Auschwitz. Treblinka. The very names of these Nazi camps evoke unspeakable cruelty. Sobibor is less well known, and this book discloses the horrors perpetrated there.Established in German-occupied Poland, the camp at Sobibor began its dreadful killing operation in May 1942. By October 1943, approximately 167,000 people had been murdered there. Sobibor is not well documented and, were it not for an extraordinary revolt on 14 October 1943, we would know little about it. On that day, prisoners staged a remarkable uprising in which 300 men and women escaped. The author identifies only forty-seven who survived the war.Sent in June 1943 to Sobibor, where his wife and family were murdered, Jules Schelvis has written the first book-length, fully documented account of the camp. He details the creation of the killing centre, its personnel, the use of railways, selections, forced labour, gas chambers, escape attempts and the historic uprising.In documenting this part of Holocaust history, this compelling and well-researched account advances our knowledge and understanding of the Nazi attempt to annihilate the European Jews.Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Adolf Eichmann was head of Gestapo Division IV-B4, the Third Reich's notorious Security Service, which was responsible for implementing the "Final Solution" of the European Jews in the Greater German Reich. False Gods is a book that will be controversial - not only with the Jewish community, but also with the historical "revisionists" who seek to deny the Holocaust. Eichmann's testimony not only challenges the generally accepted history of that period, but it provides much in-depth detail of the historical facts - facts which Eichmann himself was fully prepared to confirm from the surviving documents of the period that were submitted by both the prosecution and defense during his trial. In False Gods Eichmann states: "I shall describe the genocide of the Jews, how it happened and give, in addition, my thoughts of the past and of today. For not only did I have to see with my own eyes the fields of death, the battlefields on which life died away, I saw much worse. I saw how, through a few words, through the mere concise order of an individual to whom the state gave authority, such fields for the extinction of life were created. I saw the machinery of death. Grasping cogs within cogs, like clockwork. I saw those who observed the process of the work; and during the process. I saw them always repeating the work and they looked at the seconds-hand, which hurried; hurried like life to death. The greatest and cruellest dance of death of all time. That I saw. And I prepare to describe it, as a warning." Adolf Eichmann

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

Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.

The role of massacre in history has been given little focused attention either by historians or academics in related fields. This is surprising as its prevalence and persistence surely demands that it should be a subject of serious and systematic exploration. What exactly is a massacre? When - and why - does it happen? Is there a cultural, as well as political framework within which it occurs? How do human societies respond to it? What are its social and economic repercussions? Are massacres catalysts for change or are they part of the continuity of the human saga? These are just some of the questions the authors address in this important volume. Chronologically and geographically broad in scope, The Massacre in History provides in-depth analysis of particular massacres and themes associated with them from the 11th century to the present. Specific attention is paid to 15th century Christian-Jewish relations in Spain, the St. Batholemew's Day massacre, England and Ireland in the civil war era, the 19th century Caucasus, the rape of Nanking in 1937 and the Second World War origins of the Serb-Croat conflict. The book explores the subject of massacre from a variety of perspectives - its relationship to politics, culture, religion and society, its connection to ethnic cleansing and genocide, and its role in gender terms and in relation to the extermination of animals. The historians provide evidence to suggest that the "massacre" is often central to the course of human development and societal change.

The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the survivors of the Holocaust contended with life after the darkest night in Jewish history. They include the Earl Harrison mission and significant report, the effort to keep Europe's borders open to refugee infiltration, the murder of the first Jew in Germany after V-E Day and its aftermath, and the iconic sculptures of Nathan Rapoport and Poland's landscape of Holocaust memory up to the present day. Joining extensive archival research and a limpid prose, Professor Monty Noam Penkower again displays a definitive mastery of his craft.

Good Beyond Evil is the story of a handful of ordinary people who risked their lives to save the lives of one Jewish family. It begins in the spring of 1939, weaves through the post-liberation period and ends in 1997 with a ceremony at Yad Vashem. The acceptance of two of the main characters into the Community of 'Righteous Among the Nations' provokes humbling reflection on the richness of opportunities enjoyed by members of the family who were saved compared with the narrowly circumscribed lives of those who saved them. Set in the broader context of Czechoslovakia's short history, its democratic institutions and endemic anti-Semitism, Good Beyond Evil is a also a requiem for a once-flourishing Jewish community.

This book is the result of a four-year, in-depth study using social science methodology of those refugees who came as children or youths from Central Europe to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, fleeing persecution from the National Socialist regime. This study examines their fates in their new country, their successes and tribulations.

