The Nazis' persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to hold so-called "privileged" positions, and their behavior has often been judged as self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood, and often taboo aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi's concept of the "grey zone," this study analyzes the passing of moral judgment on "privileged" Jews as represented by writers, such as Raul Hilberg, and in films, including Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Negotiating the problems and potentialities of "representing the unrepresentable," this book engages with issues that are fundamental to present-day attempts to understand the Holocaust and deeply relevant to reflections on human nature.

This landmark book, the product of years of research by a team of two dozen historians, reveals that resistance to occupation by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Second World War was not narrowly delineated by country but startlingly international. Tens of thousands of fighters across Europe resisted 'transnationally', travelling to join networks far from their homes. These 'foreigners' were often communists and Jews who were already being persecuted and on the move. Others were expatriate business people, escaped POWs, forced labourers or deserters. Their experiences would prove personally transformative and greatly affected the course of the conflict. From the International Brigades in Spain to the onset of the Cold War and the foundation of the state of Israel, they played a significant part in a period of upheaval and change during the long Second World War. -- .

This celebratory volume consists of nineteen previously published essays by Professor David A. Scrase. These English-language essays are divided into three sections: (1) studies on the twentieth-century German author Wilhelm Lehmann; (2) literary studies on Johannes Bobrowski, Ludwig Greve, Stephan Hermlin, and others; and (3) studies on the literature, art, and film of the Holocaust. The book addresses German literature of the twentieth century in particular, with an emphasis on modern poetry and fiction by East and West German authors. Another theme concerns itself with biographical matters of various authors. While there is an emphasis on the poetry and fiction of Wilhelm Lehmann, the third section on the Holocaust also addresses the important factor of teaching about the Holocaust at schools and on the undergraduate level of colleges and universities. In its entirety the book includes an impressive overview of the rich German literary world of the twentieth century while also stressing the necessary study of the Holocaust through literary and artistic expressions. The detailed analysis of numerous poems will be of much use to students, and some of the articles on the Holocaust will be useful to instructors as they prepare courses on the literature, art, and film dealing with various aspects of the Holocaust.

Secondary level teachers and professors from various disciplines present their best advice and insights into teaching about various facets of genocide and/or delineate actual lessons they have taught that have been particularly successful with their students.

Prompted by the 2017 commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, this book examines the legacy of Martin Luther in the life, work, and reception of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the most widely read modern Lutheran theologian. Framing the commemoration of the Reformation in conversation with Bonhoeffer's legacy places much more than Bonhoeffer's connection to Luther at stake. Given the fraught relationship of the Lutheran Bonhoeffer with the German Protestant Church under National Socialism, the question inevitably arises: "What happened to Luther's church in Germany?" This in turn prompts the question: "How did the Protestant tradition play out in public life in other nations?" And these historical issues in turn encourage reflection on a question that exercised both Luther and Bonhoeffer: "What will be the shape of the church in the future?" In these pages, an international group of scholars and practitioners from both church and state pursues these questions.

This edited collection delves into the horrors of November 1938 and to what degree they portended the Holocaust, demonstrating the varied reactions of Western audiences to news about the pogrom against the Jews. A pattern of stubborn governmental refusal to help German Jews to any large degree emerges throughout the book. Much of this was in response to uncertain domestic economic conditions and underlying racist attitudes towards Jews. Contrasting this was the outrage expressed by ordinary people around the world who condemned the German violence and challenged the policy of Appeasement being advanced by Great Britain and France towards Adolf Hitler's Nazi German government at the time. Contributors employ multiple media sources to make their arguments, and compare these with official government records. For the first time, a collection on Kristallnacht has taken a truly transnational approach, giving readers a fuller understanding of how the events of November 1938 were understood around the Western world.

Drawing on testimonies, memoirs, and personal interviews of Holocaust survivors, Francoise S. Ouzan reveals how the experience of Nazi persecution impacted their personal reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reintegration into a free society. She sheds light on the life trajectories of various groups of Jews, including displaced persons, partisan fighters, hidden children, and refugees from Nazism. Ouzan shows that personal success is not only a unifying factor among these survivors but is part of an ethos that unified ideas of homeland, social justice, togetherness, and individual aspirations in the redemptive experience. Exploring how Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives after World War II, Ouzan tells the story of how they coped with adversity and psychic trauma to contribute to the culture and society of their country of residence.

