Now a retired university academic living in Jerusalem, Katz was born into a well-to-do Jewish family who owned a thriving grocery shop and export business in Jaroslaw, a smallish town in southeastern Poland. In 1939, the Katz family was expelled by the Gestapo from Jaroslaw into the Soviet-occupied

Irmin Vinson's Some Thoughts on Hitler and Other Essays is a book about propaganda. Vinson explains how the organized Jewish community uses the memory of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust as weapons to stigmatize the patriotism and ethnic pride not just of Germans, but of all whites, including those who fought against Hitler. In these clear, rational, and highly readable essays, Irmin Vinson demolishes this propaganda and exposes the insidious agenda behind it.

Sarah, nine years old, endures yet another air-raid in the street shelter in Blitz-torn England. At the same time nine-year old Claude is practising an escape should their house in occupied France be raided by the Gestapo. Sarah and Claude, Jews, and their families experience the devastating effects of Nazi Germany. The children are deeply traumatised, Sarah by the fate of her mother during an air-raid and Claude by the 'disappearance' of his family. The effects of their tragic experiences are played out very differently. The early lives of the children, though in different cultures and different circumstances, manifest very similar parallel experiences. It is only when the two central characters meet as adults that the effects of the trauma show themselves clearly and very dramatically. The novel traces four generations of the two families through to the final powerful and moving outcome.

Paris was home to one of the key European initiatives to document and commemorate the Holocaust, the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine . By analysing the earliest Holocaust narratives and their reception in France, this study provides a new understanding of the institutional development of Holocaust remembrance in France after the War.

This book by dynamic scholars James Whisker and John Coe examines the short life of the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, one of the most overlooked individuals in the pantheon of leaders in the Third Reich. Born to German mercantile parents in the Baltic region of the Russian Empire, he was a student in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. Deeply influenced by the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a propaganda pamphlet distributed by the tsar's secret police, he carried it to Germany, where he introduced it to Adolf Hitler. Rosenberg leaned heavily on heterodox Christian writings that challenged mainstream Christian thought. He revived interest in a variety of philosophies and individuals long forgotten, such as the cosmic dualistic Cathars and the mystic Master Eckart von Hochheim. Rosenberg came to view history from a perspective often called "Scientific Racism," which held that the history of humankind had been marked by a struggle between the Aryan race and their supposed inferiors. Race was the newest subject for the application of cosmic dualism, which is the spiritual belief that two fundamental concepts exist. Rosenberg identified the Nazis' task as creating a bulwark against Semitic influences from Europe generally and Germany in particular, and to do so by any means necessary. Rosenberg figured in a long anti-Jewish tradition in Germany, a tortured legacy that began with Martin Luther and continued through many of the prominent German figures of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Rosenberg considered his magnum opus, The Myth of the 20th Century, to be the logical successor work to Foundations of the 19th Century by the composer Richard Wagner's son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

The Warsaw weekly Polityka issued the following appeal to its readers on the 50th anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: "We are asking those of you who still remember the circumstances of the Time of Humiliation to summon up scenes and images from memory. We are appealing to Poles who helped rescue Jews, to Polish witnesses of the persecution of the Jews and of the Holocaust...The aim is to recount events, including those whose narrators would rather forget about them, or never return to them." The people who were born before or during the war, and who found themselves on one side or the other of the ghetto wall, are the last participants in, and eyewitnesses to, the history of the Jews there. Polityka's appeal for recollections of scenes that 'cannot be forgotten' generated 225 submissions, 82 of which are collected in this volume. More than half a century later - and now available in paperback - the dilemmas, emotions, and doubts about their attitudes, and the behavior of t

Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man is a book written by the Italian author, Primo Levi. It describes his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War.

Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months.

This truly amazing story offers a revealing glimpse into the realities of the Holocaust and its effects on our world.

