This volume documents the persecution of the Jews in the German Reich between 1933 and 1937. The documents illustrate the ways in which the Jews in Germany were thrown out of their jobs and excluded from public institutions and public life, and how the Nuremberg Laws reduced the status of German Jews to second-class citizens and set out to sever the ties between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. It documents the political calculations and strategy of the Nazi ruling elite in relation to antisemitic measures, and the local outbreaks of violence and terror against the Jewish population. It also illustrates the widespread indifference of non-Jewish Germans. In 1935 the Berlin rabbi Joachim Prinz described how the circumstances for the Jewish population had changed: 'The Jew's lot is to be neighbourless. We would not find it all so painful if we did not have the feeling that we once did have neighbours.' Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/

In 1961 Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem for his part in the Nazi persecution and mass murder of Europe s Jews. For the first time a judicial process focussed on the genocide against the Jews and heard Jewish witnesses to the catastrophe. The trial and the controversies it caused had a profound effect on shaping the collective memory of what became the Holocaust .

This volume, a special issue of the Journal of Israeli History, brings together new research by scholars from Europe, Israel and the USA.

The collecting of Holocaust artifacts can often result in an emotional and historical dilemma. Survivors and some militaria collectors regard these items as "stained" with the blood of Holocaust victims, and therefore should not be bought and sold. However, to honor the memory of those who perished and to keep a proper historical record, these items must be preserved. While a small contingent of collectors deal in Holocaust artifacts, the vast majority of Holocaust-oriented artifacts are purchased by individuals who intend to donate these items to museums. This book is a reference and resource guide to help determine the authenticity of these artifacts, and provides a detailed look at various Holocaust-related artifacts in a manner that follows the experiences of the survivors and victims. As an example; the Germans identified some individuals with outward markings, forced them to register, pressed them into forced labor, ghettoized, and eventually deported them to concentration camps or labor facilities, and due to the different times that these activities took place in conquered and occupied countries, they are distinguished here by the action rather than by a general timeline (for example, Jews in occupied Poland were forced to wear "Jewish badges" in 1939, while this did not occur in Germany until 1941). The Holocaust is a difficult period of history to examine, and although some of the photographs contained in this book are horrific in nature, this book in no way trivializes the magnitude of the Holocaust by discussing the collection and identification of Holocaust-related artifacts. The issue at hand is the callous disregard by those who profit from the Holocaust by manufacturing and selling counterfeit and fake items. Alec Tulkoff has been a collector of World War II militaria for the past twenty-five years. Over the past seven years he has taken an interest in Holocaust history and artifacts. During the past two years, while working at the SHOAH Visual History Foundation as a cataloguer, he compiled the information and materials contained in this book. As a cataloguer in the Foundation, he had the opportunity to hear hundreds of first hand Holocaust survivor testimonies. Tulkoff has worked hard in combating the vast amount of Holocaust artifact fraud that has spread in the collecting community and has posted a website dealing with this fraud and also publishes a quarterly newsletter on this topic.

The first English-language monograph on Hermann Broch's literary and theoretical work on mass hysteria. Austrian Jewish author Hermann Broch (1886-1951), a leading figure of European Modernism, spent decades attempting to understand the phenomenon of mass hysteria. With his work, he hoped to help protect society from the allure of mass hysteria, embodied in the fanatical appeal of National Socialism. He was torn between two approaches to the problem: using literature to diagnose and expose the irrational knowledge that underpins mass hysteria, and employing theory as a more precise and effective means of doing the same. In this first English-language monograph on the topic, Brett E. Sterling traces the development of Broch's understanding of the mass from an initial confrontation in 1918 to a recurring theme in his fiction and ultimately to the monumental but incomplete Massenwahntheorie (Theory of Mass Hysteria, 1939-48). In thorough readings of Broch's major fictional and theoretical works, the analysis centers on the question of how his literature and theory provide distinct but complementary approaches to conceiving and representing the elusive figure of the mass and the attendant experience of mass hysteria. With political extremism and conspiratorial thinking on the rise, Sterling makes the case that Broch's insights into mass hysteria - literary as well as theoretical - are of renewed relevance to a contemporary audience.

