This book seeks to answer three vital questions about the worldwide response to Hitler's "Final Solution" When did information about the genocide first become known to Jews and non-Jews? Through what channels was this information transmitted? What was the reaction of those who received word of the slaughter?

Walter Laqueur's quest focuses on the period between June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and December 1942, by which time the United Nations had confirmed the news about the mass killings in a common declaration. By the end of 1942, Chelmno, Belzec, Auschwitz, Maidanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were fully operational and two and a half million Jews had already been killed.

According to Laqueur, word started to spread soon after extermination began. But there is no easy, straightforward answer to the wider question of why there was a failure to read and correctly interpret the signs in 1941; why so many individuals and governments actually chose to deny the reality of genocide when faced with incontrovertible evidence. A probing and disturbing work, The Terrible Secret explores one of the most perplexing aspects of the Holocaust, a political and psychological riddle of general significance to the understanding of the history of our times.

An exploration of the development of Holocaust research in Israel, this book ranges from the consolidation of Holocaust research as an academic subject in the late 1940s to the establishment of Yad Vashem and beyond. Research on the story of historiography is often a work on books, on the "final products" that fill academic bookshelves yet, in Israeli Holocaust Research, Boaz Cohen illustrates that the evolution of holocaust research in Israel has a more human element to it. Drawing on knowledge gained through seven years of work in ten major archives in Israel, the author reveals a previously unseen picture of the development of Israeli Holocaust research "from below," and of the social and cultural forces influencing its character. In doing so, a new facet to the picture emerges, of the story beyond the archive and the people who see Holocaust research as their mission and responsibility. This book will be a fascinating addition to the study of Holocaust research and will be of particular interest to students of history, historiography and Jewish studies

In The Price of Survival: Marcus Levin, Norwegian Holocaust Humanitarian, Irene Levin Berman tells the story of her father's heroic attempts to save the Jews of Norway, as well as hundreds of stateless refugees who had escaped other European countries in the 1930s, from deportation to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Marcus Levin worked tirelessly to help Jews before and after the Nazis invaded Norway, and after the war he worked with the American Joint Distribution Committee and organizations in Norway such as the Jewish Social Unit to help find homes and jobs for the few Norwegian Jews who returned survived the concentration camps as well as about 600 stateless Displaced Persons. In 1962 Marcus Levin was awarded a gold Medal of Honor by King Olav of Norway in recognition of his efforts during World War II.

Primo Levi was perhaps the most humane and eloquent writer of testimony to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust. But his work also went beyond testimony, tackling many of the founding ethical questions of what it is to be human. This book unveils the extraordinary depth of Levi the ethical writer for the fist time, enhancing his status as one of the key literary figures of the twentieth century.

This book goes beyond historical and psychological explanations of the Holocaust to directly address the moral responsibility of individuals involved in it. While defending the view that individuals caught up in large-scale historical events like the Holocaust are still responsible for their choices, he provides the philosophical tools needed to assess the responsibility, both negative and positive, of perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders, victims, helpers and rescuers. This book will be an important addition to courses on the Holocaust in social and political philosophy, history, religion, and applied ethics.

A deeply reflective work, written by a number of eminent scholars both Jewish and Christian who represent a variety of disciplines and perspectives, this book explores basic issues in Wiesel's work -the nature of God, madness, silence, horror, and hope. With essays by such authorities among others, as Robert McAfee Brown, Eugene J. Fisher, Hary James Cargas, Eva Fleuschner, and Irving Abrahamson, the bool reflects the inspitation of Wiesel's reconstructed belief in God, humanity, and the future. These eminent theologians, literary scholars, and philosophers show how Wiesel's thinking has changed over the past thirty years, and how it has remained the same.

The story of the African-American crew of the USS Mason that made history in World War II when they escorted six convoys across the Atlantic.

