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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War
For decades the history of the US Military Tribunals at Nuremberg
(NMT) has been eclipsed by the first Nuremberg trial-the
International Military Tribunal or IMT. The dominant
interpretation-neatly summarized in the ubiquitous formula of
"Subsequent Trials"-ignores the unique historical and legal
character of the NMT trials, which differed significantly from that
of their predecessor. The NMT trials marked a decisive shift both
in terms of analysis of the Third Reich and conceptualization of
international criminal law. This volume is the first comprehensive
examination of the NMT and brings together diverse perspectives
from the fields of law, history, and political science, exploring
the genesis, impact, and legacy of the twelve Military Tribunals
held at Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949.
Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis' genocidal vision
of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Historians have
estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were
transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination
camps. In his writings on the "Final Solution," Raul Hilberg
pondered the role of trains: "How can railways be regarded as
anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time
came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds
and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?" This book explores the
question by analyzing the victims' experiences at each stage of
forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos,
the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps.
Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished
testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train
journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more
studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.
The purpose of this annotated bibliography is to provide a
comprehensive survey of writings about the Holocaust. The authors
present an overview of topics including Christian anti-judentum,
anti-semitism, the moral and religious response to the Nazi
persecution and genocide of the Jews, and post-World War II
responses to the Holocaust as they have appeared in the thousands
of books and articles published on the Holocaust. The bibliography
is divided into four topics with introductory comments that frame
the theories put forward in the books and articles. A broad array
of past and recent scholarship from a variety of venues and points
of view are represented.
"A well-structured, ambitious collection of essays, it will
certainly be an essential read for anyone interested in the
anti-Jewish policies of National Socialist Germany and their
long-term consequences for postwar Europe." . H-German The robbery
and restitution of Jewish property are two inextricably linked
social processes. It is not possible to understand the lawsuits and
international agreements on the restoration of Jewish property of
the late 1990s without examining what was robbed and by whom. In
this volume distinguished historians first outline the mechanisms
and scope of the European-wide program of plunder, before assessing
the effectiveness and historical implications of post-war
restitution efforts. Integrating the abundance of new research on
the material effects of the Holocaust and its aftermath, a
comparative perspective is offered on both robbery and restitution,
examining developments in countries such as Germany, Poland, Italy,
France, Belgium, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The international
and interrelated nature of property confiscation initiated by Nazi
Germany and its satellite states offers new insights into the
functions and beneficiaries of state sanctioned robbery. Although
the extent of implementation varied, Jewish spoils were used to
boost support for anti-Jewish policies and prop up ailing war
finances throughout Europe. Thus the combination of personal
enrichment and state plunder were two sides of the same coin. The
prolonged struggles over restitution issues are confronted in the
second section of the book on the basis of eight national studies.
Everywhere the solution of legal and material problems was
intertwined with changing national myths about the war and
conflicting interpretations of justice. Even those countries that
pursued extensive restitution programs using rigorous legal means
were unable to compensate or comprehend fully the scale of Jewish
loss. Especially in Eastern Europe, it was not until the collapse
of communism that even the concept of restoring some Jewish
property rights became a viable option. The legacy of robbery and
restitution offers both a model for redefining the practice of
human rights and keys to understanding the lingering ghosts of
antisemitism in countries where few Jews remain. Martin Dean is a
Research Scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies,
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). He is the author
of Collaboration in the Holocaust, published in association with
the USHMM in 2000, and of several articles on the confiscation of
Jewish property. From 1992 to 1997 he worked as Senior Historian
for the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit. Constantin Goschler
teaches modern history at the Humboldt-University, Berlin. He also
taught at the universities of Prague, Jena and Bochum. His main
fields of interest are transitional justice in the 20th century,
history of science and the history of political ideas in the 19th
century. He published several articles and books on restitution and
indemnification for Nazi victims. Philipp Ther teaches modern
Central and Eastern European History at the European University
Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. His fields of interest are comparative
nationalism studies, migrations and "ethnic cleansing," postwar
social history of Central Europe and most recently the history of
opera theatres in the long 19th century."
