Enacting History is a practical guide for educators that provides methodologies and resources for teaching the Holocaust through a variety of theatrical means, including scripted texts, verbatim testimony, devised theater techniques and process-oriented creative exercises. A close collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation I Witness program and the National Jewish Theater Foundation Holocaust Theater International Initiative at the University of Miami Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies resulted in the ground-breaking work within this volume. The material facilitates teaching the Holocaust in a way that directly connects students to individual people and historical events through the art of theater. Each section is designed to help middle and high school educators meet curricular goals, objectives and standards and to integrate other educational disciplines based upon best practices. Students will gain both intellectual and emotional understanding by speaking the words of survivors, as well as young characters in scripted scenes, and developing their own performances based on historical primary sources. This book is an innovative and invaluable resource for teachers and students of the Holocaust; it is an exemplary account of how the power of theater can be harnessed within the classroom setting to encourage a deeper understanding of this defining event in history.

Enacting History is a practical guide for educators that provides methodologies and resources for teaching the Holocaust through a variety of theatrical means, including scripted texts, verbatim testimony, devised theater techniques and process-oriented creative exercises. A close collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation I Witness program and the National Jewish Theater Foundation Holocaust Theater International Initiative at the University of Miami Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies resulted in the ground-breaking work within this volume. The material facilitates teaching the Holocaust in a way that directly connects students to individual people and historical events through the art of theater. Each section is designed to help middle and high school educators meet curricular goals, objectives and standards and to integrate other educational disciplines based upon best practices. Students will gain both intellectual and emotional understanding by speaking the words of survivors, as well as young characters in scripted scenes, and developing their own performances based on historical primary sources. This book is an innovative and invaluable resource for teachers and students of the Holocaust; it is an exemplary account of how the power of theater can be harnessed within the classroom setting to encourage a deeper understanding of this defining event in history.

A widely celebrated intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe, Anson Rabinbach is one of the most important scholars of National Socialism working over the last forty years. This volume collects, for the first time, his pathbreaking work on Nazi culture, antifascism, and the after-effects of Nazism on postwar German and European culture. Historically detailed and theoretically sophisticated, his essays span the aesthetics of production, messianic and popular claims, the ethos that Nazism demanded of its adherents, the brilliant and sometimes successful efforts of antifascist intellectuals to counter Hitler's rise, the most significant concepts to emerge out of the 1930s and 1940s for understanding European authoritarianism, the major controversies around Nazism that took place after the regime's demise, the philosophical claims of postwar philosophers, sociologists and psychoanalysts-from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt and from Alexander Kluge to Klaus Theweleit-and the role of Auschwitz in European history.

Despite Adorno's famous dictum, the memory of the Shoah features prominently in the cultural legacy of the 20th century and beyond. It has led to a proliferation of works of representation and re-memorialization which have brought in their wake concerns about a 'holocaust industry' and banalization. This volume sheds fresh light on some of the issues, such as the question of silence and denial, of the formation of contemporary identities - German, East European, Jewish or Israeli, the consequences of the legacy of the Shoah for survivors and for the 'second generation,' and the political, ideological, and professional implications of Shoah historiography. One of the conclusions to be drawn from this volume is that the 'Auschwitz code,' invoked in relation to all 'unspeakable' catastrophes, has impoverished our vocabulary; it does not help us remember the Shoah and its victims, but rather erases that memory.

" ...] 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.

Nazis, fascists and voelkisch conservatives in different European countries not only cooperated internationally in the fields of culture, science, economy, and persecution of Jews, but also developed ideas for a racist and ethno-nationalist Europe under Hitler. The present volume attempts to combine an analysis of Nazi Germany's transnational relations with an evaluation of the discourse that accompanied these relations.

