In this vivid memoir originally published in German, Anne Groschler (1888-1982) recounts her 1944 escape from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Mandatory Palestine via "Transport 222", an exchange transport of 222 Jews for "Aryan" prisoners of war. In the most detailed contribution of the exchange ever published, Groschler paints an authentic picture of life before WWII amongst the upper echelons of German society, her ultimate persecution and escape to Holland where she was betrayed, the horrors of life in the Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen camps, and her eventual flight via "Transport 222" to Palestine. Written immediately after her liberation in 1944, this unique document captures a little-known chapter of Holocaust history.

Although the period leading up to the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews has been well recorded, few sources convey the incremental effect of specific decrees aimed to dehumanize the Jews who were caught in Hitler's net, and how their everyday lives were transformed. These letters, written by Malvina Fischer to her daughter Mimi Weisz, have been translated and edited by her granddaughter Edith Kurzweil. They convey with vivid immediacy the fears and premonitions, the ghettoization and escape attempts that were the common experience of Viennese and German Jews in the years preceding the implementation of the "Final Solution." In the first section of the volume, Kurzweil establishes the personal and political contexts of the letters (written between April 6, 1940 and December 1941, when Malvina Fischer and her family were deported) and links them to the then emerging "Jewish laws." The second section contains the letters themselves and documents the throttling grip in which the authorities held every Viennese Jew who had not managed to escape. The third section consists of translations of official summaries of the relevant laws, ordinances, and edicts--many of them marked "secret"--which inexorably determined that Kurzweil's family become part of the "final solution." From these letters and documents we become aware, also, of the profusion of legal entities dealing with Jews, the rivalries among them, and the free-floating dimensions of victims' fear and dread. Because the letters are full of allusions rather than straightforward information, and characterized by self-censorship, Edith Kurzweil has annotated them and inserted the relevant numbers of the specific laws as these were being applied.

How did British Jewry respond to the Holocaust, how prominent was it on the communal agenda, and what does this response tell us about the values, politics, and fears of the Anglo-Jewish community? This book studies the priorities of that community, and thereby seeks to analyse the attitudes and philosophies which informed actions. It paints a picture of Anglo-Jewish life and its reactions to a wide range of matters in the non-Jewish world. Richard Bolchover charts the transmission of the news of the European catastrophe and discusses the various theories regarding reactions to these exceptional circumstances. He investigates the structures and political philosophies of Anglo-Jewry during the war years and covers the reactions of Jewish political and religious leaders as well as prominent Jews acting outside the community's institutional framework. Various co-ordinated responses, political and philanthropic, are studied, as are the issues which dominated the community at that time, namely internal conflict and the fear of increased domestic antisemitism: these preoccupations inevitably affected responses to events in Europe. The latter half of the book looks at the ramifications of the community's socio-political philosophies including, most radically, Zionism, and their influence on communal reactions. This acclaimed study raises major questions about the structures and priorities of the British Jewish community. For this paperback, the author has added a new Introduction summarizing research in the field since the book's first appearance.

This book provides a sophisticated investigation into the experience of being exterminated, as felt by victims of the Holocaust, and compares and contrasts this analysis with the experiences of people who have been colonized or enslaved. Using numerous victim accounts and a wide range of primary sources, the book moves away from the 'continuity thesis', with its insistence on colonial intent as the reason for victimization in relation to other historical examples of mass political violence, to look at the victim experience on its own terms. By affording each constituent case study its own distinctive aspects, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust allows for a more enriching comparison of victim experience to be made that respects each group of victims in their uniqueness. It is an important, innovative volume for all students of the Holocaust, genocide and the history of mass political violence.

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah's innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes. The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann's body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove-over 220 hours-of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann's impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-a-vis the filmmaker's posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume's contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann's filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation. In light of Lanzmann's invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker's complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

Since the end of the 1980s the field of Holocaust studies has burgeoned, diversified, and experienced a series of important controversies. Drawing on the best research of the past sixty years, this collection brings together the most significant secondary literature on the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews. Care is taken to set the work in a context of historical breadth and depth.

This new verbatim play is based on the testimony of Hungarian Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack MBE, aged only thirteen when she was sent to the notorious Auschwitz -Birkenau in the summer of 1944. Interwoven with complementary narratives and layered with Holocaust history, this is a powerful new piece for Drama and History teachers alike. Commissioned by Europe's only specialist Holocaust theatre in education company, Kindness offers tremendous challenge to Drama students. It allows the stories of survivors, as well as the voices of some of the millions more who did not survive, to not be lost as living memory increasingly becomes becomes a history that must never be forgotten. "I sincerely felt very moved and grateful that the play so accurately represented my experiences, and the mood and political situation of the time is so accurately shown. It is most wonderful and I give you my legacy most willingly. Thank you so much." Susan Pollack MBE Duration: 60 minutes approximately Cast: 21 female / male, or 2 female and 2 male with multiroling Suitable for: Key Stage 3/4, BTEC, GCSE, A Level

This volume examines the changing role which ordinary members of society played in the state-sponsored persecution of the Jews in Bukovina and Bessarabia, both during the summer of 1941, when Romania joined the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and beyond. It establishes different patterns of civilian complicity and discusses the significance of the phenomenon in the context of the exterminatory campaign pursued by the Romanian military authorities against the Jews living in the borderlands.

