Academics, NGOs, the United Nations, and individual nations are focused on the prevention and intervention of genocide. Traditionally, missions to prevent or intervene in genocide have been sporadic and under-resourced. The contributors to this volume consider some of the major stumbling blocks to the avoidance of genocide.

Bartrop and Totten argue that realpolitik is the major impediment to the elimination of genocide. Campbell examines the lack of political will to confront genocide, and Theriault describes how denial becomes an obstacle to intervention against genocide. Loyle and Davenport discuss how intervention is impeded by a lack of reliable data on genocide violence, and Macgregor presents an overview of the influence of the media. Totten examines how the UN Convention on Genocide actually impedes anti-genocide efforts; and how the institutional configuration of the UN is itself often a stumbling block.

Addressing an issue that is often overlooked, Travis examines the impact of global arms trade on genocide. Finally, Hiebert examines how international criminal prosecution of atrocities can impede preventive efforts, and Hirsch provides an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, and effectiveness of major international and national prescriptions developed over the last decade. The result is a distinguished addition to Transaction's prestigious Genocide Studies series.

Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. IF THIS IS A MAN describes his deportation to Poland and the twenty months he spend working in Auschwitz. THE TRUCE covers his long journey to Italy at the end of the war through Russia and Central Europe. Levi never raises his voice, complains or attributes blame. By telling his story quietly, objectively and in plain language he renders both the horror and the hope of the situation with absolute clarity. Probing the themes which preoccupy all his writing - work love, power, the nature of things, what it is to be human - he leaves the reader drained, elated, apprehensive.

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that both he and others in Auschwitz coped (or didn't) with the experience. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest - and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The sort of person the concentration camp prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not of camp influences alone. Only those who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influence - while those who made a victory of those experiences turned them into an inner triumph. Frankl came to believe man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. This outstanding work offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the art of living.

Thomas Buergenthal is unique. Liberated from the death camps of Auschwitz at the age of eleven, in adulthood he became a judge at the International Court in The Hague. In his honest and heartfelt memoirs, he tells the story of his extraordinary journey - from the horrors of Nazism to an investigation of modern day genocide. Aged ten Thomas Buergenthal arrived at Auschwitz after surviving the Ghetto of Kielce and two labour camps, and was soon separated from his parents. Using his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck, he managed to survive until he was liberated from Sachsenhausen in 1945. After experiencing the turmoil of Europe's post-war years - from the Battle of Berlin, to a Jewish orphanage in Poland - Buergenthal went to America in the 1950s at the age of seventeen. He eventually became one of the world's leading experts on international law and human rights. His story of survival and his determination to use law and justice to prevent further genocide is an epic and inspirational journey through twentieth century history. His book is both a special historical document and a great literary achievement, comparable only to Primo Levi's masterpieces.

This is the first comprehensive book in English on the fate of the homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The author, a German refugee, examines the climate and conditions that gave rise to a vicious campaign against Germany's gays, as directed by Himmler and his SS--persecution that resulted in tens of thousands of arrests and thousands of deaths.
In this Nazi crusade, homosexual prisoners were confined to death camps where, forced to wear pink triangles, they constituted the lowest rung in the camp hierarchy. The horror of camp life is described through diaries, previously untranslated documents, and interviews with and letters from survivors, revealing how the anti-homosexual campaign was conducted, the crackpot homophobic fantasies that fueled it, the men who made it possible, and those who were its victims, this chilling book sheds light on a corner of twentieth-century history that has been hidden in the shadows much too long.

'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

George Steiner has enjoyed international acclaim as a distinguished cultural critic for many years. The son of central European Jews, he was born in France, fled from the Nazis to New York in 1940, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944. Through his many books, voluminous literary criticism, and book review articles published in the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Guardian, Steiner has played a major role in introducing the works of prominent continental writers and thinkers to readers in North America and Great Britain. Having escaped the Nazis as a child, Steiner vowed that his work as an intellectual would attempt to understand the tragedy of the Shoah. In Disenchantment, Chatterley focuses on Steiner's neglected writings on the Holocaust and antisemitism and places this work at the center of her analysis of his criticism. She clearly demonstrates how Steiner's family history and education, as well as the historical and cultural developments that surrounded him, are central to the evolution of his dominant intellectual concerns. It is during the 1950s and 1960s, in relation to unfolding discoveries about the Nazi murder of European Jewry, that Steiner begins to study the effects of the Holocaust on language and culture and then questions the very purpose and meaning of the humanities. The first intellectual biography of George Steiner, Disenchantment provides an invaluable contribution to literary and cultural studies, confirming his critical and intellectual legacy.

