In Hitler's Shadow War, World War II scholar Donald McKale contends that Hitler's persecution and murder of the Jews, Slavs, and other groups was his primary effort during the war, not the conquest of Europe. According to McKale, the war was a diversion that Hitler used to draw attention away from his real goal, the Final Solution. McKale explores the origins of the anti-Semitism that spread like wildfire through Germany before and during the Nazis' rise to power, and the failure of the Allies to perceive and stop the Holocaust even as they were defeating the Germans in combat.

The Nazi regime opened its first concentration camps within weeks of coming to power, but with the exception of Dachau the history of these early, improvised camps and their inmates is not yet widely known. Gabriele Herz's memoir, published for the first time, is a unique record of a Jewish woman's detention in the first women's concentration camp in Moringen (housed in part of an old-established workhouse), at a time when most other inmates were communists or Jehovah's Witnesses. This original translation of her wry and perceptive memoir is accompanied by an extensive introduction that sets Herz's experience in the history both of political detention under the Nazi regime and of the German workhouse system.

The persecution and mass-murder of the Jews during World War II would not have been possible without the modern organization of division of labor. Moreover, the perpetrators were dependent on human and organizational resources they could not always control by hierarchy and coercion. Instead, the persecution of the Jews was based, to a large extent, on a web of inter-organizational relations encompassing a broad variety of non-hierarchical cooperation as well as rivalry and competition. Based on newly accessible government and corporate archives, this volume combines fresh evidence with an interpretation of the governance of persecution, presented by prominent historians and social scientists. Gerald D. Feldman is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His special fields of interest are 20th-century German history, and he has a special interest in business history, most recently authoring a biography of Hugo Stinnes, participating in the history of the Deutsche Bank, and writing a history of the Allianz Insurance Company in the Nazi period. He has recently started work on a history of the Austrian banks under National Socialism. Wolfgang Seibel is Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Previous appointments include guest professorships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Vienna (1992), and the University of California at Berkeley (1994). He was also a temporary member of the School of Social Science (1989/90) and of the School of Historical Studies (2003) of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton. Currently (2004/2005) he is a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His research is mainly devoted to issues of politics, public bureaucracy and non-governmental organizations.

"A truly revolutionary idea.... Clear, tight, disciplined, beautifully structured, and brilliantly reasoned." --Ayn Rand
Self-sacrifice, Oriental mysticism, racial "truth," the public good, doing one's duty--these are among the seductive catchphrases that circulated in pre-Nazi Germany. Objectivist author and philosopher Leonard Peikoff was Ayn Rand's long-time associate. In "The Cause of Hitler's Germany--"previously published in "The Ominous Parallels--"Peikoff demonstrates how unreason and collectivism led the seemingly civilized German society to become a Nazi regime.

This volume is the twenty-sixth in the Holocaust Studies Series sponsored by the Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. It contains ten seminal studies the catastrophe that befell the Jews of Europe during the Nazi era. It also reprints two historically crucial documents relating to the so-called Hungarian Gold Train, a freight train that, in 1944, carried stolen or confiscated Jewish valuables from Hungary.

Essays recount the unfolding of the Holocaust in Hungary and the history of the Jews in Europe. They detail the elimination of Jews in Greece, particularly from the large Sephardic community of Salonika, and describe the rescue of Jews in Albania. Nonhistorical essays concern autobiographical narratives in which survivors and their descendents reflect on the return to former shtetls in East Central Europe and the attitudes of victims toward the perpetrators of Holocaust crimes. Taken altogether, this volume formulates a more complete understanding of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi's reflections on what he called "the gray zone," a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain--lest resolution deceive us--will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible.

"Say the Name" vividly describes in the voice of a fourteen-year-old the experiences of a Jewish girl who was imprisoned in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp during World War II. Miraculously, Judita Sternova of Kurima, Czechoslovakia, survives persecutions, hiding, flight, capture, deportation, and the Camp. Like the few other surviving Jews, she could not bear to remain in her village emptied of family and other Jews and emigrates to England and, eventually, the United States. After more than fifty years Sherman gets up from her years of memories, private resistance, and public silence to write this book. She is triggered to do so upon hearing a lecture by Professor Carrasco at Princeton on "Religion and the Terror of History."