From Darkness to Light is a compilation of personal testimonies of six Holocaust survivors, written in a short story format. The book walks readers through their life experiences before and during the Holocaust, their liberation, and their new life in Israel. Each story is told in their own words, culled from hours of personal interviews with them and their children, so the world can have first-hand knowledge of what happened during that darkest time of our history. These survivors came from different parts of Europe, and not one story is like the other. Now in their eighties and nineties, they still recall in detail their darkest memories. Amid immense pain and suffering, they managed to overcome every hurdle they encountered under the Nazi regime. When these stalwart individuals were liberated, no matter what further anguish and obstacles they faced, they realized their dream to make aliya to Israel. They settled in the Holy Land as visionaries and pioneers to build the Jewish state, which itself was undergoing conflict and difficult economic times. Their love for the Jewish homeland and their creation of families with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren exemplify how Hitler's aim to annihilate the Jews was nullified.

Contrary to the common notion that news regarding the genocide was unavailable or unreliable, news from Europe was often communicated to North American Poles through the Polish-language press. This work engages with the origins of this debate and demonstrates that the Polish-language press covered seminal issues during the inter-war years, the war, and the Holocaust extensively on their front and main story pages, and were extremely responsive, professional, and vocal in their journalism. From Polish-Jewish relations, to the cause of the Second World War and subsequently the development of genocide-related policy, North American Poles, had a different perspective from mainstream society on the "causes and effects" of what was happening. New research for this book examines attitudes toward Jews prior to and during the Holocaust, and how information on such attitudes was disseminated. It utilizes original research from selected Polish newspapers, predominantly the Republika-Gornik, as well as survivor testimony from 1926-1945.

Rudolf Hoss has been called the greatest mass murderer in history. As the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, he supervised the killing of more than 1.1 million people. Unlike many of his Nazi colleagues who denied either knowing about or participating in the Holocaust, Hoss remorselessly admitted, both at the Nuremberg war crimes trial and in his memoirs, that he sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers, frankly describing the killing process. His "innovations" included the use of hydrogen cyanide (derived from the pesticide Zyklon B) in the camp's gas chambers. Hoss lent his name to the 1944 operation that gassed 430,000 Hungarian Jews in 56 days, exceeding the capacity of the Auschwitz's crematoria. This biography follows Hoss throughout his life, from his childhood through his Nazi command and eventual reckoning at Nuremberg. Using historical records and Hoss' autobiography, it explores the life and mind of one of history's most notorious and sadistic individuals.

Since ancient times, music has demonstrated the incomparable ability to touch and resonate with the human spirit as a tool for communication, emotional expression, and as a medium of cultural identity. During World War II, Nazi leadership recognized the power of music and chose to harness it with malevolence, using its power to push their own agenda and systematically stripping it away from the Jewish people and other populations they sought to disempower. But music also emerged as a counterpoint to this hate, withstanding Nazi attempts to exploit or silence it. Artistic expression triumphed under oppressive regimes elsewhere as well, including the horrific siege of Leningrad and in Japanese internment camps in the Pacific. The oppressed stubbornly clung to music, wherever and however they could, to preserve their culture, to uplift the human spirit and to triumph over oppression, even amid incredible tragedy and suffering. This volume draws together the musical connections and individual stories from this tragic time through scholarly literature, diaries, letters, memoirs, compositions, and art pieces. Collectively, they bear witness to the power of music and offer a reminder to humanity of the imperative each faces to not only remember, but to prevent another such cataclysm.

Bringing together some of the last Holocaust survivor stories in living memory, After the Holocaust shares Jewish scholarship, activism, poetry, and personal narratives which tackle the changing face of human rights education in the 21st century. The collected voices draw on decades of research on Holocaust history to discuss education, broader human rights abuses, genocide, internment, and oppression. Advancing the dialogue between civic advocacy, public remembrance, and research, contributors discuss how the Holocaust is taught and remembered. By including additional perspectives on the context of Canadian antisemitism, the legacy of human rights abuses of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and the internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II, After the Holocaust examines the ways the Holocaust changed thinking around human rights legislation and memorialization on a global scale. "The first- and second-generation survivor accounts are treasures-invaluable reflections that anchor this collection." - David MacDonald , author of The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation

Examines how German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe who migrated to Germany during or after the Cold War have widened European cultural memory to include the traumas of the Gulag. Preserving the memory of the Holocaust as a moral and ethical limit case is key to the European Union's attempt to construct a pan-European identity. But with the Eastern expansion of the EU, new member states have challenged the Holocaust's singularity, calling for the traumas of the Stalinist Gulag to be acknowledged much more explicitly. Thus even though Europe has been unified politically, it is divided by its diverging perceptions of the past. Jessica Ortner argues that German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe and the GDR who migrated to Germany as refugees during or after the Cold War have responded critically to the need to widen European cultural memory to include the traumatic experiences of the East. The writers focused on include Katja Petrowskaja, Olga Grjasnowa, Lena Gorelik, Vladimir Vertlib, and Barbara Honigmann. A central focus of the book is the "traveling of memories" from Eastern Europe and the GDR to (Western) Germany and Austria. Introducing the term "literature of mnemonic migration," Ortner asserts that these authors' writings negotiate the mnemonic divide between East and West. They criticize the normative memory politics of both Germany and the Soviet Union and address not only the politically explosive question of how to remember both National Socialism and Communism but also the status of Jews in contemporary Germany.

