; the institutional, cultural, and social life of the Third Reich; World War II; and the Holocaust. World War II and the Holocaust are presented as logical outcomes of the ideology of Hitler and the Nazi movement. This new edition contains more information on the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany), as well as Nazi complicity in the Reichstag Fire and increased discussion of consent and dissent during the Nazi attempt to create the ideal Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). It takes a greater focus on the experiences of ordinary bystanders, perpetrators, and victims throughout the text, includes more discussion of race and space, and the final chapter has been completely revised. Fully updated, the book ensures that students gain a complete and thorough picture of the period and issues. Supported by maps, images, and thoroughly updated bibliographies that offer further reading suggestions for students to take their study further, the book offers the perfect overview of Hitler and the Third Reich.

Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is a comprehensive consideration of the role of empathy in historical knowledge, informed by the literature on empathy in fields including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and sociology. The book seeks to raise the consciousness of historians about empathy, by introducing them to the history of the concept and to its status in fields outside of history. It also seeks to raise the self-consciousness of historians about their use of empathy to know and understand past people. Defining empathy as thinking and feeling, as imagining, one's way inside the experience of others in order to know and understand them, Thomas A. Kohut distinguishes between the external and the empathic observational position, the position of the historical subject. He argues that historians need to be aware of their observational position, of when they are empathizing and when they are not. Indeed, Kohut advocates for the deliberate, self-reflective use of empathy as a legitimate and important mode of historical inquiry. Insightful, cogent, and interdisciplinary, the book will be essential for historians, students of history, and psychoanalysts, as well as those in other fields who seek to seek to know and understand human beings.

"With this timely book in Hackett Publishing's Passages series, Michael Bryant presents a wide-ranging survey of the trials of Nazi war criminals in the wartime and immediate postwar period. Introduced by an extensive historical survey putting these proceedings into their international context, this volume makes the case, central to Hackett's collection for undergraduate courses, that these events constituted a 'key moment' that has influenced the course of history. Appended to Bryant's analysis is a substantial section of primary sources that should stimulate student discussion and raise questions that are pertinent to warfare and human rights abuses today." Michael R. Marrus, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto

This book shares the conclusions of a remarkable conference marking the centennial of Thessaloniki's incorporation into the Greek state in 1912. Like its Roman and Byzantine predecessors, Ottoman Salonica was the metropolis of a huge, multi-ethnic Balkan hinterland, a center of modernization/westernization, and the de facto capital of Sephardic Judaism. The powerful attraction it exerted on competing local nationalisms, including the Young Turks, gave it a paradigmatic role in the transition from imperial to national rule in southeastern Europe. Twenty-three articles cover the multicultural physiognomy of a 'Levantine' city. They describe the mechanisms for cultivating national consciousness (including education, journalism, the arts, archaeology, and urban planning), the relationship between national identity, religious identity, and an evolving socialist labor movement, anti-Semitism, and the practical issues of governing and assimilating diverse non-Greek populations after Greece's military victory in 1912. Analysis of this transformation extends chronologically through the arrival of Greek refugees from Turkey and the Black Sea in 1923, the Holocaust, the Greek civil war, and the new waves of migration after 1990. These processes are analyzed on multiple levels, including civil administration, land use planning, and the treatment of Thessaloniki's historic monuments. This work underscores the importance of cities and their local histories in shaping the key national narratives that drove development in southeastern Europe. Those lessons are highly relevant today, as Europe reacts to renewed migratory pressures and the rise of new nationalist movements, and draws lessons, valid or otherwise, from the nation-building experiments of the previous century.

The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia examines the contents and context of a rare diary written by a Jewish man from Nazi-occupied Poland. Serving as both a record and an artifact of Samuel Golfard's life, the diary details his attempt to make sense of and resist the event that ultimately destroyed him. Wendy Lower integrates photographs, newspaper articles, documents, and testimonies to create a more complete picture of Golfard's experiences and writings. She also traces the diary's own journey after Golfard's death, from 1943 Poland to the present day.