The narrative is interspersed with Sherman's powerful poems that grab the reader's attention. Poignant original drawings made secretly by imprisoned women of Ravensbruck, at risk of their lives, illuminate the text. Sherman courageously bears witness to the terror of man and simultaneously challenges God for answers.

This book should "jolt us into remembrance, warning, and action."

From "Say the Name"

Survivor's Legacy Wish to Her Children

Bread, always bread
stars that lighten the heavens
not brand your chests
always, alwayswater
trains to journeys of delight
with seats, windows,
tickets of return
no accent;
fathers to hold your childrens hand
children who outgrow their shoes
Your mantle of Jew
of cloth so light
so safe
so Kol BSeder;
mothersoh yesmothers
mothers you can stand up to!
Israel to fill your soul.

and what of Auschwitz memory?
that too is in your legacy.

This is the first work in any language that offers both an overarching exploration of the flight and evacuation of Soviet Jews viewed at the macro level, and a personal history of one Soviet Jewish family. It is also the first study to examine Jewish life in the Northern Caucasus, a Soviet region that history scholars have rarely addressed. Drawing on a collection of family letters, Kiril Feferman provides a history of the Ginsburgs as they debate whether to evacuate their home of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia and are eventually swept away by the Soviet-German War, the German invasion of Soviet Russia, and the Holocaust. The book makes a significant contribution to the history of the Holocaust and Second World War in the Soviet Union, presenting one Soviet region as an illustration of wartime social and media politics.

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.

While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside of a dying member of the SS. Haunted by the crimes in which he had participated, the soldier wanted to confess to--and obtain absolution from--a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion and justice, silence and truth, Wiesenthal said nothing.  But even years after the way had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?

In this important book, fifty-three distinguished men and women respond to Wiesenthal's questions. They are theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, and victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China and Tibet. Their responses, as varied as their experiences of the world, remind us that Wiesenthal's questions are not limited to events of the past.  Often surprising and always thought provoking, The Sunflower will challenge you to define your beliefs about justice, compassion, and human responsibility.

When we are confronted with images of and memoirs from the Holocaust and subsequent cases of vast cruelty and suffering, is our impulse to empathize put at risk by the possibility of becoming numb to horror? Carolyn J. Dean's provocative new book addresses the ways we evade our failures of empathy in the face of massive suffering: Has exposure (or overexposure) to representations of pain damaged our ability to feel? Do the frequent claims that artistic representations of extreme cruelty are pornographic allow us to dodge the real issues that we must confront in attempting to come to terms with suffering? Does an excess of terror place constraints on compassion?Dean examines the very different representations of suffering found in visual media, history writing, cultural criticism, and journalism that grapple with the assumption that Americans and Western Europeans have been rendered numb and their appropriate human responses blunted by the events of the past century. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust will be of interest to all readers concerned with contemporary "victim culture," Holocaust representation, and humanism.

The name of the town, Brest-Litovsk, indicates its link with Lithuania. Although founded by the Slavs in 1017 and invaded by the Mongols in 1241, it became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1319, and in1569 it became the capital of the unified Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The town is also known as "Brisk," in Yiddish to the Jews who lived and thrived there for six centuries. Jewish "Brisk" had an illustrious history; the famous Brisker Yeshivah attracted scholars from all over Europe. The list of Rabbis of Brest includes such famous rabbis as Solomon Luria and Joel Sirkes in earlier periods, the Katzenellenbogens, and three generations of the Soloveitchik dynasty in more recent times. Brest also produced Jacob Epstein the great Talmudist at the Hebrew University, Menachem Begin, and many other major religious, literary and political leaders. In 1923, Jews, made up 60% of Brest's population of 60,000. This book was written by Brest survivors and former residents from many countries who contributed their memories of their hometown as a record for future generations, and as testament and loving tribute to the innocent Victims of the Shoah. It is a must read for researchers of the town and descendants of "Briskers." Brest, Belarus is located at 52 06' North Latitude and 23 42' East Longitude 203 mi SW of Minsk. lternate names for the town are: Brest Belarussian], Brest Litovsk Russian], Brze Litewski Polish], Brze nad Bugiem Polish, 1918-39], Brisk Yiddish], Brasta Lithuanian], Brest Litowsk, Brisk Dlita, Brisk de-Lita, Brze -Litewsk, Brist nad Bugie, Bzheshch nad Bugyem, Biera cie