"Masterful...An indispensable warning for our own time." -Samuel Moyn "Magisterial...Covers this dark history with insight and skill...A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history." -The Nation For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism. "It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really is...A century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little." -Mark Mazower, Financial Times "From the start, the fantasy held that an alien element-the Jews-aimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societies...The writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers." -Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs

Recent representations of the Holocaust have increasingly required us to think beyond rigid demarcations of nation and history, medium and genre. Holocaust Intersections sets out to investigate the many points of conjunction between these categories in recent images of genocide. The book examines transnational constellations in Holocaust cinema and television in Europe disclosing instances of border-crossing and boundary-troubling at levels of production, distribution and reception. It highlights intersections between film genres, through intertextuality and pastiche, and the deployment of audio-visual Holocaust memory and testimony. Finally, the volume addresses connections between the Holocaust and other histories of genocide in the visual culture of the new millennium, engaging with the questions of transhistoricity and intercultural perspective. Drawing on a wide variety of different media - from cinema and television to installation art and the internet - and on the most recent scholarship on responses to the Holocaust, the volume aims to update our understanding of how visual culture looks at the Holocaust and genocide today.

A rediscovered masterpiece by the 16 million copy bestselling author of Man’s Search For Meaning

Just months after his liberation from Auschwitz renowned psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl delivered a series of talks revealing the foundations of his life-affirming philosophy. The psychologist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience and his conviction that every crisis contains opportunity.

Published here for the very first time in English, Frankl's words resonate as strongly today as they did in 1946. Despite the unspeakable horrors in the camp, Frankl learnt from his fellow inmates that it is always possible to say ‘yes to life’ – a profound and timeless lesson for us all.

With an introduction by Daniel Goleman.

The Triumph of Wounded Souls vividly recounts the stories of seven Holocaust survivors who overcame many obstacles to earn advanced degrees and become college and university professors. As Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe from 1939 to 1945, these remarkable individuals witnessed and endured terror and torture. After the war they pursued academic subjects that increased their understanding of the world and gave them a sense of purpose. Their inspirational accounts demonstrate that despite the worst of circumstances it is possible to heal with time. Each narrative chapter describes the social background and circumstances that helped to shape the survivor's destiny. Lerner's interrogative approach unearths surprising insights into each survivor's distinct personality, beliefs, and aspirations. Isaac Bash and George Zimmerman both survived the horrors of Auschwitz to become physicists. Ruth Anna Putnam, a philosopher, endured the war in hiding with her non-Jewish grandparents. Samuel Stern, a biologist, spent his early childhood in Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen. Zvi Griliches survived a Dachau subsidiary camp to become a prominent economist. Maurice Vanderpol became a psychiatrist after spending years during the war hiding in Amsterdam. Micheline Federman was sheltered by French farmers and later became a pathologist. While each survivor's postwar journey is complex and unique, these seven scholars reveal that the contemplative life can serve as a salve for wounded souls. They are extraordinary examples of how those who act justly and purposefully can help to bring reconciliation and meaning to an unjust world. In sharing their personal stories, they illuminate the realm of humanpossibility.

'The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend a day at Headingley, and I was reading a book about the death camp Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction involved for me in this train journey...had the effect of fixing my thoughts on one of the more dreadful features of human coexistence, when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to me.' The contract of mutual indifference In this classic work, newly reissued here with a preface by Oliver Kamm, Norman Geras discusses a central aspect of the experience of the Holocaust with a view to exploring its most important contemporary implications. A bold and powerful synthesis of memorial, literary record, historical reflection and political theory, Geras's argument focuses on the figure of the bystander - the bystander to the destruction of the Jews of Europe and the bystander to more recent atrocity - to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active responses at persecution and great suffering. This book argues that we owe a duty of help to those who are suffering under terrible oppression. Geras contends that the tragedy of European Jewry - so widely pondered by historians, social scientists, psychologists, theologians and others - has not yet found its proper reflection within political philosophy. Attempting to fill the gap, he adapts an old idea from within that tradition of enquiry, the idea of the social contract, to the task of thinking about the triangular relation between perpetrators, victims and bystanders, and draws a sombre conclusion from it. Geras goes on to ask how far this conclusion may be offset by the hypothesis of a universal duty to bring aid. The contract of mutual indifference is an original and challenging work, aimed at the complacent abstraction of much contemporary theory-building. It is supplemented by three shorter essays on the implications of the Jewish catastrophe for conceptions of human nature and progress. -- .

