In one of the darker aspects of Nazi Germany, churches and universities - generally respected institutions - grew to accept and support Nazi ideology. Robert P. Ericksen explains how an advanced, highly educated, Christian nation could commit the crimes of the Holocaust. This book describes how Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders enthusiastically partnered with Hitler's regime, thus becoming active participants in the persecution of Jews, and ultimately, in the Holocaust. Ericksen also examines Germany's deeply flawed yet successful postwar policy of denazification in these institutions. Complicity in the Holocaust argues that enthusiasm for Hitler within churches and universities effectively gave Germans permission to participate in the Nazi regime.

The number of books and articles dealing with various aspects of World War II has increased at a phenomenal rate since the end of the hostilities. Perhaps no other chapter in this bloodiest of all wars has received as much attention as the Holo caust. The Nazis' program for the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" - this ideologically conceived, diabolical plan for the physicalliquidation of European Jewry - has emerged as a subject of agonizing and intense interest to laypersons and scholars alike. The centrality of the Holocaust in the study of the Third Reich and the Nazi phenomenon is almost universally recognized. The source materials for many of the books published during the immediate postwar period were the notes and diaries kept by many camp and ghetto dwellers, who were sustained during their unbelievable ordeal by the unusual drive to bear witness. These were supplemented after the liberation by a large number of personal narratives collected from survivors alI over Europe. Understandably, the books published shortly after the war ended were mainly martyrological and lachrymological, reflecting the trauma of the Holocaust at the personal, individual level. These were soon followed by a considerable number of books dealing with the moral and religious questions revolving around the role ofthe lay and spiritual leaders of the doomed Jewish communities, especially those involved in the Jewish Councils, as well as God' s responsibility toward the "chosen people."

Historians long have analyzed the emergence of the "final solution of the Jewish question" primarily on the basis of German documentation, devoting much less attention to wartime Jewish perceptions of the growing threat. Jurgen Matthaus fills this critical gap by showcasing the highly insightful reports compiled during the first half of World War II by two Geneva-based offices: those of Richard Lichtheim representing the Jewish Agency for Palestine and of Gerhart Riegner's World Jewish Congress office. Since the first days of war, Lichtheim's predictions of Jewish dead ran in the millions and increased progressively with the rising tide of Nazi rule over Europe. His and Riegner's perceptions of German anti-Jewish policy resulted from shared goals and personal experiences as well as from their bureaus' range of functions and the massive problems that impacted the gathering and communicating of information on the unfolding Holocaust in German-controlled Europe. Beyond the specifics of the wartime Geneva setting, these sources show how human cognition works in times of extreme crisis and contribute to a better understanding of the potential inherent in Jewish sources for gauging perpetrator actions. The reports and contextual information featured here reflect the first narratives on the Holocaust, their emergence, evolution, and importance for post-war historiography.

Alon Confino seeks to rethink dominant interpretations of the Holocaust by examining it as a problem in cultural history. As the main research interests of Holocaust scholars are frequently covered terrain - the anti-Semitic ideological campaign, the machinery of killing, the brutal massacres during the war - Confino's research goes in a new direction. He analyzes the culture and sensibilities that made it possible for the Nazis and other Germans to imagine the making of a world without Jews. Confino seeks these insights from the ways historians interpreted another short, violent and foundational event in modern European history - the French Revolution. The comparison of the ways we understand the Holocaust with scholars' interpretations of the French Revolution allows Confino to question some of the basic assumptions of present-day historians concerning historical narration, explanation and understanding.

Responding to the increasingly influential role of Hannah Arendt's political philosophy in recent years, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance, critically engages with Arendt's understanding of totalitarianism. According to Arendt, the main goal of totalitarianism was total domination; namely, the virtual eradication of human legality, morality, individuality, and plurality. This attempt, in her view, was most fully realized in the concentration camps, which served as the major "laboratories" for the regime. While Arendt focused on the perpetrators' logic and drive, Michal Aharony examines the perspectives and experiences of the victims and their ability to resist such an experiment. The first book-length study to juxtapose Arendt's concept of total domination with actual testimonies of Holocaust survivors, this book calls for methodological pluralism and the integration of the voices and narratives of the actors in the construction of political concepts and theoretical systems. To achieve this, Aharony engages with both well-known and non-canonical intellectuals and writers who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Additionally, she analyzes the oral testimonies of survivors who are largely unknown, drawing from interviews conducted in Israel and in the U.S., as well as from videotaped interviews from archives around the world. Revealing various manifestations of unarmed resistance in the camps, this study demonstrates the persistence of morality and free agency even under the most extreme and de-humanizing conditions, while cautiously suggesting that absolute domination is never as absolute as it claims or wishes to be. Scholars of political philosophy, political science, history, and Holocaust studies will find this an original and compelling book.