Louis Lowy (1920-1991), an international social worker and gerontologist, rarely spoke publicly about the Holocaust. During the last months of his life, however, he recorded an oral narrative that explores his activities during the Holocaust as the formative experiences of his career. Whether caring for youth in concentration camps, leading an escape from a death march, or forming the self-government of a Jewish displaced persons center, Lowy was guided by principles that would later inform his professional identity as a social worker, including the values of human worth and self-determination, the interdependence of generations, and the need for social participation and lifelong learning. Drawing on Lowy's oral narrative and accounts from three other Holocaust survivors who witnessed his work in the Terezin ghetto and the Deggendorf Displaced Persons Center, Gardella offers a rich portrait of Lowy's personal and professional legacy. In chronicling his life, Gardella also uncovers a larger story about Jewish history and the meaning of the Holocaust in the development of the social work profession.

It has been more than sixty years since the end of World War II and the liberation of the survivors of the Holocaust. Since then, many rich personal and historical accounts have been written of the horrific events of those times. Mental health workers have strived to give survivors solace for their loss, and help them return to a meaningful life. Meanwhile, scholars continue to ponder the inexplicable facts of genocide.

Yet Studies of the Holocaust: Lessons in Survivorship continues to be timely. Based on more than 100 interviews in nine U.S. locations, the book offers a powerful view of survivors? hope, determination, and resilience. Study questions elicited survival strategies, and revealed how, following the war, survivors overcame the horrors of the Holocaust, formed families, built careers, and gave to their communities. Survivor quotes taken from these interviews illuminate how the survivors maintained competence into old age.

While memories of pain persist, accomplishments are acknowledged, and provide lessons for students of human development, mental health practitioners, and the general public.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Journal of Human Behaviour and the Social Environment.

This major reinterpretation of the Holocaust surveys the destruction of the European Jews within the broader context of Nazi violence against other victim groups. Christian Gerlach offers a unique social history of mass violence which reveals why particular groups were persecuted and what it was that connected the fate of these groups and the policies against them. He explores the diverse ideological, political and economic motivations which lay behind the murder of the Jews and charts the changing dynamics of persecution during the course of the war. The book brings together both German actions and those of non-German states and societies, shedding new light on the different groups and vested interests involved and their role in the persecution of non-Jews as well. Ranging across continental Europe, it reveals that popular notions of race were often more important in shaping persecution than scientific racism or Nazi dogma.

Terezin, as it was known in Czech, or Theresienstadt as it was known in German, was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Terezin was the last ghetto to be liberated, one day after the end of World War II. The Last Ghetto is the first in-depth analytical history of a prison society during the Holocaust. Rather than depict the prison society which existed within the ghetto as an exceptional one, unique in kind and not understandable by normal analytical methods, Anna Hajkova argues that such prison societies that developed during the Holocaust are best understood as simply other instances of the societies human beings create under normal circumstances. Challenging conventional claims of Holocaust exceptionalism, Hajkova insists instead that we ought to view the Holocaust with the same analytical tools as other historical events. The prison society of Terezin produced its own social hierarchies under which seemingly small differences among prisoners (of age, ethnicity, or previous occupation) could determine whether one ultimately lived or died. During the three and a half years of the camp's existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages and on empathetic reading of victim testimonies, The Last Ghetto is a transnational, cultural, social, gender, and organizational history of Terezin, revealing how human society works in extremis and highlighting the key issues of responsibility, agency and its boundaries, and belonging.

"When my father was a little boy in Vienna, he told Anna Freud this dream: He is walking on the rim of the white gravel path that leads around the oval pond in the upper part of the Belvedere Gardens. The birds are singing, the sun is out ... Then a blue-black machine with a brilliant array of handles and shafts comes into sight ... The machine comes closer and closer ... He calls out for help as loud as he can, but no one comes to rescue him. There is nothing he can do; the machine grinds him up." Analysis and Exile: Boyhood, Loss, and the Lessons of Anna Freud is the story of the childhood and youth of Peter Heller, one of the first children to be psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud and one of the 20 students invited to attend her experimental school in 1920s Vienna. While Anna Freud tries to teach him how to overcome his fears, Peter's native Vienna slides into Fascist barbarism and he is forced to navigate an increasingly dangerous world. When he is eighteen, he flees to England only to be deported to Canada, where he is interned as a German-speaking foreign national; here Jewish refugees and Nazi P.O.W.'s live cheek by jowl. To tell this story, Vivian Heller draws on a wealth of primary sources, including her father's case history and his internment diary, using novelistic techniques to bring the past alive.