"This anthology does indeed offer a panoramic survey, and thus is a valuable contribution to Holocaust literature.]"
--"The Princeton Seminary Bulletin"

"Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok has provided a much needed and indeed "panoramic survey of Holocaust theology" (1) that offers a comprehensive overview of excerpts from representative writings in the field. "Holocaust Theology: A Reader" provides a fine, comprehensive overview of the interpretive possibilities."
--"Journal of the American Academy of Religion"

""Holocaust Theology: A Reader" should prove useful as an introductory text which grapples with complex issues."
--"SHOFAR"

Where was God during the Holocaust? And where has God been since? How has our religious belief been changed by the Shoah? For more than half a century, these questions have haunted both Jewish and Christian theologians. Holocaust Theology provides a panoramic survey of the writings of more than one hundred leading Jewish and Christian thinkers on these profound theological problems.

Beginning with a general introduction to Holocaust theology and the religious challenge of the Holocaust, this sweeping collection brings together in one volume a coherent overview of the key theologies which have shaped responses to the Holocaust over the last several decades, including those addressing perplexing questions regarding Christian responsibility and culpability during the Nazi era. Each reading is preceded by a brief introduction. The volume will be invaluable to Rabbis and the clergy, students, scholars of the Holocaust and of religion, and all those troubled by the religious implications of the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Contributors include LeoBaeck, Eugene Borowitz, Stephen Haynes, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Steven T. Katz, Primo Levi, Jacob Neusner, John Pawlikowski, Rosemary Radford Reuther, Jonathan Sarna, Paul Tillich, and Elie Wiesel.

How do democratic and pluralistic societies cope with traumatic events in their past? What strategies and taboos are employed to reconstruct wars, revolutions, torturing, mass killings and genocide in a way to make their contradiction to basic human rights and values invisible? This interdisciplinary volume analyzes in detail for the first time, in multiple genres, the history and image of the "German "Wehrmacht"" and the debates in Austria and Germany surrounding two highly contested exhibitions about the war crimes of the German "Wehrmacht" during WWII.

A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel
"Night" is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.
"""Night" offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

Arnold Daghani (1909-85) came from a German-speaking Jewish family in Suczawa, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Romania. His understated narrative of his experiences in the slave labour camp at Mikhailowka, south west Ukraine (1942-43), presented here in its first English book edition, provides a day-by-day account of the chilling experiences of Jewish slave labourers. It is written in a compelling style and illustrated by watercolours and drawings that Daghani made secretly in captivity and smuggled out of the camp and a Romanian ghetto. It includes an extraordinary account of the couple's escape and the shooting of over three hundred prisoners. The uniqueness of Daghani's Holocaust testimony lies in his role as an artist which led to his (and his wife's) escape from the camp and their survival. The camps in Ukraine have been under-investigated and the diary provides significant material. It was used as the basis of investigations in the 1960s into war crimes in the slave labour camps in Ukraine, helping to bring attention to the region and providing some form of recognition for those who suffered there. This richly illustrated and scrupulously edited book is distinguished from more conventional Holocaust memoirs by focusing on fundamental questions of historical testimony and the problems of representation in both words and images. Daghani's diary is contextualized on the basis of wide-ranging new historical, archival and art historical research in essays that document the artist's attempts to achieve justice and reconciliation. They locate the diary in relation to contemporary issues on migration and statelessness, genocide and trauma, self-reflection and memory. The diary is both art and document, addressing how we understand and construct history. It enables readers to engage with the Holocaust via the viewpoint of an individual, making statistics more meaningful and history less distant.

The Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum. Events had been building up to it for a long, long time before the Nazis came to power.
German history, along with the supposed civilizing effects of Judeo-Christianity, are, thefore, traced from Roman times to the chaotic conditions after WWI which allowed a fanatical, nationalist dictator to came to power.
The relentless infiltration of the Jews into Europe is outlined, explaining why they came. Also discussed is the inability of Germans to unite as a nation of German speakers and the disaster that befell Europe following Luther's protestant schism.
Most importantly, the essential factor provoking the present day Muslim terror campaign against the West is pointed out.
This work treats a number of highly important issues-the resolution of which will be essential to any harmonious evolution of humanity.

Why didn't the Hungarian Jews do more to resist the 'Final Solution'? Why didn't the Allies bomb the gas chambers at Auschwitz? Why did the Allies sabotage schemes to save the Jews?
In this provocative book, historians from Hungary, Israel, Britain and the United States examine one of the greatest tragedies of World War II -- the deportation and murder of 435,000 Hungarian Jews during the last months of the war when German military and diplomatic power was on the wane. Could Jews in the West have done more to help, or were they 'prisoners' of civil servants and politicians in Whitehall and the US State Department? Drawing on new sources, leading scholars address these controversial issues and shed new light on a shameful period in history.