In 1925, the three leading chemical firms in Germany - BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst - merged, together with some smaller firms, to become IG Farben. IG Farben became, like no other firm, synonymous with the participation of German industry in the most heinous crimes of the Nazi regime. This book deals in depth with one of IG Farben s leading factories, Hoechst, during the Third Reich. On the basis of long and meticulous archival research, including previously inaccessible company records, the author tries to describe and analyze the relationship between management and employees and the Nazi party and its organizations. The author shows the exclusion and persecution of employees, particularly Jewish employees. He traces the extent of Hoechst s involvement in the exploitation of forced labor, and its active participation in human experiments in several concentration camps. Throughout, he tries to shed light on the motivations of those responsible for this conduct.

This book is a linguistic-cultural study of the emergence of the Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust. It traces the origins and uses of the term 'ghetto' in European discourse from the sixteenth century to the Nazi regime. It examines with a magnifying glass both the actual establishment of and the discourse of the Nazis and their allies on ghettos from 1939 to 1944. With conclusions that oppose all existing explanations and cursory examinations of the ghetto, the book impacts overall understanding of the anti-Jewish policies of Nazi Germany.

They were outnumbered and underrated. They were fresh from the training fields in America and ordered to fight an enemy that had rewritten the book of war and brutally controlled a continent and the air above it. But the men of the 56th fighter group had courage and, more importantly, they had the P-47 Thunderbolt.

This is the incredible story of the U.S. 56th Fighter Group as told by one of its best pilots, Robert S. Johnson, who would rack up a score of twenty-eight kills against the Luftwaffe and become one of America¹s top aces‹one of a special breed of men who changed the course of history.

One Sunday morning in October, Istvan and his wife Vera start their day as usual. They tidy their house; Vera makes a festive cake to put in the freezer and cuts fresh roses for a vase in the living room. That evening, after nearly fifty years of marriage, they lie down in the bed that they share and take their own lives. Having survived the tumult of twentieth-century Europe and after raising a family together, they could not accept the words 'until death do us part'. Vera and Istvan met at a recital in Budapest in 1940, and from that moment Vera knew that he was the man she would marry. A deep and abiding friendship grew between them. While sifting through the fragments of the family history in an attempt to understand this glamorous and enigmatic couple, their granddaughter Johanna Adorjan imagines their final day. Amid the family stories and portraits by friends, she dares to give voice to their never-mentioned experiences in the Holocaust and their escape from Hungary during the uprising of 1956. An Exclusive Love is both a love story and a journey of self-understanding, beautifully told and shot through with tender humour. It is a history at once personal and universal, a tale of memory, belonging and devotion.

When the real is so fantastic, what literary effects will succeed in making it credible and help readers to comprehend its human meaning? As recent world developments fully show us, several lessons of the Nazi Holocaust still remain to be learned. To respond meaningfully and ethically to the Holocaust, writers need to incorporate moral and emotional complexity, and one way they have done this is through using the techniques of the fantastic. The authors in this anthology of essays examine the usefulness of fantastic story-telling for exploring relevant philosophical and moral issues about the Holocaust. The present volume is interdisciplinary in scope, including print literature and film, animation, graphic novels, and various other media. The editors have sought essays that, while ranging in theoretical perspectives, engage in dialogue with one another, together producing a comprehensive whole. Examined are writers like JaneYolen and Art Spiegelman and such works as the sci-fi television series V (1983), Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil (1982), Guillermo del Toro's imaginative Pan's Labyrinth (2006), and Martin Scorsese's dark thriller Shutter Island (2010).