The papacy of Pius XII (1939-1958) has been a source of
near-constant debate and criticism since his death over half a
century ago. Powerful myths have arisen around him, and central to
them is the dispute surrounding his alleged silence during the
years of the Holocaust. In this groundbreaking work, historian Paul
O'Shea examines the papacy as well as the little-studied pre-papal
life of Eugenio Pacelli in order to illuminate his policies,
actions, and statements during the war. Drawing carefully and
comprehensively on the historical record, O'Shea convincingly
demonstrates that Pius was neither an anti-Semitic villain nor a
"lamb without stain." Ultimately, Pius's legacy reveals the moral
crisis within many parts of the fractured Christian Commonwealth as
well as the personal culpability of Pacelli, the man and pope.
Examining how the press in Britain, Sweden and Finland responded to
the Holocaust immediately after the Second World War, Holmila
offers new insights into the challenge posed by the Holocaust for
liberal democracies by looking at the reporting of the liberation
of the camps, the Nuremberg trial and the Jewish immigration to
Palestine.
Model Nazi tells the story of Arthur Greiser, the man who initiated
the Final Solution in Nazi-occupied Poland. Between 1939 and 1945,
Greiser was the territorial leader of the Warthegau, an area of
western Poland annexed to Nazi Germany. In an effort to make the
Warthegau "German," Greiser introduced numerous cruel policies. He
spearheaded an influx of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans.
He segregated Germans from Poles, and introduced wide-ranging
discriminatory measures against the Polish population. He
refashioned the urban and natural landscape to make it "German."
And even more chillingly, the first and longest standing ghetto,
the largest forced labour program, and the first mass gassings of
Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were all initiated under Greiser's
jurisdiction.
Who was the man behind these dreadful policies? Catherine Epstein
gives us a compelling biographical portrait of Greiser the man: his
birth in the German-Polish borderlands, his rise to Nazi prominence
in Danzig, his actions as party leader in the Warthegau, and his
trial and execution in postwar Poland. Drawing on a remarkable
array of German and Polish sources, she shows how nationalist
obsessions, political jealousies, and personal insecurities shaped
the policies of a man who held remarkable power in his Nazi
fiefdom. Throughout, Epstein confronts a burning question of our
age: why do individuals imagine genocide and ethnic cleansing to be
solutions to political problems?
Alter Wiener's father was brutally murdered on September 11,
1939 by the German invaders of Poland. Alter was then a boy of 13.
At the age of 15 he was deported to Blechhammer, a Forced Labor
Camp for Jews, in Germany. He survived five camps. Upon liberation
by the Russian Army on May 9, 1945, Alter weighed 80 lbs as
reflected on the book's cover. Alter Wiener is one of the very few
Holocaust survivors still living in Portland, Oregon. He moved to
Oregon in 2000 and since then he has shared his life story with
over 800 audiences (as of April, 2013) in universities, colleges,
middle and high schools, Churches, Synagogues, prisons, clubs, etc.
He has also been interviewed by radio and TV stations as well as
the press. Wiener's autobiography is a testimony to an unfolding
tragedy taking place in WWII. Its message illustrates what
prejudice may lead to and how tolerance is imperative. This book is
not just Wiener's life story but it reveals many responses to his
story. Hopefully, it will enable many readers to truly understand
such levels of horror and a chance to empathize with the unique
plight of the Holocaust victims. Feel free to visit my website
www.alterwiener.com for more information including links.
Over the centuries, New Testament texts have often been read in ways that reflect and encourage anti-Semitism. For example, the parable of the "wicked husbandmen," who kill the son of their landlord in order to seize the land, has been used to blame the Jews for the death of Christ. Since the Holocaust, Christian scholars have increasingly recognized and rejected this inheritance. In Parables for Our Time Tania Oldenhage seeks to fashion a biblical hermeneutics that consciously works with memories of the Holocaust. New Testament scholars have not directly confronted the horror of Nazi crimes, Oldenhage argues, but their work has nonetheless been deeply affected by the events of the Holocaust. By placing twentieth-century biblical scholarship within its specific historical and cultural contexts, she is able to trace the process by which the Holocaust gradually moved into the collective consciousness of New Testament scholars, both in Germany and in the United States. Her focus is on the scholarly interpretation of the parables of Jesus. She sets the stage with the work of Wolfgang Harnisch who exemplifies the problems surrounding Holocaust remembrance in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s. She then turns to Joachim Jeremias's eminent work on the parables, first published in 1947. Jeremias's anti-Jewish rhetoric, she argues, should be understood not only as a perpetuation of an age-old interpretive pattern, but as representative of German difficulties in responding to the Holocaust immediately after the war. Oldenhage goes on to explore the way in which Jeremias's approach was challenged by biblical scholars in the U.S. during the 1970s. In particular, she examines the turn to literature and literary theory exemplified in the works of John Dominic Crossan and Paul Ricoeur. Nazi atrocities became part of the cultural reservoir from which Crossan and Ricoeur drew, she shows, although they never engaged with the historical facts of the Holocaust. In conclusion, Oldenhage offers her own reading of the parable of the wicked husbandmen, demonstrating how the turn from historical to literary criticism opens up the text to interpretation in light of the Holocaust. If the parables are to be meaningful in our time, she contends, we must take account of the troubling resonances between these ancient Christian stories and the atrocities of Auschwitz.