It has been widely accepted that few individuals had as great an influence on the church and its theology during the twentieth century as Karl Barth (1886-1968). His legacy continues to be explored and explained, with theologians around the world and from across the ecumenical spectrum vigorously debating the doctrinal ramifications of Barth's insights. What has been less readily accepted is that the Holocaust of the Jews had an equally profound effect, and that it, too, entails far-reaching consequences for the church's understanding of itself and its God. In this groundbreaking book, Barth and the Holocaust are brought into deliberate dialogue with one another to show why the church should heed both their voices, and how that might be done.

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.

This book goes beyond historical and psychological explanations of the Holocaust to directly address the moral responsibility of individuals involved in it. While defending the view that individuals caught up in large-scale historical events like the Holocaust are still responsible for their choices, he provides the philosophical tools needed to assess the responsibility, both negative and positive, of perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders, victims, helpers and rescuers. This book will be an important addition to courses on the Holocaust in social and political philosophy, history, religion, and applied ethics. Visit our website for sample chapters!

This book charts the performative dimension of the Holocaust memorialization culture through a selection of representative artistic, educational, and memorial projects. Performative practice refers to the participatory and performance-like aspects of the Holocaust memorial culture, the transformative potential of such practice, and its impact upon visitors. At its core, performative practice seeks to transform individuals from passive spectators into socially and morally responsible agents. This edited volume explores how performative practices came into being, what impact they exert upon audiences, and how researchers can conceptualise and understand their relevance. In doing so, the contributors to this volume innovatively draw upon existing philosophical considerations of performativity, understandings of performance in relation to performativity, and upon critical insights emerging from visual and participatory arts. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

This heart-stopping story of a young girl hiding from the Nazis is based on Clara Kramer's diary from her years surviving in an underground bunker with seventeen other people.

Clara Kramer was a typical Polish Jewish teenager from a small town at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded, Clara's family was taken in by the Becks, a Volksdeutsch (ethnically German) family from their town. Mr. Beck was known to be an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a vocal anti-Semite. His wife had worked as Clara's family's housekeeper. But on hearing that Jewish families were being led into the woods and shot, Beck sheltered the Kramers and two other Jewish families.

In all, eighteen people lived in a bunker dug out of the Becks' basement. Fifteen-year-old Clara kept a diary during the twenty terrifying months she was in hiding, writing down details of their unpredictable life, from the house's catching fire to Beck's affair with Clara's neighbor; the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room above to the small pleasure of a shared Christmas carp.Against all odds, Clara lived to tell her story, and her diary is now part of the permanent collection of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

For more than thirty years Francesco Lotoro, an Italian pianist and composer has been on an odyssey to recover music written by the inmates of Adolf Hitler's concentration camps and the gulags of Stalin's Soviet Union. Between 1933, the year of the opening of the Dachau Lager in Germany, to Stalin's death in 1953 when thousands of Soviet prisoners were released, Lotoro pieces together the human stories of survivors whose only salvation was their love of music. Across three decades of relentless investigation, his findings as captured in Lost Music of the Holocaust are extraordinary and historically important. Lotoro unearthed over eight thousand unpublished works of music, ten thousand documents (microfilms, diaries, notebooks, and recordings on phonographic recordings), as well as locating and interviewing many survivors who in a previous life had been trained musicians and composers. Be it a symphony, an opera, a simple folk song or even a gypsy melody, Lotor has travelled the globe to track them down. Many pieces were hastily scribbled down ow whatever the composer could find: food wrappings, a vegetable sack and even a train ticket stub. To avoid discover by camp guards, Lotoro even discovered forgotten pieces of code inmates had invented to hide their real meaning - music. In many cases, the composers would be murdered in the gas chambers or worked to death, not knowing whether their music would be heard by the world. Until now. Their stories and their music adds colour and humanity to the horrors of the Holocaust and of Stalin's oppressive rule. It is a journey into music and history that reveals a new way of telling the darkest chapters of the twentieth century whilst shining a light on the beauty that could still be created amidst the horrors endured.

