Providing diverse insights into Jewish-Gentile relations in East Central Europe from the outbreak of the Second World War until the reestablishment of civic societies after the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, this volume brings together scholars from various disciplines - including history, sociology, political science, cultural studies, film studies and anthropology - to investigate the complexity of these relations, and their transformation, from perspectives beyond the traditional approach that deals purely with politics. This collection thus looks for interactions between the public and private, and what is more, it does so from a still rather rare comparative perspective, both chronological and geographic. It is this interdisciplinary and comparative perspective that enables us to scrutinize the interaction between the individual majority societies and the Jewish minorities in a longer time frame, and hence we are able to revisit complex and manifold encounters between Jews and Gentiles, including but not limited to propaganda, robbery, violence but also help and rescue. In doing so, this collection challenges the representation of these encounters in post-war literature, films, and the historical consciousness. This book was originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies.

This book deals with the Second World War in Southeastern Europe from the perspective of conditions on the ground during the conflict. The focus is on the reshaping of ethnic and religious groups in wartime, on the "top-down" and "bottom-up" dynamics of mass violence, and on the local dimensions of the Holocaust. The approach breaks with the national narratives and "top-down" political and military histories that continue to be the predominant paradigms for the Second World War in this part of Europe.

This book is a collection of some of the most influential recent writing on vital aspects of Nazi Germany. It provides readers with an insight into new perspectives on traditional understandings of the Third Reich as well as covering all the central aspects of the period, from the rise of the Nazis and the internal organization of the regime, to Germany's role in the Second World War.

The readings incorporate discussion of social and economic change, the personality of Hitler, the role of women in Nazi Germany, the involvement of German armed forces in the atrocities of the Second World War, the relationship between the German people and the Gestapo and, most controversially, continuing debates about German public opinion and the Holocaust. A key feature is the inclusion of three seminal articles by German historians translated into English here for the first time. The volume begins with a substantial editorial introduction to current issues and each essay is prefaced with a headnote, setting it in its historiographical context.

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.

An extraordinary and unique document: Hoess was in charge of the huge extermination camp in Poland where the Nazis murdered some three million Jews, from the time of its creation (he was responsible for building it) in 1940 until late in 1943, by which time the mass exterminations were half completed. Before this he had worked in other concentration camps, and afterwards he was at the Inspectorate in Berlin. He thus knew more, both at first-hand and as an administrator, about Nazi Germany's greatest crime than did any save two or three other men. Taken prisoner by the British, he was handed over to the Poles, tried, sentenced to death, and taken back to Auschwitz and there hanged. During the period between his trial and his execution, he was ordered to write his autobiography. This is it. Hoess repeatedly says he was glad to write the book. He enjoyed the work. And finally the most careful checking has shown that he took great pains to tell the truth. Here we have, painted by his own hand, a vivid and unforgettable self-portrait of one of the great monsters of all time. To this are added portraits of some of his more spectacular fellow-criminals. The royalties from this macabre but historically important book go to the fund set up to help the few survivors from the Auschwitz camps.

This book presents a multidimensional case study of international human rights in the immediate post-Second World War period, and the way in which complex refugee problems created by the war were often in direct competition with strategic interests and national sovereignty. The case study is the clandestine immigration of Jewish refugees from Italy to Palestine in 1945-1948, which was part of a British-Zionist conflict over Palestine, involving strategic and humanitarian attitudes. The result was a clear subjection of human rights considerations to strategic and political interests.

Perfect for readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Cilka's Journey and The Librarian of Auschwitz - this is the international bestselling and life-affirming true story of female bravery and surviving the horrors of Auschwitz. NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller and WINNER of the Opzij Literature Prize 2019 They knew their survival depended on each other. They had to live for each other. It is 1940 and the Final Solution is about to begin. The Nazis have occupied The Netherlands but resistance is growing and two Jewish sisters - Janny and Lien Brilleslijper - are risking their lives to save those being hunted, through their clandestine safehouse 'The High Nest'. It becomes one of the most important safehouses in the country but when the house and its occupants are betrayed the most terrifying time of the sisters' lives begins. This is the beginning of the end. With German defeat in sight, the Brilleslijper family are put on the last train to Auschwitz, along with Anne Frank and her family. What comes next challenges the sisters beyond human imagination as they are stripped of everything but their courage, resilience and love for each other.

" 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.

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.

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.

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.