" Interviews with: Yitzhak Arad Leo Eitinger Emil Fackenheim Whitney Harris Jan Karski Arnost Lusting Mordecai Paldiel Marion Pritchard Dorothee Soelle Leon Wells Elie Wiesel Simon Wiesenthal The late Harry James Cargas was professor emeritus of literature and language at Webster University and author of thirty-two books, including Problems Unique to the Holocaust.

The association of Nazism with the symbol of ultimate evil - the devil - can be found in the works of Klaus and Thomas Mann, Else Lasker-Schuler, and Rolf Hochhuth. He appears either as Satan of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or as Goethe's Mephisto. The devil is not only a metaphor, but a central part of the historical analysis. Barasch-Rubinstein looks into this phenomenon and analyzes the premise that the image of the devil had a substantial impact on Germans' acceptance of Nazi ideas. His diabolic characteristics, the pact between himself and humans, and his prominent place in German culture are part of the intriguing historical observations these four German writers embedded in their work. Whether writing before the outbreak of WWII, during the war, or after it, when the calamities of the Holocaust were already well-known, they all examine Nazism in the light of the ultimate manifestation of evil.

This book offers psychodynamic studies of Holocaust survivors and their families in Israel and the Diaspora. It is a most moving account of the desperate struggles of these survivors to overcome the horrendous experiences in the ghettos and concentration camps and their subsequent attempts at the revival of their lives after the Second World War. Hillel Klein, the author, was himself one of these Holocaust survivors. Later, as a psychoanalyst, Klein interviewed survivors in Israel and the United States of America and evaluated the consequences of the Holocaust and its aftermath from a psychoanalytic point of view which, together with his own memories contained in the book, gives it a special depth and contributes to making it a most moving account.

The title of this book is taken from Primo Levi's words about survivors of the Holocaust: `The survivors are divided into two well-defined groups: those who repress their past en bloc, and those whose memory of the offence persists, as though carved in stone.' The memories of Manny Drukier are indelibly inscribed on his mind, and in Carved in Stone he recounts them with honesty and precision. In 1939, at the age of eleven, Drukier was forced by the Nazis to leave his native city of Lodz, in Poland. His narrative, prompted by his first visit back to Poland after fifty years, begins with his childhood, follows him in and out of various hiding places and to the labour camps, and describes his day of liberation and his later emigration to North America. But this is also the story of the day-to-day life of Jews both before and during the war, providing a detailed account of Drukier's friends and family, and their love, wit, and will to survive.

The powerful chronicle of the women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, stitching beautiful clothes at an extraordinary fashion workshop created within one of the most notorious WWII death camps.

At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp - mainly Jewish women and girls - were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers.

This fashion workshop - called the Upper Tailoring Studio - was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant's wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz, and for ladies from Nazi Berlin's upper crust.

Drawing on diverse sources - including interviews with the last surviving seamstress - The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women. Their bonds of family and friendship not only helped them endure persecution but also played their part in camp resistance. Weaving the dressmakers' remarkable experiences within the context of Nazi policies for plunder and exploitation, historian Lucy Adlington exposes the greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the Third Reich and offers a fresh look at a little-known chapter of World War II and the Holocaust.