As the Nazis staged their takeover in 1933, instances of antisemitic violence began to soar. While previous historical research assumed that this violence happened much later, Hermann Beck counteracts this, drawing on sources from twenty German archives, and focussing on this early violence, and on the reaction of German institutions and the elites who led them. Before the Holocaust examines the antisemitic violence experienced in this period - from boycotts, violent attacks, robbery, extortion, abductions, and humiliating 'pillory marches', to grievous bodily harm and murder - which has hitherto not been adequately recognized. Beck then analyses the reactions of those institutions that still had the capacity to protest against Nazi attacks and legislative measures - the Protestant Church, the Catholic Church, the bureaucracies, and Hitler's conservative coalition partner, the DNVP - and the mindset of the elites who led them, to determine their various responses to flagrant antisemitic abuses. Individual protests against violent attacks, the April boycott, and Nazi legislative measures were already hazardous in March and April 1933, but established institutions in the German State and society were still able to voice their concerns and raise objections. By doing so, they might have stopped or at least postponed a radicalization that eventually led to the pogrom of 1938 (Kristallnacht) and the Holocaust.

For the last decade scholars have been questioning the idea that the Holocaust was not talked about in any way until well into the 1970s. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence is the first collection of authoritative, original scholarship to expose a serious misreading of the past on which, controversially, the claims for a ?Holocaust industry? rest. Taking an international approach this bold new book exposes the myth and opens the way for a sweeping reassessment of Jewish life in the postwar era, a life lived in the pervasive, shared awareness that Jews had narrowly survived a catastrophe that had engulfed humanity as a whole but claimed two-thirds of their number.

The chapters include:

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A breakthrough volume in the debate about the ?Myth of Silence?, this is a must for all students of Holocaust and genocide.

The first account of the August Trials, in which postwar Poland confronted the betrayal of Jewish citizens under Nazi rule but ended up fashioning an alibi for the past. When six years of ferocious resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the "many Cains among us," as a Poznan newspaper editorial put it, Poland's judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being largely forgotten. Andrew Kornbluth reconstructs the story of the August Trials, long dismissed as a Stalinist travesty, and discovers that they were in fact a scrupulous search for the truth. But as the process of retribution began to unearth evidence of enthusiastic local participation in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely independent judiciary all struggled to salvage a purely heroic vision of the past that could unify a nation recovering from massive upheaval. The trials became the crucible in which the Communist state and an unyielding society forged a foundational myth of modern Poland but left a lasting open wound in Polish-Jewish relations. The August Trials draws striking parallels with incomplete postwar reckonings on both sides of the Iron Curtain, suggesting the extent to which ethnic cleansing and its abortive judicial accounting are part of a common European heritage. From Paris and The Hague to Warsaw and Kyiv, the law was made to serve many different purposes, even as it failed to secure the goal with which it is most closely associated: justice.

Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe explores the phenomenon of Holocaust transfer, analysing the widespread practice of using the Holocaust and its imagery for the representation and recording of other historical events in various media sites. It investigates the use of Holocaust imagery in political and legal discourses, in critical thinking and philosophy, as well as in popular culture, to provide a fresh theorisation of the manner in which the Holocaust comes loose from its historical context and is applied to events and campaigns in the contemporary public sphere. Richly illustrated with concrete examples, including prominent, international animal rights activism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the genocide in Rwanda, this book traces the visual rhetoric of Holocaust imagery and its application to events other than the genocide of Jewish people With its discussion of the wide range of issues arising with this form of 'Holocaust-transfer', the generalization of the Holocaust as a metaphor in representations of catastrophe, as well as in other cultural locations, Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe will appeal to those working in the fields of holocaust studies, cultural and visual culture studies, sociology, and media studies.