Germans remember the Nazi past so that it may never happen again. But how has the abstract vow to remember translated into concrete action to prevent new genocides abroad? As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany's pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when Germans said "never again," did they mean "never again Auschwitz" or "never again war"? Looking beyond solemn statements and well-meant monuments, Andrew I. Port examines how the Nazi past shaped German responses to the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda-and further, how these foreign atrocities recast Germans' understanding of their own horrific history. In the late 1970s, the reign of the Khmer Rouge received relatively little attention from a firmly antiwar public that was just "discovering" the Holocaust. By the 1990s, the genocide of the Jews was squarely at the center of German identity, a tectonic shift that inspired greater involvement in Bosnia and, to a lesser extent, Rwanda. Germany's increased willingness to use force in defense of others reflected the enthusiastic embrace of human rights by public officials and ordinary citizens. At the same time, conservatives welcomed the opportunity for a more active international role involving military might-to the chagrin of pacifists and progressives at home. Making the lessons, limits, and liabilities of politics driven by memories of a troubled history harrowingly clear, Never Again is a story with deep resonance for any country confronting a dark past.

The SS Cavalry Brigade was a unit of the Waffen-SS that differed from other German military formations as it developed a 'dual role': SS cavalrymen both helped to initiate the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and experienced combat at the front.

Paths to Genocide examines the development of antisemitism from the beginnings of Christianity, through the Middle Ages, Reformation, Enlightenment and nineteenth century liberalism, nationalism and racism to the Holocaust. Focusing on major periods, places and problems in the history of European civilization, the book highlights historical contexts as it shows how religion, science, and socioeconomic forces all played a role in the evolution of antisemitism to its genocidal climax.

For decades scholars have pored over Hitler's autobiographical journey/political treatise, debating if Mein Kampf has genocidal overtones and arguably led to the Holocaust. For the first time, Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Holocaust sees celebrated international scholars analyse the book from various angles to demonstrate how it laid the groundwork for the Shoah through Hitler's venomous attack on the Jews in his text. Split into three main sections which focus on 'contexts', 'eugenics' and 'religion', the book reflects carefully on the point at which the Fuhrer's actions and policies turn genocidal during the Third Reich and whether Mein Kampf presaged Nazi Germany's descent into genocide. There are contributions from leading academics from across the United States and Germany, including Magnus Brechtken, Susannah Heschel and Nathan Stoltzfus, along with totally new insights into the source material in light of the 2016 German critical edition of Mein Kampf. Hitler's views on Marxism, violence, and leadership, as well as his anti-Semitic rhetoric are examined in detail as you are taken down the disturbing path from a hateful book to the Holocaust.

Although the Holocaust represents one of the worst atrocities in the history of mankind, it is thought of by many only in terms of statistics--the brutal slaughter of over 6 million lives. The art of those who suffered under the most unspeakable conditions and the art of those who reflect on the genocide remind us that statistics cannot tell the entire story. This important and diverse collection focuses on the art expression from the inferno, documenting the Holocaust through sketches of camp life drawn surreptitiously by victims on scraps of paper, and through contemporary paintings, sculpture, and personal reflections. From an informative and comprehensive perspective, this book evokes a powerful response to the 20th-century catastrophe.

Jurek Becker is one of the most important post-war German authors. His first novel, Jacob the Liar, already has the status of a classic of post-1945 European literature about the Holocaust and has been widely translated. This timely book traces the main events in Becker's unusual personal history: his childhood experiences in the Lodz Ghetto and in the concentration camps of Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen, his life in the GDR, and his move to the West. The author reflects both on Becker's quest for his Jewish identity as well as on his achievements in terms of narrative technique, formal innovation and style. Examining Becker's treatment of the Holocaust in his novels and stories, the author highlights their central themes of hope as resistance to barbarity, the idea of memory, the inability of a survivor of the camps to overcome psychological scars, but also the provocative portrayal of Jews as oppressors who take revenge on their former persecutors. Becker's portrayal of life in former East Germany, the role of gender relations, the problems facing a writer under a socialist regime, and East-West German relations are also investigated.
As the first comprehensive assessment of Becker's life and work, this book will be essential reading for those interested in German and Holocaust literature, critical theory and German studies.

The essays in this book reflect on the significance of the Holocaust sixty years afterwards. In this time it has become embedded in collective memory This book explores the idea that even thought the tenets of Nazism--racism, dictatorship, expansionism --have become unacceptable in the western world, little has actually changed. Since 1945 crimes against humanity and human rights have occurred throughout the world. The Holocaust thus pre-figures a "death-drive" in contemporary culture: the idea that the ability to deliver death is the supreme expression of self-affirmation.

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.