This is the first musicological study entirely devoted to a comprehensive analysis of musical Holocaust representations in the Western art music tradition. Through a series of chronological case studies grounded in primary source analysis, Amy Lynn Wlodarski analyses the compositional processes and conceptual frameworks that provide key pieces with their unique representational structures and critical receptions. The study examines works composed in a variety of musical languages - from Arnold Schoenberg's dodecaphonic A Survivor from Warsaw to Steve Reich's minimalist Different Trains - and situates them within interdisciplinary discussions about the aesthetics and ethics of artistic witness. At the heart of this book are important questions about how music interacts with language and history; memory and trauma; and politics and mourning. Wlodarski's detailed musical and cultural analyses provide new models for the assessment of the genre, illustrating the benefits and consequences of musical Holocaust representation in the second half of the twentieth century.

Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933 1946 offers a new perspective on Holocaust history by presenting documentation that describes the manifestations and meanings of Nazi Germany's "final solution" from the Jewish perspective. This first volume, taking us from Hitler's rise to power through the aftermath of Kristallnacht, vividly reveals the increasing devastation and confusion wrought in Jewish communities in and beyond Germany at the time. Numerous period photos, documents, and annotations make this unique series an invaluable research and teaching tool. Co-published with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The remarkable story of Mohammed Helmy, the Egyptian doctor who risked his life to save Jewish Berliners from the Nazis. One of the people he saved was a Jewish girl called Anna. This book tells their story. The Israeli holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem has to date honoured more than 25,000 of the courageous non-Jewish men and women who saved Jewish people during the Second World War. But it is a striking fact that under the 'Righteous Among the Nations' listed at Yad Vashem there is only one Arab person: Mohammed Helmy. Helmy was an Egyptian doctor living in Berlin. He spent the entire war there, all the time walking the fine line between accommodation to the Nazi regime and subversion of it. He was also a master of deception, outfoxing the Nazis and risking his own life to save his Jewish colleagues and other Jewish Berliners from Nazi persecution. One of the people he saved was a Jewish girl called Anna. This book tells their story. Also revealed here is a wider understanding of the Arab community in Berlin at the time, many of whom had warm relations with the Jewish community, and some of whom - like Mohammed Helmy - risked their lives to help their Jewish friends when the Nazis rose to power. Mohammed Helmy was the most remarkable individual amongst this brave group, but he was by no means the only one.

A rich and accessible introduction to the role of the German railway system in the Holocaust, a topic that remains understudied even today. Renowned Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg considered the German railway system that delivered European Jews to ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe to be not only an essential component of the "machinery of destruction" but also emblematic of the amoral bureaucracy that helped to implement the Jewish genocide. German Railroads, Jewish Souls centers around Hilberg's seminal essay of the same name, a landmark study of German railways in the Nazi era long unavailable in English. Supplemented with additional writings from Hilberg, primary source materials, and historical commentary from leading scholars Christopher Browning and Peter Hayes. "This important book unites three prominent scholars tackling crucial questions about German railways and the Holocaust. Two essays from the late, renowned Raul Hilberg investigate their overlooked role in the extermination of the European Jews. They provide groundbreaking investigations into the German railway as the prototype of a bureaucracy and challenge its supposed banality. While Christopher Browning eloquently situates Hilberg's essays within the historical literature, Peter Hayes makes a detailed critique of the common but false belief that the deportation and annihilation of the Jews were more of a priority for the Nazis than the war effort. This question, arising from Hilberg's essays, demonstrates the continued significance of his work today."-Wolf Gruner, author, The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

A multifaceted look at historian Raul Hilberg, tracing the evolution of Holocaust research from a marginal subdiscipline into a vital intellectual project. "I would recommend this book to both Holocaust historians and general readers alike. The breadth and depth of Hilberg's research and his particular insights have not yet been surpassed by any other Holocaust scholar."-Jewish Libraries News & Reviews Though best known as the author of the landmark 1961 work The Destruction of the European Jews, the historian Raul Hilberg produced a variety of archival research, personal essays, and other works over a career that spanned half a century. The Anatomy of the Holocaust collects some of Hilberg's most essential and groundbreaking writings many of them published in obscure journals or otherwise inaccessible to nonspecialists in a single volume. Supplemented with commentary and notes from Hilberg's longtime German editor and his biographer. From the Introduction: This selection by the editors from the multitude of his published texts focuses on Hilberg's intellectual interests as a Holocaust researcher. Among other topics, they deal with the bureaucracy of the Holocaust, the number of victims, the role of the Judenrate(Jewish councils), and the function of the railway and the police in the extermination process. The scholarly impulses extending from Hilberg's work remain remarkable and virulent almost a decade after his death.2 They deserve to be readily accessible in one place to historians and the interested public in the new compilation offered here. Many of the debates influenced by Hilberg are not yet resolved. The texts presented can be quite revealing in light of these controversies.