2015 was the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War Two, and, for Jews, the seventieth anniversary of the end of the worst Jewish catastrophe in diaspora history. After Genocide considers how, more than two generations since the war, the events of the Holocaust continue to haunt Jewish people and the worldwide Jewish population, even where there was no immediate family connection. Drawing from interviews with "ordinary" Jews from across the age spectrum, After Genocide focuses on the complex psychological legacy of the Holocaust. Is it, as many think, a "collective trauma"? How is a community detached in space and time traumatised by an event which neither they nor their immediate ancestors experienced?"Ordinary" Jews' own words bring to life a narrative which looks at how commonly-recognised attributes of trauma - loss, anger, fear, guilt, shame - are integral to Jewish reactions to the Holocaust.

German Reparations and the Jewish World" has become a standard reference work since it was first published. Based extensively on archival sources, the author examines the difficult debate within the Jewish world whether it was possible to reach a material settlement with Germany so soon after Auschwitz. Concentrating on how the money was spent in rebuilding Jewish life, he also analyzes how the reparations payments transformed the relations bteween Israel and the diaspora, and between different Jewish political and ideological groups. This revised and expanded edition includes material on sensitive relief programmes from archives that have only recently been opened to researchers. In a new, extensive introductory essay the author reexamines the reparations, restitution and indemnification processes from the perspective of 50 years later.

The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial was the largest, most public, and most important trial of Holocaust perpetrators conducted in West German courts. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Devin O. Pendas provides a comprehensive history of this momentous event. Situating the trial in a thorough analysis of West German criminal law, this book argues that in confronting systematic, state-sponsored genocide, the Frankfurt court ran up against the limits of law. Because many of the key categories of German criminal law were defined with direct reference to the specific motives of the defendants, the trial was unable to adequately grasp the deep social roots and systematic character of Nazi genocide. Much of the trial's significance came from the vast public attention it captured, and this book provides a compelling account of the divided response to the trial among the West German public.

The Holocaust is a pervasive presence in British culture and society. Schools have been legally required to deliver Holocaust education, the government helps to fund student visits to Auschwitz, the Imperial War Museum's permanent Holocaust Exhibition has attracted millions of visitors, and Britain has an annually commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day. What has prompted this development, how has it unfolded, and why has it happened now? How does it relate to Britain's post-war history, its contemporary concerns, and the wider "globalisation" of Holocaust memory? What are the multiple shapes that British Holocaust consciousness assumes and the consequences of their rapid emergence? Why have the so-called "lessons" of the Holocaust enjoyed such popularity in Britain? Through analysis of changing engagements with the Holocaust in political, cultural and memorial landscapes over the past generation, this book addresses these questions, demonstrating the complexities of Holocaust consciousness and reflecting on the contrasting ways that history is used in Britain today.

Stranded in Germany after the Second World War, 300,000 Holocaust survivors began to rebuild their lives while awaiting emigration. Brought together by their shared persecution, Jewish displaced persons forged a vibrant community, redefining Jewish identity after Auschwitz. Asserting their dignity as Jews, they practised Jewish rituals, created new families, embraced Zionism, agitated against British policies in Palestine, and tried to force Germans to acknowledge responsibility for wartime crimes. In Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, Margarete Myers Feinstein uses survivor memoirs and interviews, allowing the reader to 'hear' the survivors' voices, focusing on the personal aspects of the transition to normalcy. Unlike previous political histories, this study emphasizes Jewish identity and cultural life after the war.

Chil Rajchman, a Polish Jew, was arrested with his younger sister in 1942 and sent to Treblinka, a death camp where more than 750,000 were murdered before it was abandoned by German soldiers. His sister was sent to the gas chambers, but Rajchman escaped execution, working for ten months under incessant threats and beatings as a barber, a clothes-sorter, a corpse-carrier, a puller of teeth from those same bodies. In August 1943, there was an uprising at the camp, and Rajchman was among the handful of men who managed to escape. In 1945, he set down this account, a plain, unembellished and exact record of the raw horror he endured every day. This unique testimony, which has remained in the sole possession of his family ever since, has never before been published in English. For its description of unspeakably cruelty, Treblinka is a memoir that will not be superseded. In addition to Rajchman's account, this volume includes the complete text of Vasily Grossman's 'The Hell of Treblinka', one of the first descriptions of a Nazi extermination camp; a powerful and harrowing piece of journalism written only weeks after the camp was dissolved. Introduction by Samuel Moyn, Professor of History at Columbia University and author of A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France.