From January to April 2000 historian David Irving brought a high-profile libel case against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt in the British High Court, charging that Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust (1993), falsely labeled him a Holocaust denier. The question about the evidence for Auschwitz as a death camp played a central role in these proceedings. Irving had based his alleged denial of the Holocaust in part on a 1988 report by an American execution specialist, Fred Leuchter, which claimed that there was no evidence for homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz. In connection with their defense, Penguin and Lipstadt engaged architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt to present evidence for our knowledge that Auschwitz had been an extermination camp where up to one million Jews were killed, mainly in gas chambers. Employing painstaking historical scholarship, van Pelt prepared and submitted an exhaustive forensic report that he successfully defended in cross-examination in court.

Christopher R. Browning's shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews-now with a new afterword and additional photographs. Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever. While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition. Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today. "A remarkable-and singularly chilling-glimpse of human behavior...This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."-Newsweek

Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History is a brief but comprehensive survey of the Third Reich based on current research findings that provides a balanced approach to the study of Hitler's role in the history of the Third Reich. The book considers the economic, social, and political forces that made possible the rise and development of Nazism; the institutional, cultural, and social life of the Third Reich; World War II; and the Holocaust. World War II and the Holocaust are presented as logical outcomes of the ideology of Hitler and the Nazi movement. This new edition contains more information on the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany), as well as Nazi complicity in the Reichstag Fire and increased discussion of consent and dissent during the Nazi attempt to create the ideal Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). It takes a greater focus on the experiences of ordinary bystanders, perpetrators, and victims throughout the text, includes more discussion of race and space, and the final chapter has been completely revised. Fully updated, the book ensures that students gain a complete and thorough picture of the period and issues. Supported by maps, images, and thoroughly updated bibliographies that offer further reading suggestions for students to take their study further, the book offers the perfect overview of Hitler and the Third Reich.

Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is a comprehensive consideration of the role of empathy in historical knowledge, informed by the literature on empathy in fields including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and sociology. The book seeks to raise the consciousness of historians about empathy, by introducing them to the history of the concept and to its status in fields outside of history. It also seeks to raise the self-consciousness of historians about their use of empathy to know and understand past people. Defining empathy as thinking and feeling, as imagining, one's way inside the experience of others in order to know and understand them, Thomas A. Kohut distinguishes between the external and the empathic observational position, the position of the historical subject. He argues that historians need to be aware of their observational position, of when they are empathizing and when they are not. Indeed, Kohut advocates for the deliberate, self-reflective use of empathy as a legitimate and important mode of historical inquiry. Insightful, cogent, and interdisciplinary, the book will be essential for historians, students of history, and psychoanalysts, as well as those in other fields who seek to seek to know and understand human beings.

Few scholarly fields have developed in recent decades as rapidly and vigorously as Holocaust Studies. At the start of the twenty-first century, the persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subjects of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines and a touchstone of public and intellectual discourse in such diverse fields as politics, ethics and religion. Forward-looking and multi-disciplinary, this handbook draws on the work of an international team of forty-seven outstanding scholars.
The handbook is thematically divided into five broad sections. Part One, Enablers, concentrates on the broad and necessary contextual conditions for the Holocaust. Part Two, Protagonists, concentrates on the principal persons and groups involved in the Holocaust and attempts to disaggregate the conventional interpretive categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. It examines the agency of the Nazi leaders and killers and of those involved in resisting and surviving the assault. Part Three, Settings, concentrates on the particular places, sites, and physical circumstances where the actions of the Holocaust's protagonists and the forms of persecution were literally grounded. Part Four, Representations, engages complex questions about how the Holocaust can and should be grasped and what meaning or lack of meaning might be attributed to events through historical analysis, interpretation of texts, artistic creation and criticism, and philosophical and religious reflection. Part Five, Aftereffects, explores the Holocaust's impact on politics and ethics, education and religion, national identities and international relations, the prospects for genocide prevention, and the defense of human rights.