From the survivor of ten Nazi concentration camps who went on to create the New England Holocaust Memorial, a "devastating...inspirational" memoir (The Today Show) about finding strength in the face of despair. On August 14, 2017, two days after a white-supremacist activist rammed his car into a group of anti-Fascist protestors, killing one and injuring nineteen, the New England Holocaust Memorial was vandalized for the second time in as many months. At the base of one of its fifty-four-foot glass towers lay a pile of shards. For Steve Ross, the image called to mind Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass in which German authorities ransacked Jewish-owned buildings with sledgehammers. Ross was eight years old when the Nazis invaded his Polish village, forcing his family to flee. He spent his next six years in a day-to-day struggle to survive the notorious camps in which he was imprisoned, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau among them. When he was finally liberated, he no longer knew how old he was, he was literally starving to death, and everyone in his family except for his brother had been killed. Ross learned in his darkest experiences--by observing and enduring inconceivable cruelty as well as by receiving compassion from caring fellow prisoners--the human capacity to rise above even the bleakest circumstances. He decided to devote himself to underprivileged youth, aiming to ensure that despite the obstacles in their lives they would never experience suffering like he had. Over the course of a nearly forty-year career as a psychologist working in the Boston city schools, that was exactly what he did. At the end of his career, he spearheaded the creation of the New England Holocaust Memorial, a site millions of people including young students visit every year. Equal parts heartrending, brutal, and inspiring, From Broken Glass is the story of how one man survived the unimaginable and helped lead a new generation to forge a more compassionate world.

A distinguished group of scholars from Germany, Israel and right across the United States are brought together in Nazi Law to investigate the ways in which Hitler and the Nazis used the law as a weapon, mainly against the Jews, to establish and progress their master plan for German society. The book looks at how, after assuming power in 1933, the Nazi Party manipulated the legal system and the constitution in its crusade against Communists, Jews, homosexuals, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious and racial minorities, resulting in World War II and the Holocaust. It then goes on to analyse how the law was subsequently used by the opponents of Nazism in the wake of World War Two to punish them in the war crime trials at Nuremberg. This is a valuable edited collection of interest to all scholars and students interested in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

In this compelling and engaging book, Dvir Abramovich introduces readers to several landmark novels, poems and stories that have become classics in the Israeli Holocaust canon. Discussed are iconic writers such as Aharon Appelfeld, Dan Pagis, Etgar Keret, Yoram Kaniuk, Uri Tzvi Greenberg and Ka-Tzetnik, and their attempts to come to terms with the unprecedented trauma and its after-effects. Scholarly, yet deeply accessible to both students and to the public, this illuminating volume offers a wide-ranging introduction to the intersection between literature and the Shoah, and the linguistic, stylistic and ethical difficulties inherent in representing this catastrophe in fiction. Exploring narratives by survivors and by those who wrote about the European genocide from a distance, each chapter contains a compassionate and thoughtful analysis of the author's individual opus, accompanied by a comprehensive exploration of their biography and the major themes that underpin their corpus. The rich and sophisticated discussions and interpretations contained in this masterful set of essays are sure to become essential reading for those seeking to better understand the responses by Hebrew writers to the immense tragedy that befell their people.

This book offers a study of the Jewish community in Kielce and its environs during World War II and the Holocaust: it is the first of its kind in providing a comprehensive account of Kielce's Jews and their history as victims under the German occupation. The book focuses in particular on Jewish-Polish relations in the Kielce region; the deportation of the Jews of Kielce and its surrounding areas to the Treblinka death camp; the difficulties faced by those attempting to help and save them; and daily life in the Small Ghetto from September 1942 until late May 1943.