Before Pep Guardiola and before Jose Mourinho, there was Bela Guttmann: the first superstar football coach, and the man who paved the way for the celebrated coaches of the modern age. He was also a Holocaust survivor. In 1944, much of Europe had wanted Guttmann dead. He hid for months in an attic near Budapest as thousands of fellow Jews in the neighbourhood were dragged off to be murdered. Later, he escaped from a slave labour camp before a planned deportation and almost certain death. His father, sister and wider family were murdered. But by 1961, as coach of Benfica, he had lifted Europe's greatest sporting prize, the European Cup, a feat he repeated the following year. This biography spans two contrasting visions of Europe: one of barbarism and genocide, and one of beauty, wonder and romance, of balmy evenings in magnificent cities, where great players would stretch every sinew in a bid to win football's holy grail. With dark forces rising once again in that continent, the story of Bela Guttmann's life asks the question: which vision will triumph in our times?

Deploying concepts of interpretation, liberation, and survival, esteemed literary critic Herbert Lindenberger reflects on the diverse fates of his family during the Holocaust. Combining public, family, and personal record with literary, musical, and art criticism, 'One Family's Shoah' suggests a new way of writing cultural history.

This is the catalogue of the first-ever travelling exhibition about the Auschwitz concentration camp, where 1.1 million people - mostly Jews, but also non-Jewish Poles, Roma, and others - lost their lives.More than 280 objects and images from the exhibition are illustrated herein. Drawn from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and other collections around the world, they range from the intimate (such as victims' family snapshots and personal belongings) to the immense (an actual surviving barrack from the Auschwitz III-Monowitz satellite camp); all are eloquent in their testimony. An authoritative yet accessible text weaves the stories behind these artefacts into an encompassing history of Auschwitz - from a Polish town at the crossroads of Europe, to the dark center of the Holocaust, to a powerful site of remembrance. Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away. is an essential volume for everyone who is interested in history and its lessons.

Witnessing Witnessing focuses critical attention on those who receive the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Questioning the notion that traumatic experience is intrinsically unspeakable and that the Holocaust thus lies in a quasi-sacred realm beyond history, the book asks whether much current theory does not have the effect of silencing the voices of real historical victims. It thereby challenges widely accepted theoretical views about the representation of trauma in general and the Holocaust in particular as set forth by Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, Berel Lang, and Dori Laub. It also reconsiders, in the work of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, reflections on ethics and aesthetics after Auschwitz as these pertain to the reception of testimony. Referring at length to videotaped testimony and to texts by Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, and Jorge Semprun, the book aims to make these voices heard. In doing so, it clarifies the problems that anyone receiving testimony may encounter and emphasizes the degree to which listening to survivors depends on listening to ourselves and to one another. Witnessing Witnessing seeks to show how, in the situation of address in which Holocaust survivors call upon us, we discover our own tacit assumptions about the nature of community and the very manner in which we practice it.

This book analyzes how West German intellectuals debated the Nazi past and democratic future of their country. Rather than proceeding event by event, it highlights the underlying issues at stake: the question of a stigmatized nation and the polarized reactions to it that structured German discussion and memory of the Nazi past. Paying close attention to the generation of German intellectuals born during the Weimar Republic - the forty-fivers - this book traces the drama of sixty years of bitter public struggle about the meaning of the past: did the Holocaust forever stain German identity so that Germans could never again enjoy their national emotions like other nationalities? Or were Germans unfairly singled out for the crimes of their ancestors? By explaining how the perceived pollution of family and national life affected German intellectuals, the book shows that public debates cannot be isolated from the political emotions of the intelligentsia.

The Jews of Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945 brings to light the Italian-Jewish experience from the start of Mussolini's prime ministership through the end of the Second World War. Challenging the myth of Italian benevolence during the Fascist period, the authors investigate the treatment of Jews by Italians during the Holocaust, and the native versus foreign roots of Italian fascist anti-Semitism. Each essay in this volume each illustrates a different aspect of Italian Jewry under Fascist and Nazi rule. Areas of inquiry include the role of the Catholic Church with special reference to Pope Pius XII, Mussolini s attitude and anti-Jewish policies leading to the onset of the 1938 Italian racial laws, and the Italian popular reactions to anti-Jewish persecution. Included also is an examination of cover images and articles from the Italian racist newspaper La Difesa della Razza intended to lay bare the influence of the Italian media on the general Italian public.