For the last decade scholars have been questioning the idea that the Holocaust was not talked about in any way until well into the 1970s. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence is the first collection of authoritative, original scholarship to expose a serious misreading of the past on which, controversially, the claims for a Holocaust industry rest. Taking an international approach this bold new book exposes the myth and opens the way for a sweeping reassessment of Jewish life in the postwar era, a life lived in the pervasive, shared awareness that Jews had narrowly survived a catastrophe that had engulfed humanity as a whole but claimed two-thirds of their number.

The chapters include:

A breakthrough volume in the debate about the Myth of Silence, this is a must for all students of Holocaust and genocide.

The majority of Poland's prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Wolfson History Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Cundill History Prize Told for the first time from their perspective, the story of children who survived the chaos and trauma of the Holocaust-named a best history book of 2020 by the Daily Telegraph "Impressive, beautifully written, judicious and thoughtful. . . . Will be a major milestone in the history of the Holocaust and its legacy."-Mark Roseman, author of The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Clifford follows the lives of one hundred Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age. Drawing on archives and interviews, Clifford charts the experiences of these child survivors and those who cared for them-as well as those who studied them, such as Anna Freud. Survivors explores the aftermath of the Holocaust in the long term, and reveals how these children-often branded "the lucky ones"-had to struggle to be able to call themselves "survivors" at all. Challenging our assumptions about trauma, Clifford's powerful and surprising narrative helps us understand what it was like living after, and living with, childhoods marked by rupture and loss.

This book is a collection of some of the most influential recent writing on vital aspects of Nazi Germany. It provides readers with an insight into new perspectives on traditional understandings of the Third Reich as well as covering all the central aspects of the period, from the rise of the Nazis and the internal organization of the regime, to Germany's role in the Second World War.

The readings incorporate discussion of social and economic change, the personality of Hitler, the role of women in Nazi Germany, the involvement of German armed forces in the atrocities of the Second World War, the relationship between the German people and the Gestapo and, most controversially, continuing debates about German public opinion and the Holocaust. A key feature is the inclusion of three seminal articles by German historians translated into English here for the first time. The volume begins with a substantial editorial introduction to current issues and each essay is prefaced with a headnote, setting it in its historiographical context.

Recently, there has been a major shift in the focus of historical research on World War II towards the study of the involvements of scholars and academic institutions in the crimes of the Third Reich. The roots of this involvement go back to the 1920s. At that time right-wing scholars participated in the movement to revise the Versailles Treaty and to create a new German national identity. The contribution of geopolitics to this development is notorious. But there were also the disciplines of history, geography, ethnography, art history, archeology, sociology, and demography that devised a new nationalist ideology and propaganda. Its scholars established an extensive network of personal and institutional contacts. This volume deals with these scholars and their agendas. They provided the Nazi regime with ideas of territorial expansion, colonial exploitation and racist exclusion culminating in the Holocaust. Apart from developing ideas and concepts, scholars also actively worked in the SS and Wehrmacht when Hitler began to implement its criminal policies in World War II. This collection of original essays, written by the foremost European scholars in this field, describes key figures and key programs supporting the expansion and exploitation of the Third Reich. In particular, they analyze the historical, geographic, ethnographical and ethno-political ideas behind the ethnic cleansing and looting of cultural treasures.

Architectural design can play a role in helping make the past present in meaningful ways when applied to preexisting buildings and places that carry notable and troubling pasts. In this comparative analysis, Rumiko Handa establishes the critical role architectural designs play in presenting difficult pasts by examining documentation centers on National Socialism in Germany. Presenting Difficult Pasts Through Architecture analyzes four centers - Cologne, Nuremberg, Berlin, and Munich - from the point of view of their shared intent to make the past present at National Socialists' perpetrator sites. Applying original frameworks, Handa considers what more architectural design could do toward meaningful representations and interpretations of difficult pasts. This book is a must-read for students, practitioners, and academics interested in how architectural design can participate in presenting the difficult pasts of historical places in meaningful ways.