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.

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.

Elisabeth Orsten grew up in a comfortable Viennese middle class milieu, together with her wealthy parents, her younger brother George and her nanny. Educated as a Roman Catholic, she was nevertheless Jewish according to Nazi criteria, and it rapidly became clear to her parents that if she was to survive the Nazi occupation she would have to leave her native country. Her settled and secure childhood changed abruptly in January 1939, when she and her brother George were transported to England by the Jewish Refugee Children's Movement in an operation parallel to the English Quakers; 'kindertransport'. In England she was lodged with a friend of her family and her three daughters, but they were unable to accommodate George, who was found a lodging by the Quakers in a different part of the country. Feeling very much alone, Elisabeth immediately had to start learning an entirely new language and to accommodate herself to a quite different culture from the one she was used to. The struggle shows in her narrative of those times and, particularly, in the extracts from the diary she had been given by her nanny as a last present before she left Austria and which she began writing in to maintain her German. When at last she managed to begin feeling at home in England, there was yet more disruption in her life. At the age of twelve, not knowing where George was, she was put on a ship to America. Confusion on disembarkation, and the renewed difficulties of fitting in with yet another family and culture, were exacerbated by the frightening news of the sinking of later transatlantic transports which might have been carrying others of her family to safety. Only when she was finally reunited with her parents and her brother, in September 1940, did the terror abate; and there her diary entries cease. Fifty years later, now a university professor, Elisabeth Orsten picked up that diary and reread it. As the memories flooded back, she knew that she had to share the story with others, and she began writing these memoirs. Full of personal feelings and private incident, they constitute an intimate account of the problems a refugee child faces when it is suddenly plucked from its usual environment and placed unceremoniously into a different world. Many contemporary refugee children have to deal with harsher conditions than the author endured. Yet their stories have things in common with these memoirs. From Anschluss to Albion can give us all an understanding of the feelings and the turmoil undergone by a refugee child struggling to understand what has occurred and why, while at the same time having to cope with different language, culture, and carers.

'To portray the Holocaust, one has to create a work of art', says Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah. However, can the Holocaust be turned into theatre? Is it possible to portray on stage events that, by their monstrosity, defy human comprehension? These are the questions addressed by the playwrights and the scholars featured in this book. Their essays present and analyse plays performed in Israel, America, France, Italy, Poland and, of course, Germany. The style of presentation ranges from docudramas to avant-garde performances, from realistic impersonation of historical figures to provocative and nightmarish spectacles. The book is illustrated with original production photographs and some rare drawings and documents; it also contains an important descriptive bibliography of more than two hundred Holocaust plays.

"Holocaust as Fiction" seeks to explain and critically evaluate the extraordinary success of Schlink's internationally acclaimed novel, "The Reader," the widely read "Selb" detective trilogy, and two popular films based closely on his work. With the help of wide-ranging reception data, the work of Holocaust scholars, as well as cultural and legal reflections on the concept of guilt, Donahue elucidates not only these works, but the wider critical climate that has fostered their success.

The Holocaust and Representations of Jews examines how prominent national exhibitions in Europe represent the Jewish minority and its cultural and religious self-understandings, historically and today, in particular in the context of the Holocaust. Insights from the New Museology are brought to the field of Jewish Studies through an exploration of the visual representation of Jewish history and Jewish identifications in the display of photographs. Drawing on case studies which focus on the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London and the permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin, these themes become the prism through which aspects of historiography and the display of the 'otherness' of minorities are addressed. Casting new light on the issues surrounding the visual representation of Jews, the work of museum practitioners in relation to historical presentations and to the use of photographs in exhibitions, this book is an important contribution not only to the fields of Jewish Studies, Religion and History, but also to the study of the representation of minority-majority relations and the understanding of exhibition visits as an educational tool.

Forced labor was a key feature of Nazi anti-Jewish policy and shaped the daily life of almost every Jewish family in occupied Europe. This book systematically describes the implementation of forced labor for Jews in Germany, Austria, the Protectorate, and the various occupied Polish territories. As early as the end of 1938, compulsory labor for Jews had been introduced in Germany and annexed Austria by the labor administration. Similar programs subsequently were established by civil administrations in the German-occupied Czech and Polish territories. At its maximum extent, more than one million Jewish men and women toiled for private companies and public builders, many of them in hundreds of now often-forgotten special labor camps. This study refutes the widespread thesis that compulsory work was organized only by the SS, and that exploitation was only an intermediate tactic on the way to mass murder or, rather, that it was only a facet in the destruction of the Jews.