A crafted collection detailing western responses to the Balkan War We didn't know. For half a century, Western politicians and intellectuals have so explained away their inaction in the face of genocide in World War II. In stark contrast, Western observers today face a daily barrage of information and images, from CNN, the Internet, and newspapers about the parties and individuals responsible for the current Balkan War and crimes against humanity. The stories, often accompanied by video or pictures of rape, torture, mass graves, and ethnic cleansing, available almost instantaneously, do not allow even the most uninterested viewer to ignore the grim reality of genocide. And yet, while information abounds, so do rationalizations for non-intervention in Balkan affairs-the threshold of real genocide has yet to be reached in Bosnia; all sides are equally guilty; Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia is a threat to the West; it will only end when they all tire of killing each other-to name but a few. In This Time We Knew, Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic have put together a collection of critical, reflective, essays that offer detailed sociological, political, and historical analyses of western responses to the war. This volume punctures once and for all common excuses for Western inaction. This Time We Knew further reveals the reasons why these rationalizations have persisted and led to the West's failure to intercede, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, in the most egregious crimes against humanity to occur in Europe since World War II. Contributors to the volume include Kai Erickson, Jean Baudrillard, Mark Almond, David Riesman, Daniel Kofman, Brendan Simms, Daniele Conversi, Brad Kagan Blitz, James J. Sadkovich, and Sheri Fink.

Adolf Eichmann was head of Gestapo Division IV-B4, the Third Reich's notorious Security Service, and he was responsible for implementing the "Final Solution" of the European Jews in the Greater German Reich. Though arrested at the end of the war by the U.S. army, Eichmann succeeded in escaping from U.S. custody in 1946 and lived unnoticed in Germany and Austria until 1950, when he travelled to Argentina. While living in Buenos Aires, Eichmann produced a series of tape recordings, and hand written notes, giving a very open and incriminating account of his role in the Final Solution, and Eichmann declares that this is indeed the only testimony that he wishes to be considered as genuine and not dictated under duress. In 1960 the Israeli Intelligence Service Mossad, succeeded in tracing Eichmann to Argentina. They captured him, and on May 21 he was flown to Israel, where he was tried by the Israeli Court in 1961, found guilty and hanged on May 31, 1962. After his courtroom testimony in Israel, in August 1961, Eichmann wrote an additional testimony that he called "False Gods." The English translation of "False Gods," is also published by Black House Publishing, and is a companion to this volume. This book provides an incriminating account of Eichmann's role in the wholesale murder of the Jews in Europe, and establishes the scope of the anti-Jewish measures undertaken in the Third Reich and the gradual development of these measures from emigration to concentration to large-scale murder. The reader of Eichmann's memoirs will thus obtain not only a vivid impression of the extensive police operations of the Third Reich but also a glimpse into the ideological and political motivations of these actions, motivations that were perhaps not fully shared by Eichmann himself.

The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust identifies the Yiddish historians who created a distinctively Jewish approach to writing Holocaust history in the early years following World War II. Author Mark L. Smith explains that these scholars survived the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe, yet they have not previously been recognized as a specific group who were united by a common research agenda and a commitment to sharing their work with the worldwide community of Yiddish-speaking survivors. These Yiddish historians studied the history of the Holocaust from the perspective of its Jewish victims, focusing on the internal aspects of daily life in the ghettos and camps under Nazi occupation and stressing the importance of relying on Jewish sources and the urgency of collecting survivor testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and memoirs. With an aim to dispel the accusations of cowardice and passivity that arose against the Jewish victims of Nazism, these historians created both a vigorous defense and also a daring offense. They understood that most of those who survived did so because they had engaged in a daily struggle against conditions imposed by the Nazis to hasten their deaths. The redemption of Jewish honor through this recognition is the most innovative contribution by the Yiddish historians. It is the area in which they most influenced the research agendas of nearly all subsequent scholars while also disturbing certain accepted truths, including the beliefs that the earliest Holocaust research focused on the Nazi perpetrators, that research on the victims commenced only in the early 1960s, and that Holocaust study developed as an academic discipline separate from Jewish history. Now, with writings in Yiddish journals and books in Europe, Israel, and North and South America having been recovered, listed, and given careful discussion, former ideas must yield before the Yiddish historians' published works. The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust is an eye-opening monograph that will appeal to Holocaust and Jewish studies scholars, students, and general readers.

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

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

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

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

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