Taking as its point of departure Omer Bartov's acclaimed Anatomy of a Genocide, this volume brings together previously unknown accounts by three individuals from Buczacz. These rare narratives give personal glimpses into daily life in unsettled times: a Polish headmaster during World War I, a Ukrainian teacher and witness to both Soviet and German rule, and a Jewish radio technician, genocide survivor, and member of the Polish resistance. Together, they offer a prismatic perspective on a world remote from our own that nonetheless helps us understand how people not unlike ourselves responded to mass violence and destruction.

Since antiquity, European Jewish diaspora communities have used formal appeals to secular and religious authorities to secure favors or protection. Such petitioning took on particular significance in modern dictatorships, often as the only tool left for voicing political opposition. During the Holocaust, tens of thousands of European Jews turned to individual and collective petitions in the face of state-sponsored violence. This volume offers the first extensive analysis of petitions authored by Jews in nations ruled by the Nazis and their allies. It demonstrates their underappreciated value as a historical source and reveals the many attempts of European Jews to resist intensifying persecution and actively struggle for survival.

This is the true story of one man's efforts to bring horrific news of the Nazi genocide to the Swiss public and to the rest of the world. Armed with this information, prominent Swiss church leaders and theologians condemned the unfolding Holocaust from their pulpits, spurring large public demonstrations.

In 400 articles appearing in 120 newspapers, Mantello reached opinion makers throughout the world community. International pressure halted the Hungarian deportations, and Mantello distributed thousands of Salvadoran citizenship papers to Jews in Nazi-occupied territories.

In addition to Mantello's role, Kranzler shows how Swiss theologians such as Karl Barth and Paul Vogt mobilized thousands of Christians against the Germans and against the indifference of the Swiss government and the International Red Cross. This fresh look at the intersection of politics and religion also allows for a new assessment of Swiss complicity in the crimes of the Nazi Third Reich.

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.

Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust attempts to sensitize individuals to the tragic results of a racist world outlook, as well as make clear to them how complicated are the series of steps that take the individual from the expression of racist sentiments and mild expressions of anti-Semitism to outright genocide. The text shows the complex ways in which politics, economics, culture, and social forces interacted with individual motivations to produce the Holocaust. A useful supplementary text for students in European History courses, students in Clinical and Social Psychology courses, and for students in Judaic Studies.

A reexamination of the narrative of genocide. Personal stories help audiences consider the cause, course, and consequences of this seminal period in world history. In The Holocaust, historian James Bulgin presents a wealth of archival material--including emotive objects, newly commissioned photography, and previously unpublished personal testimony from those who were there--to examine the role of ideology and individual decision-making in the course of World War II and the Holocaust. The book is published to coincide with the opening of Imperial War Museums's groundbreaking new Second World War and Holocaust Galleries.

This study investigates six German Jewish writers' negotiation of Jewish-German-Communist identity in post-Holocaust East Germany. This study investigates the negotiation of Jewish-German-Communist identity in post-Holocaust Germany, specifically East Germany. After an introduction to the political-historical context, it highlights the conflicted writings of six East German Jewish writers: Anna Seghers (1900-1983), Stefan Heym (1913-2001), Stephan Hermlin (1915-1997), Jurek Becker (1937-1997), Peter Edel (1921-1983), and Fred Wander (1917-2006). All were Holocaust survivors. All lost family members in the Holocaust. All were important writers who played a leading role in East German cultural life, and all were loyal citizens and committed socialists, although their definitions of and maneuvers regarding Party loyalty differed greatly. Good soldiers, they viewed their writing as contributing to the social-political revolution taking place in East Germany. Informed by Holocaust and trauma studies, as well as psychology and deconstruction, this study looks for moments when Party discipline falters and other, repressed, thoughts and emotions surface, decentering the works. Some recurring questions addressed include: What is the image of Germans? Do the works evidence revenge fantasies? How does the negotiation of ostensibly mutually exclusive identities play out? Is there acknowledgment of the insufficiency of Communist theory to explain antisemitism, as well as recognition of Stalinist or other forms of Communist antisemitism? Although these writers ultimately established themselves in East Germany, attaining positions of privilege and even power, their best works nonetheless evince an acute sense of endangerment and vulnerability; they are documents both created and marked by trauma.

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.

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.