The genocide of Jewish and non-Jewish civilians perpetrated by the German regime during World War Two continues to confront scholars with elusive questions even after nearly seventy years and hundreds of studies. This multi-contributory work is a landmark publication that sees experts renowned in their field addressing these questions in light of current research. A comprehensive introduction to the history of the Holocaust, this volume has 42 chapters which add important depth to the academic study of the Holocaust, both geographically and topically. The chapters address such diverse issues as: continuities in German and European history with respect to genocide prior to 1939 the eugenic roots of Nazi anti-Semitism the response of Europe's Jewish Communities to persecution and destruction the Final Solution as the German occupation instituted it across Europe rescue and rescuer motivations the problem of prosecuting war crimes gender and Holocaust experience the persecution of non-Jewish victims the Holocaust in postwar cultural venues. This important collection will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of the Holocaust.

Politics, Violence, Memory highlights important new social scientific research on the Holocaust and initiates the integration of the Holocaust into mainstream social scientific research in a way that will be useful both for social scientists and historians. Until recently social scientists largely ignored the Holocaust despite the centrality of these tragic events to many of their own concepts and theories. In Politics, Violence, Memory the editors bring together contributions to understanding the Holocaust from a variety of disciplines, including political science, sociology, demography, and public health. The chapters examine the sources and measurement of antisemitism; explanations for collaboration, rescue, and survival; competing accounts of neighbor-on-neighbor violence; and the legacies of the Holocaust in contemporary Europe. Politics, Violence, Memory brings new data to bear on these important concerns and shows how older data can be deployed in new ways to understand the "index case" of violence in the modern world. -- Cornell University Press

A writer's search for his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original and riveting epic, brilliantly exploring the nature of time and memory. 'The Lost' begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relative's fates. The quest takes him to a dozen countries and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. Finally, he goes back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him. Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with memories of a vanished generation, 'The Lost' transforms the story of one family into a profound and morally searching study of our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.

'Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt' Sunday Times 'An unsparing, honest and insightful memoir, that shows how private failure becomes national disaster' Hilary Mantel Twenty years after the end of the war, Horst Kruger attempted to make sense of his childhood. He had grown up in a quiet Berlin suburb. Here, people lived ordinary lives, believed in God, obeyed the law, and were gradually seduced by the promises of Nazism. He had been 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'. With tragic inevitability, this world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble. Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides a searing portrait of life under the Nazis.

In the midst of the Second World War, the Allies acknowledged Germany's ongoing programme of extermination. In the Shadow of the Holocaust examines the struggle to attain post-war justice and prosecution. Focusing on Poland's engagement with the United Nations War Crimes Commission, it analyses the different ways that the Polish Government in Exile (based in London from 1940) agitated for an Allied response to German atrocities. Michael Fleming shows that jurists associated with the Government in Exile made significant contributions to legal debates on war crimes and, along with others, paid attention to German crimes against Jews. By exploring the relationship between the UNWCC and the Polish War Crimes Office under the authority of the Polish Government in Exile and later, from the summer of 1945, the Polish Government in Warsaw, Fleming provides a new lens through which to examine the early stages of the Cold War.

In this riveting account, historian Stephen Ambrose continues where he left off in his #1 bestseller D-Day. Ambrose again follows the individual characters of this noble, brutal, and tragic war, from the high command down to the ordinary soldier, drawing on hundreds of interviews to re-create the war experience with startling clarity and immediacy. From the hedgerows of Normandy to the overrunning of Germany, Ambrose tells the real story of World War II from the perspective of the men and women who fought it.

'Gripping, heartbreaking and uplifting.' Christy Lefteri, author of the million-copy bestseller The Beekeeper of Aleppo THEIR STORY WILL BREAK YOUR HEART THEIR JOURNEY WILL FILL YOU WITH HOPE YOU WILL NEVER FORGET THEIR NAMES When they are little girls, Cibi, Magda and Livia make a promise to their father - that they will stay together, no matter what. Years later, at just 15, Livia is ordered to Auschwitz by the Nazis. Cibi, only 19 herself, remembers their promise and follows Livia, determined to protect her sister, or die with her. Together, they fight to survive through unimaginable cruelty and hardship. Magda, only 17, stays with her mother and grandfather, hiding out in a neighbour's attic or in the forest when the Nazi militia come to round up friends, neighbours and family. She escapes for a time, but eventually she too is captured and transported to the death camp. In Auschwitz-Birkenau the three sisters are reunited and, remembering their father, they make a new promise, this time to each other: That they will survive. Three Sisters is a beautiful story of hope in the hardest of times and of finding love after loss. Heather Morris is the global bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka's Journey, which have sold eight million copies worldwide. Three Sisters is her third novel, and the final piece in the phenomenon that is the Tattooist of Auschwitz series.