With the disappearance of the eyewitness generation and the globalization of Holocaust memory, this book interrogates key concepts in Holocaust and trauma studies through an assessment of contemporary German-language Jewish authors. In the shifting media landscape of the twenty-first century, the second and third generations of German-language Jewish authors are grappling with the disappearance of the eyewitness generation and the hyper-mediation and globalization of Holocaust memory. Benjamin Stein, Maxim Biller, Vladmir Vertlib, and Eva Menasse each experiment with new approaches towards Holocaust representation and the Nazi past. This book investigates major shifts in Holocaust memory since the turn of the millennium, and argues that the works of these authors call for a much-needed reassessment of key concepts and terms in Holocaust discourse such as authenticity, empathy, normalization, representation, traumatic unspeakability, and postmemory. Drawing on current research in media, memory, cultural, and literary studies, Maria Roca Lizarazu develops a fresh approach which challenges the dominant focus on traumatic unspeakability by engaging with the culturally mediated travels of transgenerational and transnational contemporary Holocaust memory. Roca Lizarazu pays special attention to ethical and aesthetic challenges of contemporary Holocaust memory and how these are addressed in the medium of contemporary German-language literature. This book offers a critical new perspective on the central paradigms informing recent Holocaust and trauma studies scholarship and, in doing so, provides novel insights into a new generational approach towards Holocaust remembrance and representation. MARIA ROCA LIZARAZU is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, UK.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

On 18 July 1943, one-hundred and twenty Jews were transported from the concentration camp at Drancy to the Levitan furniture store building in the middle of Paris. These were the first detainees of three satellite camps (Levitan, Austerlitz, Bassano) in Paris. Between July 1943 and August 1944, nearly eight hundred prisoners spent a few weeks to a year in one of these buildings, previously been used to store furniture, and were subjected to forced labor. Although the history of the persecution and deportation of France's Jews is well known, the three Parisian satellite camps have been subjected to the silence of both memory and history. This lack of attention by the most authoritative voices on the subject can perhaps be explained by the absence of a collective memory or by the marginal status of the Parisian detainees - the spouses of Aryans, wives of prisoners of war, half-Jews. Still, the Parisian camps did, and continue to this day, lack simple and straightforward descriptions. This book is a much needed study of these camps and is witness to how, sixty years after the events, expressing this memory remains a complex, sometimes painful process, and speaking about it a struggle.

" ...] reflects impeccable, painstaking research through an impressive array of sources." . Central European History ..". provides the first substantial comparative analysis of the undertakings of political and economic planners, highlighting the conformity and conflicts between them." . H-Genocide "Kay illuminates these issues through clear, insightful analysis, and through a crisp writing style, at times emotive and darkly (yet never inappropriately) humorous. ...] The book is a valuable addition to the literature, pointing the way to further research into such issues as the degree of knowledge which the German civil service as a whole possessed of the plans, and the degree of opposition - or lack thereof - with which they greeted the plans. As an all-too-rare English-language addition to the literature on this particular aspect of Germany's war in the east, it deserves attention from specialists and students alike." . War in History "Based on meticulous research...this book is an excellent and well-written addition to the historiography about Nazi planning for mass murder." . European History Quarterly "Kay's painstaking exploration of the planning behind the subsequent 'organized chaos' goes far to enhance our understanding of Nazi intentions vis-a-vis the population of the occupied Soviet Union." Holocaust and Genocide Studies "This is an original, richly detailed, and on the whole readable work. There is more in it than a short review can cover. Although relatively specialised, it has a clear importance. The true originality of Kay's work lies in reinterpretation as well as in archival evidence, but readers must work this out for themselves." American Historical Review ..". a] thoroughly researched work ... The foundations of the German Vernichtungskrieg are clearly shown in this book, which corrects and clarifies its chronological development by assembling little known facts into a sound study of Nazi planning...For a long time to come, historians will have no need to focus special interest on these aspects of Nazi history, as they now can be perused in this book." H-German "Kay solidly identifies the significant parameters of the starvation policy... He] traces this exploitation, population and starvation policy of mass murder more closely and analyses the actions of those protagonists planning the policy more intensively than analyses hitherto available. It is written in a composed, factual style without unnecessary redundancy and in a very readable way." Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte Convinced before the onset of Operation "Barbarossa" in June 1941 of both the ease, with which the Red Army would be defeated and the likelihood that the Soviet Union would collapse, the Nazi regime envisaged a radical and far-reaching occupation policy which would result in the political, economic and racial reorganization of the occupied Soviet territories and bring about the deaths of 'x million people' through a conscious policy of starvation. This study traces the step-by-step development of high-level planning for the occupation policy in the Soviet territories over a twelve-month period and establishes the extent to which the various political and economic plans were compatible.