How far can we ever hope to understand the Holocaust? What can we reasonably say about right and wrong, moral responsibility, praise and blame, in a world where ordinary reasons seem to be excluded? In the century of Nazism, ethical writing in English had much more to say about the meaning of the word `good` than about the material reality of evil. This book seeks to redress the balance at the start of a new century. Despite intense interest in the Holocaust, there has been relatively little exploration of it by philosophers in the analytic tradition. Although ethical writers often refer to Nazism as a touchstone example of evil, and use it as a case by which moral theorising can be tested, they rarely analyse what evil amounts to, or address the substantive moral questions raised by the Holocaust itself. This book draws together new work by leading moral philosophers to present a wide range of perspectives on the Holocaust. Contributors focus on particular themes of central importance, including: moral responsibility for genocide; the moral uniqueness of the Holocaust; responding to extreme evil; the role of ideology; the moral psychology of perpetrators and victims of genocide; forgiveness and the Holocaust; and the impact of the `Final Solution` on subsequent culture. Topics are treated with the precision and rigour characteristic of analytic philosophy. Scholars, teachers and students with an interest in moral theory, applied ethics, genocide and Holocaust studies will find this book of particular value, as will all those seeking greater insight into ethical issues surrounding Nazism, race-hatred and intolerance.

Through analyses of three eventful years in Nazi Germany's history - the Kristallnacht pogrom, the invasion of Poland and the invasion of Soviet Russia - this book explores the violence of states. All three events were part of the Nazi colonial project and led to mass killings, eventually resulting in the systematic murder of Jews becoming a major war aim - one that Germany would pursue to the end, even when it became clear that the military conflict could no longer be won. Drawing on voluminous historical and sociological literature, as well as documentary and contemporary evidence, the author presents a new account of the phenomenon of extreme state violence as a special category of violence, in which the armed forces, maintained in a state of readiness, are used unnecessarily and excessively, often on thin pretexts, and, unlike coercive violence, only rarely for the purposes of carrying messages to the public. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, history and anthropology concerned with mass and state violence.

The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, interpreted either as a divine mystery or, more commonly, as God's deferral to human freedom. But traditional Judaic obligations of female presence, together with the traditional image of the Shekhinah as a figure of God's 'femaleness' accompanying Israel into exile, seem to contradict such theologies of absence. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, the first full-length feminist theology of the Holocaust, argues that the patriarchal bias of post-Holocaust theology becomes fully apparent only when women's experiences and priorities are brought into historical light. Building upon the published testimonies of four women imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau - Olga Lengyel, Lucie Adelsberger, Bertha Ferderber-Salz and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk - it considers women's distinct experiences of the holy in relation to God's perceived presence and absence in the camps.
God's face, says Melissa Raphael, was not hidden in Auschwitz, but intimately revealed in the female face turned towards the other as a refractive image of God, especially in the moral protest made visible through material and spiritual care for the assaulted other.

The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, interpreted either as a divine mystery or, more commonly, as God's deferral to human freedom. But traditional Judaic obligations of female presence, together with the traditional image of the Shekhinah as a figure of God's 'femaleness' accompanying Israel into exile, seem to contradict such theologies of absence. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, the first full-length feminist theology of the Holocaust, argues that the patriarchal bias of post-Holocaust theology becomes fully apparent only when women's experiences and priorities are brought into historical light. Building upon the published testimonies of four women imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau - Olga Lengyel, Lucie Adelsberger, Bertha Ferderber-Salz and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk - it considers women's distinct experiences of the holy in relation to God's perceived presence and absence in the camps.
God's face, says Melissa Raphael, was not hidden in Auschwitz, but intimately revealed in the female face turned towards the other as a refractive image of God, especially in the moral protest made visible through material and spiritual care for the assaulted other.

A vividly detailed account of life aboard U.S. submarines in the Pacific during World War II.

How far can we ever hope to understand the Holocaust? What can we reasonably say about right and wrong, moral responsibility, praise and blame, in a world where ordinary reasons seem to be excluded? In the century of Nazism, ethical writing in English had much more to say about the meaning of the word `good` than about the material reality of evil. This book seeks to redress the balance at the start of a new century. Despite intense interest in the Holocaust, there has been relatively little exploration of it by philosophers in the analytic tradition. Although ethical writers often refer to Nazism as a touchstone example of evil, and use it as a case by which moral theorising can be tested, they rarely analyse what evil amounts to, or address the substantive moral questions raised by the Holocaust itself. This book draws together new work by leading moral philosophers to present a wide range of perspectives on the Holocaust. Contributors focus on particular themes of central importance, including: moral responsibility for genocide; the moral uniqueness of the Holocaust; responding to extreme evil; the role of ideology; the moral psychology of perpetrators and victims of genocide; forgiveness and the Holocaust; and the impact of the `Final Solution` on subsequent culture. Topics are treated with the precision and rigour characteristic of analytic philosophy. Scholars, teachers and students with an interest in moral theory, applied ethics, genocide and Holocaust studies will find this book of particular value, as will all those seeking greater insight into ethical issues surrounding Nazism, race-hatred and intolerance.