This volume offers the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world slavery. Providing a reliable view of the relevant issues, and based on a broad and comprehensive set of data and evidence, Steven Katz analyzes the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda. Among the subjects he examines are: the use of black slaves as workers compared to the Nazi use of Jewish labor; the causes of slave demographic decline and growth in different New World locations; the main features of Jewish life during the Holocaust relative to slave life with regard to such topics as diet, physical punishment, medical care, and the role of religion; the treatment of slave women and children as compared to the treatment of Jewish women and children in the Holocaust. Katz shows that slave women were valued as workers, as reproducers of future slaves, and as sexual objects, and that slave children were valued as commodities. For these reasons, neither slave women nor children were intentionally murdered. By comparison, Jewish slave women and children were viewed as the ultimate racial enemy and therefore had to be exterminated. These and other findings conclusively demonstrate the uniqueness of the Holocaust compared with other historical instances of slavery.

The Halbjuden of Hitler's Germany were half Christian and half Jewish but, like the rest of the Mischlinge (or "partial-Jews"), were far too Jewish in the eyes of the Nazis. Thus, while they were allowed for a time to coexist with the rest of German society, they were granted only the most marginal or menial jobs, restricted from marrying Aryans or even leading normal social lives, and sent eventually to forced-labor and concentration camps. More than 70,000 Germans were subjected to these restrictions and indignities, created and fostered by Hitler's morally bankrupt race laws, yet to this day few personal accounts of their experiences exist.

James Tent movingly recounts how these men and women from all over Germany and from all walks of life struggled to survive in an increasingly hostile society, even as their Jewish relatives were disappearing into the East. It draws on extensive interviews with twenty survivors, many of whom were teenagers when Hitler came to power, to show how "half Jews" coped with conditions on a day-to-day basis, and how the legacy of the hatred they suffered has forever lingered in their minds.

Tent provides gripping stories of life beneath the boot-heel of Nazi rule: a woman deemed unsuited for a career in nursing because the shape of her earlobes and breasts indicated she was not "racially suited," a man arrested for "race defilement" because he lived with an Aryan woman, and many others. Writing with a deep and abiding respect for his subjects, Tent shows how Nazi discrimination and persecution affected the lives of the Mischlinge beginning in 1933, and he tells how such treatment intensified through the later years of the war.

These testimonies offer rare insight into how Nazi persecution functioned at a very personal level. Tent's witnesses share experiences in school and problems in the workplace, where the best survival strategy was to find an unobtrusive niche in a nondescript job. They tell of obstacles to personal and romantic relationships. And they soberly remind us that by 1944 they too were rounded up for forced labor, certain to be the next victims of Nazi genocide.

"In the Shadow of the Holocaust" demonstrates the lengths to which the Nazis were willing to go in order to eradicate Judaism-a fanaticism that increased over time and even in the face of impending military defeat. These people mostly survived the Holocaust, yet they paid for their re-assimilation into German society by remaining silent in the face of haunting memories. This book breaks that silence and is a testament to human endurance under the most trying circumstances.

In continuation of a long-standing national self-image, Switzerland saw itself after 1945 as a "small neutral state," which because of its will to resist and a clever policy managed not to be drawn into the Second World War. However, this self-image has been the subject of an increasingly heated debate since the 1970s. The argument that Switzerland had above all been a "victim of developments in world politics," was increasingly confronted with the counter-argument that this country had aided the perpetrators in important - mainly economic - areas. More recently, dealings in looted gold and the issue of dormant bank accounts and stolen cultural assets have come into focus, in addition to inquiries into the mysterious disappearance of the assets of victims of persecution and extermination. In this situation, the Swiss Parliament and Government set up, at the end of 1996, an internationally composed Independent Commission of Experts whose five-year assignment was to investigate these allegations in their historical and legal context. Thanks to the unique privilege of access to archives, it was possible for the first time to overcome the obstacle of Swiss banking secrecy - believed to be insurmountable until then - and to extend the research to the archives of banks and other companies. A crucial document on 20th-centruy European history, this volume presents the full and final report of the Commission, illustrating Switzerland's predicament as a country not only with strong economic, but also close cultural ties to Germany, the neighbor that threatened the country's very survival. A multifaceted picture emerges of the challenges of those dark years - challenges that Switzerland met with varying degrees of success. Distributed for Pendo Verlag, Switzerland