The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt by Avinoam
J. Patt analyzes how the heroic saga of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
was mythologized in a way that captured the attention of Jews
around the world, allowing them to imagine what it might have been
like to be there, engaged in the struggle against the Nazi
oppressor. The timing of the uprising, coinciding with the
transition to memorialization and mourning, solidified the event as
a date to remember both the heroes and the martyrs of Warsaw, and
of European Jewry more broadly. The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw
includes nine chapters. Chapter 1 includes a brief history of
Warsaw from 1939 to 1943, including the creation of the ghetto and
the development of the Jewish underground. Chapter 2 examines how
the uprising was reported, interpreted, and commemorated in the
first year after the revolt. Chapter 3 concerns the desire for
first-person accounts of the fighters. Chapter 4 examines the ways
the uprising was seized upon by Jewish communities around the world
as evidence that Jews had joined the struggle against fascism and
utilized as a prism for memorializing the destruction of European
Jewry. Chapter 5 analyzes how memory of the uprising was mobilized
by the Zionist movement, even as it debated how to best incorporate
the doomed struggle of Warsaw's Jews into the Zionist narrative.
Chapter 6 explores the aftermath of the war as survivors struggled
to come to terms with the devastation around them. Chapter 7
studies how the testimonies of three surviving ghetto fighters
present a fascinating case to examine the interaction between
memory, testimony, politics, and history. Chapter 8 analyzes
literary and artistic works, including Jacob Pat's Ash un Fayer,
Marie Syrkin, Blessed is the Match, and Natan Rapoport's Monument
to the Ghetto Fighters, among others. As this book demonstrates,
the revolt itself, while described as a ""revolution in Jewish
history,"" did little to change the existing modes for Jewish
understanding of events. Students and scholars of modern Jewish
history, Holocaust studies, and European studies will find great
value in this detail-oriented study.
In recent years, historical witnessing has emerged as a category of
"museum object." Audiovisual recordings of interviews with
individuals remembering events of historical importance are now
integral to the collections and research activities of museums.
They have also become important components in narrative and
exhibition design strategies. With a focus on Holocaust museums,
this study scrutinizes for the first time the new global phenomenon
of the "musealization" of the witness to history, exploring the
processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of
video testimonies into exhibits.
While much has been written about the impact of the Holocaust on
survivors and their children, little is known about how the
Holocaust has affected the third generation of Jews and Germans-the
grandchildren of those who lived during the Shoah. When these young
people try to get to know one another, they find they must struggle
against a heritage of hard truths and half-truths, varying family
histories, and community-fostered pride and prejudices. In this
book Bjoern Krondorfer, who grew up in Germany and now lives in the
United States, analyzes the guilt, anger, embarrassment, shame, and
anxiety experienced by third-generation Jews and Germans-emotions
that often act as barriers to attempts to reconcile. He then
describes the processes by which some of these young people have
moved toward an affirmative and dynamic relationship. Krondorfer
points out that relations between Jews and Germans since the war
have consisted of an uneasy truce that does not address the deeply
felt pain and anger of each group. He then shows how new
relationships can be forged, providing detailed accounts of the
group encounters he arranged between post-Shoah American Jews and
Germans. He describes how the participants reacted to oral
Holocaust testimonies and to public memorials to the Holocaust, the
creative work of a Jewish-German modern dance group to which
Krondorfer belonged, and finally the students' responses to a trip
to Auschwitz, where they developed the courage necessary to trust
and comfort one another. Krondorfer argues that friendships between
young Jews and Germans can be fostered through creative models of
communication and conflict-solving and that their road to
reconciliation may become a model for other groups in conflict.