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.

This bold intervention into the debate over the memory and post-memory of the Holocaust both scrutinises recent academic theories of post-Holocaust trauma and provides a new reading of literary and architectural memory texts related to the Holocaust.

Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper is an in-depth look at how The New York Times failed in its coverage of the fate of European Jews from 1939-1945. It examines how the decisions that were made at The Times ultimately resulted in the minimizing and misunderstanding of modern history's worst genocide. Laurel Leff, a veteran journalist and professor of journalism, recounts how personal relationships at the newspaper, the assimilationist tendencies of The Times' Jewish owner, and the ethos of mid-century America all led the Times to consistently downplay news of the Holocaust. It recalls how news of Hitler's 'final solution' was hidden from readers and - because of the newspaper's influence on other media - from America at large. Buried by The Times is required reading for anyone interested in America's response to the Holocaust and for anyone curious about how journalists determine what is newsworthy.

A naive English farmer's wife travels alone to Poznan, Poland, to visit the Zachodni Institute; an archive that holds records of the wartime Polish Resistance. It is the start of an adventure into history, and all that had been hidden since the Nuremberg Trials where Stalin and dismissed all evidence submitted by the Poles and the ensuing 45-year Russian occupation of Poland ensured their silence. On a quest to distinguish fact from fiction, Cynthia Engelmann investigates the truth of an unpublished manuscript bequeathed to her upon the death of Maria Weychan. Maria's memoire had revealed an extraordinary tale of intrigue, romance, imprisonment and survival, as told a by a young Polish dancer in Berlin after the end of World War II. She had survived life in a camp with her mother for longer than had previously been thought possible. Had they collaborated with the Germans to protect themselves? Finding herself part of a movement to collate events of history previously hidden and silenced, Cynthia uncovers the leads of the evidence to share the truth of Maria's memoire.

In an effort to create the Master Race, Nazi physicians and bioscientists, using American legislative models, money, and moral support, sterilized 400,000 and euthanized 200,000 German citizens while developing the gas chambers and crematoria used to murder 6,000,000 Jews. Rubenfeld and the contributors to this collection posit that German physicians betrayed the Hippocratic Oath when they chose knowledge over wisdom, the state over the individual, a fuhrer over God, and personal gain over professional ethics. This groundbreaking work questions whether, since the best physicians of the early twentieth century could abandon their patients, the best physicians of the twenty-first century can be certain that they will not do the same.

This important collection brings together contributions from an impressive group of scholars to comprehensively examine Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust. Addressing the severe critiques of FDR that arose after the war and what some see as his failure to stop the genocide of Europe's Jewish community, the book looks at his policies between 1933 and 1942, his rescue efforts during the war, and the possibility for future research and analysis. This is the definitive resource on a pivotal issue in American history.

Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper is an in-depth look at how The New York Times failed in its coverage of the fate of European Jews from 1939-1945. It examines how the decisions that were made at The Times ultimately resulted in the minimizing and misunderstanding of modern history's worst genocide. Laurel Leff, a veteran journalist and professor of journalism, recounts how personal relationships at the newspaper, the assimilationist tendencies of The Times' Jewish owner, and the ethos of mid-century America all led the Times to consistently downplay news of the Holocaust. It recalls how news of Hitler's 'final solution' was hidden from readers and - because of the newspaper's influence on other media - from America at large. Buried by The Times is required reading for anyone interested in America's response to the Holocaust and for anyone curious about how journalists determine what is newsworthy.

In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. This ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

First ever volume on Holocaust in Thessaloniki in English, utilizing new sources and interpretation schemes Thessaloniki was for centuries one of the most prominent Jewish communities in the world, which lost more than 90% of its population during the Holocaust Book will be a great contribution to the local efforts underway to reconcile Thessaloniki with its Jewish past and honor the victims of the Holocaust An ambitious Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the backing of several governments and institutions, is schedule to open in the city by 2021.