Special volume treating exemplars of the vast number of texts arising from historic and imaginary encounters between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, from the early modern period to the present. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-a-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 5 features essays written in honor of the memory of Jonathan M. Hess, a leading scholar in German Jewish Studies who, through both his person and publications, opened up the field for many others to explore new areas of research and inquiry. It offers exemplary instances of historic and imaginary encounters based on interactions of Jews and "other Germans" from the early modern period to the present day. It also discusses adaptations and translations of Yiddish and German texts, presenting insights into connections between literary texts and their Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike. By exploring multimodal cultural works ranging from performance to poems and illustrated fairy tales, and literature in German, Yiddish, and other languages, Nexus 5 works to expand the field of German Jewish studies in the spirit of Jonathan Hess himself.

Hitler: Profile of a Dictator is a fascinating exploration of Hitler and his role in the Third Reich. The book unravels the complex historiographical debate surrounding this notorious figure by examining his personality, his ideas and the nature of his power.
Hitler: Profile of a Dictator surveys Hitler's career chronologically and includes coverage of:
* the young idealogue
* the Führer State
* Hitler's role in the outbreak of the Second World War
* Hitler's involvement in the Holocaust.
This second edition brings the continuing debate up to date in light of the most recent reseach, and speculates on the implications of the Irving trial.

The injustices committed against millions of Europe's Jews did not end with the fall of the Third Reich. Long after the Nazis had seized the belongings of Holocaust victims, Swiss banks concealed and appropriated their assets, demanding that their survivors produce the death certificates or banking records of the depositors in order to claim their family's property--demands that were usually impossible for the petitioners to meet. Now the full account of the Holocaust deposits affair is revealed by the journalist who first broke the story in 1995. Relying on archival and contemporary sources, Itamar Levin describes the Jewish people's decades-long effort to return death camp victims' assets to their rightful heirs. Levin also uncovers the truth about the behavior of Swiss banking institutions, their complicity with the Nazis, and their formidable power over even their own neutral government.

From the first attempt to settle the fate of German property in neutral countries at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, through the heated negotiations following publication of Levin's investigative article in 1995, to the Swiss banks' ultimate agreement to a $1.25 billion payment in 1997, the pursuit of restitution is a story of delaying tactics and legal complications of almost unimaginable dimensions. Terrified that the traditional and highly marketable wall of secrecy surrounding the Swiss banks would tumble and destroy the industry, the banks' managements were dismissive and uncooperative in determining the location and extent of the assets in question, forcing the United States, other European countries, and Jewish organizations worldwide to apply tremendous pressure for a just resolution. The details and the central characters involved in this struggle, as well as new information about Switzerland's controversial policies during World War II, are fascinating reading for anyone concerned with the Holocaust and its aftermath.

This book re-evaluates the architectural history of Nazi Germany and looks at the development of the forced-labour concentration camp system. Through an analysis of such major Nazi building projects as the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds and the rebuilding of Berlin, Jaskot ties together the development of the German building economy, state architectural goals and the rise of the SS as a political and economic force. As a result, The Architecture of Oppression contributes to our understanding of the conjunction of culture and politics in the Nazi period as well as the agency of architects and SS administrators in enabling this process.

Each section of this study focuses on a different aspect of the discourse between gender and identity and explores the major research trends evincing themselves since the end of the Second World War.

The neutrality maintained by Turkey during most of World War II allowed it to rescue thousands of Jews from the Holocaust in the Nazi-occupied or collaborating countries of Europe. In France, the Turkish consels in Paris and Marseilles intervened to protect Turkish Jews from the application of anti-Jewish laws introduced both by the German occupying authorities and the Vichy government, and rescued them from concentration camps, getting them off trains destined for the extermination chambers in the East, and arranging train caravans and other special transportation to take them through Nazi-occupied territory to safety in Turkey.;Despite opposition from both the Nazis and the British, morever, the Turkish government instructed its diplomats in Eastern Europe to provide all possible assistance to Jews being persecuted during the Holocaust, allowed the Jewish Agency and other rescue groups to operate openly from offices in Istanbul, enabling them to send money and supplies to Eastern Europe, and permitted almost 100,000 East European Jews to transit through Turkey on their way to Palestine. This book is based on research in Turkish diplomatic archives in Ankara and Paris as well as i

This first volume explores Cunningham's strategy and operations from June 1940 to March 1942. Included here are the clash with the Italian Fleet off Calabria in July 1940 and the victory at Matapan in March 1941, together with the Fleet Air Arm attack on Taranto in November 1940.