"One strength of Carrier's book is the way he charts these debates,
showing how they were symptomatic of a wider struggle over national
memory. Another great strength of this book is its thorough and
informative knowledge of theoretical literature on memory and
memorials, a knowledge which Carrier - to his enormous credit -
does not simply parade before us but actually applies to the
objects of his study...a superb book."- European History Quarterly
" Carrier] argues convincingly that what really matters about
these memorials is not so much the finished product as the social
and political context in which they were mooted, conceived and
built - and the empirical context in which they are subsequently
interpreted... Another great strength of this book is its thorough
and informative knowledge of theoretical literature on memory and
memorials. - European History
"Carrier's analysis of the form and the multidimensional meaning
of the monuments is insightful. One of the most important
contributions of this book is its argument that sites of memory
produce not only social consensus but also dialogue and competition
between the victims." - German History
Since 1989, two sites of memory with respect to the deportation
and persecution of Jews in France and Germany during the Second
World War have received intense public attention: the Velo d'Hiver
(Winter Velodrome) in Paris and the Monument for the Murdered Jews
of Europe or Holocaust Monument in Berlin. Why is this so? Both
monuments, the author argues, are unique in the history of memorial
projects. Although they are genuine "sites of memory," neither
monument celebrates history, but rather serve as platforms for the
deliberation, negotiation and promotion of social consensus over
the memorial status of war crimes in France and Germany. The
debates over these monuments indicate that it is the communication
among members of the public via the mass media, rather than
qualities inherent in the sites themselves, which transformed these
sites into symbols beyond traditional conceptions of heritage and
patriotism.
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Augustow Memorial Book
(Hardcover)
Molly Karp; Edited by Y Aleksandroni; Cover design or artwork by Rachel Kolokoff Kolokoff Hopper
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R1,279
Discovery Miles 12 790
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack
of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced
medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration
camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians
managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene
protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and
perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners.
Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust
survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and
inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by
Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story,
these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist
moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.
Sent across the ocean by their parents and taken in by foster
parents and distant relatives, approximately 1,000 children,
ranging in age from fourteen months to sixteen years, landed in the
United States and out of Hitler's reach between 1934 and 1945.
Seventy years after the first ship brought a handful of these
children to American shores, the general public and many of the
children themselves remain unaware of these rescues, and the fact
that they were accomplished despite powerful forces in and outside
the government that did not want them to occur. This is the first
published account, told in the words of the children and their
rescuers, to detail this unknown part of America's response to the
Holocaust. It will challenge the belief that Americans did nothing
to directly and actively save Holocaust victims. Judith Tydor
Baumel, Holocaust scholar and sister of two rescued children,
provides an introduction explaining why, when, how, and where the
rescues were carried out, who the heroes and heroines were, and
which individuals and organizations placed almost insurmountable
obstacles in their path. This account presents both recollections
and experiences recorded at the time of the rescued children, their
descendants, and their rescuers. The story demonstrates what a
small group of determined people can do to change the course of
history.
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The Community of Żarki
(Hardcover)
Yitzchak Lador; Translated by David Horowitz-Larochette; Cover design or artwork by Rachel Kolokoff Hopper
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R995
Discovery Miles 9 950
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Described by the book's Polish publisher as a literary take on the
author's experience in the Lodz ghetto and the Nazi concentration
camps. Arnold Mostowicz, a Polish Jew was a doctor in the Lodz
ghetto and intermittently in the camps. He was a witness to and
participant in situations that have received little attention. The
book contains a unique account of a worker demonstration in 1940,
and a description of the Gypsy camp that the Nazis had created on
the edge of the Lodz ghetto. It also gives an analysis of how the
antagonism between the Lodz Jews and the German and Czech Jews,
deported to the ghetto, played itself out in everyday life.
The Holocaust is a subject of enormous historical importance. The
murder of approximately 6 million Jews stands apart as a perhaps
the most horrendous episode in world history; in this fresh
introduction, McDonough examines the racial war-within-a-war,
outlining controversies and examining how it has been popularized
and institutionalized.
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