The incorporation of German territories east of the Oder and Western Neisse rivers into Poland in 1945 was linked with the difficult process of an almost total exchange of population and involved the taking over of a region in which the Second World War had effected an enormous level of destruction. The contemporary term 'Polish Wild West' not only alluded to the reigning atmosphere of chaos and 'survival of the fittest' in the Polish-German borderland but was also associated with a new kind of freedom and the opportunity to start everything anew. The arrival in this region of Polish settlers from different parts of Poland led to Poles, Germans and Soviet soldiers temporarily coming into contact with one another. Living together in this war-damaged space was far from easy. On the basis of ego-documents, the author recreates the beginnings of the shaping of this new society, one affected by a repressive political system, internal conflicts and human tragedy. In distancing oneself from the until-recently dominant narratives concerning expellees in Germany or pioneers of the 'Recovered Territories' in Poland, Beata Halicka tells the story of the disintegration of a previous cultural landscape and the establishment of one which was new, in a colourful and vivid manner and encompassing different points of view.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'Original and compelling, an untold story of rare and captivating power' Philippe Sands 'A fascinating history about a little-known group who took on the Nazis . . . The individual tales of these courageous young women are remarkable' Independent 'Rescues a long-neglected aspect of history from oblivion, and puts paid to the idea of Jewish, and especially female, passivity during the Holocaust. It is uncompromising, written with passion - and it preserves truly significant knowledge. ... Judy Batalion has uncovered a trove of unknown or forgotten information about the Holocaust of genuine import and impact.' Eva Hoffman, TLS One of the most important untold stories of World War II, The Light of Days is a soaring landmark history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who inspired Poland's Jewish youth groups to resist the Nazis. Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland - some still in their teens - became the heart of a wide-ranging resistance network that fought the Nazis. With courage, guile and nerves of steel, these 'ghetto girls' smuggled guns in loaves of bread and coded intelligence messages in their plaited hair. They helped build life-saving systems of underground bunkers and sustained thousands of Jews in safe hiding places. They bribed Gestapo guards with liquor, assassinated Nazis and sabotaged German supply lines. The Light of Days at last reveals the real history of these incredible women whose courageous yet little-known feats have been eclipsed by time.

Based on work conducted by scholars as part of a Summer Research Workshop organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2007, this book takes a fresh look at how American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews responded to the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and German-occupied territory in the 1930s. The essays focus specifically on American religious responses to the November 9-10, 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Today understood as the first act of the Holocaust because of its systematized brutality against Germany's Jews, Kristallnacht, generated a dramatic response among mainline Protestants, Catholic clerical and lay leaders, Orthodox Jews, Protestant fundamentalists, and Jewish War Veterans. Together, the essays represent the first examination of multi-religious group responses to the beginnings of one of the pivotal moral events of the twentieth century, the Holocaust. They possess implications for the history of anti-Semitism globally and in the U.S., the history of interfaith cooperation and religious belief in America, the influence of American ideals on religious thought, and the impact of historical events on Jewish and Christian theology.

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.

By the spring of 1945, the Second World War was drawing to a close in Europe. Allied troops were sweeping through Nazi Germany and discovering the atrocities of SS concentration camps. The first to be reached intact was Buchenwald, in central Germany. American soldiers struggled to make sense of the shocking scenes they witnessed inside. They asked a small group of former inmates to draft a report on the camp. It was led by Eugen Kogon, a German political prisoner who had been an inmate since 1939. "The Theory and Practice of Hell" is his classic account of life inside.
Unlike many other books by survivors who published immediately after the war, "The Theory and Practice of Hell" is more than a personal account. It is a horrific examination of life and death inside a Nazi concentration camp, a brutal world of a state within state, and a society without law. But Kogon maintains a dispassionate and critical perspective. He tries to understand how the camp works, to uncover its structure and social organization. He knew that the book would shock some readers and provide others with gruesome fascination. But he firmly believed that he had to show the camp in honest, unflinching detail.
The result is a unique historical document--a complete picture of the society, morality, and politics that fueled the systematic torture of six million human beings. For many years, "The Theory and Practice of Hell" remained the seminal work on the concentration camps, particularly in Germany. Reissued with an introduction by Nikolaus Waschmann, a leading Holocaust scholar and author of Hilter's Prisons, this important work now demands to be re-read.

William I. Brustein provides a systematic comparative and empirical examination of anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust. Brustein studies the evolution of the four principal roots of anti-Semitism--religious, racial, economic, and political--and demonstrates how these roots became ignited in the decades before the Holocaust. The book explains the epidemic rise of modern anti-Semitism, societal differences in anti-Semitism, and how anti-Semitism varies from other forms of prejudice. The book draws upon an extensive body of data from Europe's leading newspapers and the American Jewish Year Book.

"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."