From the French Revolution to Vatican II, the institutional Catholic Church has opposed much that modernity has offered men and women constructing their societies. This book focuses on the experiences of German Catholics as they have worked to engage their faith with their culture in the midst of the two world wars, the barbarism of the Nazi era, and the uncertainties and conflicts of the post-World War II world.

German Catholics have confronted and challenged their Church's anti-modernism, two lost wars, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich, the Cold War, German reunification and the impulses of globalization. Catholic theologians and those others nurtured by Catholicism, who resisted Nazism to create their own private spaces, developed a personal and existential theology that bore fruit after 1945. Such theologians as Karl Rahner, Johannes Metz, and Walter Kasper, were rooted in their political experiences and in the renewal movement built by those who attended Vatican II. These theologians were sensitive to the horrors of the Nazi brutalization, the positive contributions of democracy, and the need to create a Catholicism that could join the conversation on human rights following World War II. This dialogue meant accepting non-Catholic religious traditions as authentic expressions of faith, which in turn required that the sacred dignity of every man, woman, and child had to be respected. By the twenty-first century, Catholic theologians had made furthering a human rights agenda part of their tradition, and the German contribution to Catholic theology was crucial to that development. The current Catholic milieu has been forged through its defensive responses to the Enlightenment, through its resistance to ideologies that have supported sanctioned murder, and through an extensive dialogue with its own traditions.

In focusing on the German Catholic experience, Dietrich offers a cultural approach to the study of the religious and ethical issues that ground the human rights paradigm that will be of particular interest to students of religion, historians, sociologists, and human rights specialists.

In Conquest and Redemption, Gregg J. Rickman explains how the Nazis stole the possessions of their Jewish victims and obtained the cooperation of institutions across Europe in these crimes of convenience. He also describes how those institutions are being brought to justice, sixty years later, for their retention of their ill-gotten gains.

Rickman not only explains how the robbery was accomplished, tracked, stalled, and then finally reversed, but also clearly shows the ways in which robbery was inextricably connected to the murder of the Jews. The Nazis took everything from Jews--their families, their possessions, and even their names. As with the murder of Jews, the Nazis' robbery was an organized, institutionalized effort. Jews were isolated, robbed, and left homeless, regarded as parasites in the Nazis' eyes, and thus fair game. In short, the organized robbery of the Jews facilitated their slaughter.

How did the German people come to believe that it was permissible to isolate, outlaw, rob, and murder Jews? A partial explanation can be found in the Nazis' creation of a virtual religion of German nationalism and homogeneity that delegitimized Jews as a people and as individuals. This belief system was expressed through a complex structure of religious rules, practices, and institutions. While Nazi ideology was the guiding principle, how that ideology was formed and how it was applied is important to understand if one is to fully grasp the Holocaust.

Rickman painstakingly describes the structural composition and motivation for the plundering of Jewish assets. The Holocaust will always remain a memory of unequalled pain and suffering, but, as Rickman shows, the return of stolen goods to their survivors is a partial victory for the long aggrieved. Conquest and Redemption will be of interest to students and scholars in the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath.

'A breathtaking story' Daily Mail 'Extraordinary' The Telegraph on the Cook sisters Desperate circumstances can cause ordinary women to achieve extraordinary things. No one would have predicted such glamorous and daring lives for Ida and Louise Cook two decidedly ordinary women who lived quiet lives in the London suburbs. But throughout the 1930s, the remarkable sisters rescued dozens of Jews facing persecution and death. Ida's memoir of the adventures she and Louise shared remains as fresh, vital, and entertaining as the woman who wrote it. Even when Ida began to earn thousands as a successful romance novelist, the sisters directed every spare resource, as well as their considerable courage and ingenuity, towards saving as many as they could from Hitler's death camps.

Based on 70 hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka (the largest of the extermination camps), this book bares the soul of a man who continually found ways to rationalize his role in Hitler's final soulution.

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.