The Nazi genocide of the Jews, while unique in some ways, was not the only genocide of the twentieth century. This innovative book, the product of a year-long collaboration of scholars from many disciplines, is the first curriculum to systematically tie the teaching of the Holocaust to an analysis of the genocides in Armenia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and Rwanda.

The book consists of five parts: introduction; history of the Holocaust; representations of the Holocaust in literature, film, and the arts; other genocides; and ethics. The curriculum, shaped with feedback from those who teach Holocaust studies, consists mainly of primary documents and their analysis. Each section includes a general introduction to a body of knowledge that reflects current research and detailed introductions to particular documents. Throughout the book, there are provocative discussion questions and suggestions for further reading and other resources. Each section features "links" to other parts to encourage interdisciplinary reflection. The final section on ethics addresses the difficult questions raised by genocide.

"The Holocaust and Other Genocides" is designed as a model for flexible, innovative teaching about this complex subject. It is also a sophisticated, interdisciplinary effort to create the conditions for discussing and understanding the genocides of the twentieth century.

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.

In this moving account of the life, work, and ethics of four Jewish women intellectuals in the world of the Holocaust, Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores the ways in which these women sought to maintain their faith in humanity while aware of intensifying destruction. She argues that through their written responses of autobiographical self-assertion Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum resisted the Nazi terror in ways that defy its horrifying dehumanization.

Personal identity crises engendered the intellectual-spiritual acts of autobiographical self-searching for each of these women. About to become a nun in 1933, Edith Stein embarked on her autobiography as a daughter of a Jewish family. Fleeing France and deportation in 1942, Simone Weil examined her inner struggle with faith and the Church in her "Spiritual Autobiography." Hiding for more than two years in the attic, Anne Frank poignantly confided in her diary about her efforts to become a better person. Having volunteered as a social worker in Westerbork, Etty Hillesum searched her soul for love in the reality of terror. In each case, autobiographical writing becomes an act of defiance that asserts humanity in a dehumanized/dehumanizing world.

By focusing on the four women's accomplishments as intellectuals, writers, and thinkers, Brenner's account liberates them from other posthumous treatments that depict them as symbols of altruism, sanctity, and victimization. Her approach also elucidates the particular predicament of Western Jewish intellectuals who trusted the ideals of the Enlightenment and believed in human fellowship. While suffering the terror of physical annihilation decreed by the Final Solution, these Jews had to contend with their exclusion from the world that they considered theirs. On yet another level, this study of four extraordinary life stories contributes to a deeper understanding of the postwar development of ethical, theological, and feminist thought. In showing concern about a world that had ceased to care for them, Stein, Weil, Frank, and Hillesum demonstrated that the meaning of human existence consisted in the responsibility for the other, in the protection of the suffering God, in the primary value of relatedness through empathy. Arguing that their ethical tenets anticipated the thought of such postwar thinkers as Levinas, Fackenheim, Tillich, Arendt, and Nodding, Brenner proposes that the breakup of the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment in the Holocaust engendered the postwar exploration of humanist potential in self-givenness to the other.

Ronnie Landau has compiled a highly original and invaluable aid to understanding the moral, historical and educational significance of the Holocaust. This cross-disciplinary work has been designed to provide a unique source of help both to students and teachers in fields as disparate as history, humanities, education, literature, drama, psychology, religious education, philosophy and sociology.
"Studying the Holocaust" contains: an historical overview of the holocaust and the years immediately preceding it; key historical documents, each with a brief introduction; a range of readings and usable ideas for imaginative, challenging and stimulating class-based discussions and other activities; an examination of the nature and extent of the crime of genocide in the modern age; a reference section containing brief biographies of key personalities and a glossary of essential terms; and more.

The Nazis asked him to swear allegiance to Hitler, betraying his country, his friends, and everything he believed in. He refused. Poland, 1939. Professional photographer Wilhelm Brasse is deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and finds himself in a deadly race to survive, assigned to work as the camp's intake photographer and take "identity pictures" of prisoners as they arrive by the trainload. Brasse soon discovers his photography skills are in demand from Nazi guards as well, who ask him to take personal portraits for them to send to their families and girlfriends. Behind the camera, Brasse is safe from the terrible fate that so many of his fellow prisoners meet. But over the course of five years, the horrifying scenes his lens capture, including inhumane medical "experiments" led by Josef Mengele, change Brasse forever. Based on the true story of Wilhelm Brasse, The Auschwitz Photographer is a stark black-and-white reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. This gripping work of World War II narrative nonfiction takes readers behind the barbed wire fences of the world's most feared concentration camp, bringing Brasse's story to life as he clicks the shutter button thousands of times before ultimately joining the Resistance, defying the Nazis, and defiantly setting down his camera for good.