W. H. Auden and Hannah Arendt belonged to a generation that experienced the catastrophic events of the mid-twentieth century, and they both sought to respond to the enormity of the novel phenomena they witnessed. "Regions of Sorrow" explores the remarkable affinity between their works. As incisive exponents and uncompromising proponents of the insuperable condition of plurality, Auden and Arendt give voice to an unexpected and inconspicuous messianism--a messianism in which contingency, frailty, and faultiness are neither rejected nor scorned but celebrated as the indispensable elements of what Auden calls "anxious hope."
Beginning with an examination of Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" and Auden's "Age of Anxiety," which both conclude with meditations on Nazi terror, the author turns to an unprecedented presentation of Arendt's "Human Condition" in terms of Jewish-German messianism, and concludes with Auden's "In Praise of Limestone," which lays out the frail and faulty space in which messianism breaks free from apocalyptic forecasts.

In The Listener, a daughter receives a troubling gift: her mother's stories of surviving World War II in Poland. During the Holocaust, Irene Oore's mother escaped the death camps by concealing her Jewish identity. Those years found her constantly on the run and on the verge of starvation, living a harrowing and peripatetic existence as she struggled to keep herself and her family alive. Throughout the memoir, Oore reveals a certain ambivalence towards the gift bestowed upon her. The stories of fear, love, and constant hunger traumatised her as a child. Now, she shares these same stories with her own children, to keep the history alive.

An intimate history of the Holocaust that casts new light on our understanding of victimhood and survival.

The only known collection of its kind currently in print, this important volume includes the work of 59 poets—among them Auden, Brecht, Celan, Jarrell, Levi, Milosz, Plath, Sexton, Spender, Wiesel, and Yevtushenko—writing on a range of subjects that are indelibly linked with the Holocaust. Collecting 119 poems in all, Holocaust Poetry commemorates the sanctity of those who died—both Jews and non-Jews—as a result of this unimaginably horrible crime.

Yet Schiff's anthology is also a solemn affirmation of humanity's survival, for it pays homage to the past while also attesting to the often brutal struggles that we as a species still face in this world, day in and day out. Also preserved here are poems written by those who themselves perished in the Shoah, the final testaments and eternal lessons of unknown soldiers, unheralded heroes, unsilenced voices.

"In The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler," Dr. Kessler, a Jewish attorney from Lwow, Poland, gives an eye-witness account of the Holocaust through the events recorded in his diary between the years, 1942-1944. In vivid, raw, documentary style, he describes his experiences in the Lwow Ghetto, the Janowska Concentration Camp, and in an underground bunker where he and twenty-three other Jews were hidden by a courageous Polish farmer and his family. The book includes a chapter written by Kazimierz Kalwinski, who, as a teenager, was a care-taker for the hidden Jews on his family's farm. Edmund's daughter, Renata Kessler, coordinated the book and has written the epilogue about her search for the story, which has taken her to Israel, Poland, and Lviv, Ukraine. Renowned scholar Antony Polonsky contributes an insightful historical overview of the times in which the book takes place. A tremendous resource for historians, scholars, and all serious students of the Holocaust.

'Bo, Jenny and I' is a memoir describing the life of a young woman growing up in unusual circumstances, as well as a discussion of political and sociological eff ects of troubled times upon "ordinary people." After an early childhood in pre-war Antwerp, the author, her formidable grandmother, and her young, unconventional working mother fl ed to England in 1940, upon Germany's invasion of Belgium. As refugees, the family adapted to its changed circumstances and to life in World War II England. The political upheavals of the times are refl ected in the life of this small family and its remarkable experiences.

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.

Inspired by seven photographs of WWII refugees in an old album, the author embarked on a quest to uncover the story behind each portrait. Had the refugees been rescued by the diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by providing Japanese transit visas? Searching for the identities of the people in the photographs, the author scoured historical records and interviewed numerous fascinating individuals, including Sugihara visa recipients and their descendants. While solving the mystery of the people in the photographs, the author uncovered more hero diplomats and new details about Sugihara visas. This account of the author's investigation supports the legacy of Chiune Sugihara and highlights other WWII saviors, such as the Dutch diplomat Jan Zwartendijk.