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were united in a 'brutal friendship'. Both had savage racial laws: both Hitler and Mussolini viciously denounced the 'Jewish menace'. Yet each nation treated the Jews quite differently. Whilst Jews who fell into the arms of the German army were consigned, almost without exception, to concentration camps, not one Jew taken by the Italians suffered the same fate.
Jonathan Steinberg uses this remarkable and poignant story to unravel the motives and forces underpinning both Nazism and Fascism in an attempt to resolve the underlying question: Why?

eBook available with sample pages: 0203356691

On 1 March, 1943, Chaim Weizmann, the elder statesman of Zionism, addressed a rally in Madison Square Garden to "Stop Hitler Now!." Three months earlier, a public declaration by the Allied governments had acknowledged that the German authorities were implementing Adolf Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. Some 2,000,000 Jews had already been killed since the beginning of World War II by the Third Reich and its collaborators, yet a deafening silence resounded throughout free world corridors of power.
Alas, Weizmann's and similar heartfelt pleas went unanswered. Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury and Arthur Cardinal Hinsley called on that same occasion for speedy deeds to meet the most appalling horror. Faced with the crime of the Holocaust - Christianity and Western humanism abdicated moral responsibility to try to save an innocent people. Without that decay of conscience, already evident in the years between Hitler's advent to power and the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland, European Jewry would not have gone abandoned into the night.
Over the past two decades, access to most of the archives has enabled historians to authenticate this grim truth. Political expediency reigned supreme in the war counsels of those governments which alone could have checked the tempo of Hitler's Final Solution of the Jewish problem.

Human Rights after Hitler reveals thousands of forgotten US and Allied war crimes prosecutions against Hitler and other Axis war criminals based on a popular movement for justice that stretched from Poland to the Pacific. These cases provide a great foundation for twenty-first-century human rights and accompany the achievements of the Nuremberg trials and postwar conventions. They include indictments of perpetrators of the Holocaust made while the death camps were still operating, which confounds the conventional wisdom that there was no official Allied response to the Holocaust at the time. This history also brings long overdue credit to the United Nations' War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), which operated during and after World War II. Dan Plesch describes the commission's work and Washington's bureaucratic obstruction to a 1944 proposal to prosecute crimes against humanity before an international criminal court. From the 1940s until a recent lobbying effort by Plesch and colleagues, the UNWCC's files were kept out of public view in the UN archives under pressure from the US government. The book answers why the commission and its files were closed and reveals that the lost precedents set by these cases have enormous practical utility for prosecuting war crimes today. They cover US and Allied prosecutions of torture, including "water treatment," wartime sexual assault, and crimes by foot soldiers who were "just following orders." Plesch's book will fascinate anyone with an interest in the history of the Second World War as well as provide ground-breaking revelations for historians and human rights practitioners alike.

Using accessible archival sources, a team of historians reveal how much the USA, Britain, Switzerland and Sweden knew about the Nazi attempt to murder all the Jews of Europe during World War II.

Using accessible archival sources, a team of historians reveal how much the USA, Britain, Switzerland and Sweden knew about the Nazi attempt to murder all the Jews of Europe during World War II.

Sparing the Child examines young reader's narratives about Nazism and the Holocaust in terms of the official as well as the understated motivations of their authors. Officially, the narratives intended to shape the young readers' acquired collective memory. However, as the narrators recollect personally experienced excesses of Nazism or the horrors of Auschwitz, they use the medium of children's literature to meliorate atrocity and thus spare the child and themselves.

Where was God when six million died? Over the last few decades this question has haunted both Jewish and Christian theologians. If God is all-good and all-powerful, how could he have permitted the Holocaust to take place? Holocaust Theology: A Reader provides a panoramic survey of the responses of over one hundred leading Jewish and Christian Holocaust thinkers. Beginning with the religious challenge of the Holocaust, the collection explores a wide range of thinking which seek to reconcile God's ways with the existence of evil. In addition, the book addresses perplexing questions regarding Christian responsibility and culpability during the Nazi era. Designed for general readers and students, the readings are arranged thematically and each one is divided into separate topics. For anyone who is troubled by the religious implications of the tragedy of the Holocaust, this collection of Holocaust theology provides a basis for discussion and debate: each reading is followed by several questions designed to stimulate this.

Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that "hidden" Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.