In this compelling book, Lithuanian author Ruta Vanagaite holds an extended conversation with noted historian Christoph Dieckmann. His exploration of the causes and consequences of the Holocaust in Lithuania provides the first overview for general readers that considers the perspectives of all the central groups involved-Jews, Lithuanians, and Germans. Drawing on a rich array of sources in all the key languages-Yiddish, Ivrit, Lithuanian, and German-Dieckmann considers not only the Berlin-based orientation of the German perpetrators but also the space where the Shoah took place-Lithuanian society with its Jewish minority under German occupation. He contends that this "space" of mass crimes is always linked with warfare and occupation. The Holocaust was unprecedented, but he makes a powerful case it cannot be isolated from the other mass crimes that took place at the same time in the same space against thousands of Soviet prisoners of war and forced refugees from the Soviet territories. Dieckmann shows that the Holocaust could not have unfolded throughout German-dominated Europe without the conditional cooperation of non-Germans in each occupied country. Existing antisemitism was radicalized from the 1930s onward, turning Jews, under the enormous stress of unrelenting warfare and often instable conditions of occupation, into what were perceived as deadly enemies. The Holocaust, its history and memory, can only be understood through this broader context. The authors' searching exchanges illuminate the most profound questions we have as we struggle to understand the Holocaust.

Drawing on testimonies, memoirs, and personal interviews of Holocaust survivors, Francoise S. Ouzan reveals how the experience of Nazi persecution impacted their personal reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reintegration into a free society. She sheds light on the life trajectories of various groups of Jews, including displaced persons, partisan fighters, hidden children, and refugees from Nazism. Ouzan shows that personal success is not only a unifying factor among these survivors but is part of an ethos that unified ideas of homeland, social justice, togetherness, and individual aspirations in the redemptive experience. Exploring how Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives after World War II, Ouzan tells the story of how they coped with adversity and psychic trauma to contribute to the culture and society of their country of residence.

A survivor of concentration camps and the Death March, Eli Pfefferkorn looks back on his Holocaust and post-Holocaust experiences to compare patterns of human behavior in extremis with those of ordinary life. What he finds is that the concentration camp Muselmann, who has lost his hunger for life and is thus shunned by his fellow inmates on the soup line, bears an eerie resemblance to an office employee who has fallen from grace and whose coworkers avoid spending time with him at the water cooler. Though the circumstances are unfathomably far apart, the human response to their situations is triggered by self-preservation rather than by calculated evil. By juxtaposing these two separate worlds, Pfefferkorn demonstrates that ultimately the human condition has not changed signifi cantly since Cain slew Abel and the Athenians sentenced Socrates.

The theological problems facing those trying to respond to the Holocaust remain monumental. Both Jewish and Christian post-Auschwitz religious thought must grapple with profound questions, from how God allowed it to happen to the nature of evil.

The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology brings together a distinguished international array of senior scholars--many of whose work is available here in English for the first time--to consider key topics from the meaning of divine providence to questions of redemption to the link between the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Together, they push our thinking further about how our belief in God has changed in the wake of the Holocaust.

Contributors: Yosef Achituv, Yehoyada Amir, Ester Farbstein, Gershon Greenberg, Warren Zev Harvey, Tova Ilan, Shmuel Jakobovits, Dan Michman, David Novak, Shalom Ratzabi, Michael Rosenak, Shalom Rosenberg, Eliezer Schweid, and Joseph A. Turner.

"With its ... over thousand] detailed and expansive footnotes drawing on twenty-four different archive collections in eight countries and three continents and an enormous secondary literature, this is one of the best researched regional studies of the Holocaust ever to appear. It is helped by the fact that the authors are also always so cognizant of what was happening elsewhere in Europe at the same time and thus frequently draw out the relationship between seemingly haphazard local decisions and trends across Europe...Indeed, the way in which the book 'makes sense' of complex institutional behavior is at times breathtaking...The precision in the detail and the scope of the contextualization make this one of the more important works to appear on the Holocaust in recent years." . English Historical Review

"This very readable and well documented study fills an important gap in the Holocaust literature: it offers insight into the microcosm reflecting the entire terrifying and murderous scenario of the SS State." . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

" This] excellent study of the Riga ghetto, informed by Eastern European sources and available now in English translation, provides a precise and ghastly description of what the liquidation] meant for the local Jews. With laudable thoroughness, they describe the organized shooting of Jews, the first form of industrial-scale mass murder." . The New York Review of Books

Ghetto, forced labor camp, concentration camp: All of the elements of the National Socialists' policies of annihilation were to be found in Riga. This first analysis of the Riga ghetto and the nearby camps of Salaspils and Jungfernhof addresses all aspects of German occupation policy during the Second World War. Drawing upon a broad array of sources that includes previously inaccessible Soviet archives, postwar criminal investigations, and trial records of alleged perpetrators, and the records of the Society of Survivors of the Riga Ghetto, the authors have produced an in-depth study of the Riga ghetto that never loses sight of the Latvian capital's place within the overall design of Nazi policy and the all-of-Europe dimension of the Holocaust.

Andrej Angrick, a native of Berlin, is a historian, consultant, and researcher affiliated with the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture. He has published numerous articles about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and co-edited "Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42" (1999) and "Die Gestapo nach 1945: Karrieren, Konflikte, Konstruktionen" (with Klaus-Michael Mallmann, 2009), as well as "Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der sudlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943" (2003).

Peter Klein, a Berlin-based historian, consultant, and researcher affiliated with the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture, has published widely on the Holocaust and German occupation in various parts of central and eastern Europe during the Second World War. Klein was the editor of "Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/1942" (1997) and a co-editor of "Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42" (1999). He is the author of "Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt" (2009).

Ray Brandon is a freelance translator, historian, and researcher based in Berlin. A former editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, English Edition, he is co-editor, with Wendy Lower, of "The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization."

While Anne Frank was in hiding during the German Occupation of the Netherlands, she wrote what has become the world's most famous diary. But how could an unknown Jewish girl from Amsterdam be transformed into an international icon? Renowned Dutch scholar David Barnouw investigates the facts and controversies that surround the global phenomenon of Anne Frank. Barnouw highlights the ways in which Frank's life and ultimate fate have been represented, interpreted, and exploited. He follows the evolution of her diary into a book (with translations into nearly 60 languages and editions that added previously unknown material), an American play, and a movie. As he asks, "Who owns Anne Frank?" Barnouw follows her emergence as a global phenomenon and what this means for her historical persona as well as for her legacy as a symbol of the Holocaust.

Many books on Holocaust survivors deal with their lives in the Displaced Persons camps, with memory and remembrance, and with the nature of their testimonies. Representing scholars from different countries and different disciplines such as history, sociology, demography, psychology, anthropology, and literature, this collection explores the survivors' return to everyday life and how their experience of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust impacted their process of integration into various European countries, the United States, Argentina, Australia, and Israel. Thus, it offers a rich mix of perspectives, disciplines, and communities.

How is the Holocaust remembered in Romania since the fall of communism? Alexandru Florian and an international group of contributors unveil how and why Romania, a place where large segments of the Jewish and Roma populations perished, still fails to address its recent past. These essays focus on the roles of government and public actors that choose to promote, construct, defend, or contest the memory of the Holocaust, as well as the tools-the press, the media, monuments, and commemorations-that create public memory. Coming from a variety of perspectives, these essays provide a compelling view of what memories exist, how they are sustained, how they can be distorted, and how public remembrance of the Holocaust can be encouraged in Romanian society today.

Over three days in November 1941, in Sosenki Forest outside the city of Rovno, Ukraine, German death squads supported by local collaborationists murdered some 23,500 Jewish men, women, and children. Often remembered as "the second Babi Yar," the massacre was one of nearly a hundred similar German-sponsored, large-scale, anti-Jewish killing operations perpetrated in Soviet zones during the early months of World War II on the Eastern Front. Preceding the adoption of the "Final Solution" by the Third Reich, Rovno and other mass killings in the East were testing grounds for genocide. This study of the Rovno massacre is based substantially on remarkable new research that blends sources from multiple archives (and archival traditions), national memories, and first-person testimony that places victims' accounts side-by-side with those of German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian eyewitnesses. In its meticulous reconstruction of these events, The Holocaust in Rovno exemplifies the burgeoning movement to form a genuinely transnational history of the Holocaust.

This book presents the insights, advice and suggestions of secondary level teachers and professors in relation to teaching about various facets of genocide. The contributions are extremely eclectic, ranging from the basic concerns when teaching about genocide to a discussion as to why it is critical to teach students about more general human rights violations during a course on genocide, and from a focus on specific cases of genocide to various pedagogical strategies ideal for teaching about genocide.