This book focuses on the fate of Polish Jews and Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust and its aftermath, in the ill-recognized era of Eastern-European pogroms after the WW2. It is based on the author's own ethnographic research in those areas of Poland where the Holocaust machinery operated. The results comprise the anthropological interviews with the members of the generation of Holocaust witnesses and the results of her own extensive archive research in the Polish Institute for National Remembrance (IPN). "[This book] is at times shocking; however, it grips the reader's attention from the first to the last page. It is a remarkable work, set to become a classic among the publications in this field." Jerzy Jedlicki, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Ein einmaliges Zeitzeugnis und eine Sammlung von Augenzeugenberichten der Novemberpogrome 1938, der Reichskristallnacht. Erscheint erstmals in englischer Sprache mit einem Vorwort von Saul Friedlander, Pulitzer-Preistrager und UEberlebender des Holocaust.

"The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010" is the first major study of how postwar Italy confronted, or failed to confront, the Holocaust. Fascist Italy was the model for Nazi Germany, and Mussolini was Hitler's prime ally in the Second World War. But Italy also became a theater of war and a victim of Nazi persecution after 1943, as resistance, collaboration, and civil war raged. Many thousands of Italians--Jews and others--were deported to concentration camps throughout Europe. After the war, Italian culture produced a vast array of stories, images, and debate through which it came to terms with the Holocaust's difficult legacy. Gordon probes a rich range of cultural material as he paints a picture of this shared encounter with the darkest moment of twentieth-century history. His book explores aspects of Italian national identity and memory, offering a new model for analyzing the interactions between national and international images of the Holocaust.

In the heart of the twentieth century, the game of soccer was becoming firmly established as the sport of the masses across Europe, even as war was engulfing the continent. Intimately woven into the war was the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, genocide on a scale never seen before. For those victims ensnared by the Nazi regime, soccer became a means of survival and a source of inspiration even when surrounded by profound suffering and death. In Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust, Kevin E. Simpson reveals the surprisingly powerful role soccer played during World War II. From the earliest days of the Nazi dictatorship, as concentration camps were built to hold so-called enemies, captives competed behind the walls and fences of the Nazi terror state. Simpson uncovers this little-known piece of history, rescuing from obscurity many poignant survivor testimonies, old accounts of wartime players, and the diaries of survivors and perpetrators. In victim accounts and rare photographs-many published for the first time in this book-hidden stories of soccer in almost every Nazi concentration camp appear. To these prisoners, soccer was a glimmer of joy amid unrelenting hunger and torture, a show of resistance against the most heinous regime the world had ever seen. With the increasing loss of firsthand memories of these events, Soccer under the Swastika reminds us of the importance in telling these compelling stories. And as modern day soccer struggles to combat racism in the terraces around the world, the endurance of the human spirit embodied through these personal accounts offers insight and inspiration for those committed to breaking down prejudices in the sport today. Thoughtfully written and meticulously researched, this book will fascinate and enlighten readers of all generations.

In January 1942, Soviet press photographers came upon a scene like none they had ever documented. That day, they took pictures of the first liberation of a German mass atrocity, where an estimated 7,000 Jews and others were executed at an anti-tank trench near Kerch on the Crimean peninsula. Dmitri Baltermants, a photojournalist working for the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia, took photos that day that would have a long life in shaping the image of Nazi genocide in and against the Soviet Union. Presenting never before seen photographs, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph shows how Baltermants used the image of a grieving woman to render this gruesome mass atrocity into a transcendentally human tragedy. David Shneer tells the story of how that one photograph from the series Baltermants took that day in 1942 near Kerch became much more widely known than the others, eventually being titled "Grief." Baltermants turned this shocking wartime atrocity photograph into a Cold War era artistic meditation on the profundity and horror of war that today can be found in Holocaust photo archives as well as in art museums and at art auctions. Although the journalist documented murdered Jews in other pictures he took at Kerch, in "Grief" there are likely no Jews among the dead or the living, save for the possible NKVD soldier securing the site. Nonetheless, Shneer shows that this photograph must be seen as an iconic Holocaust photograph. Unlike images of emaciated camp survivors or barbed wire fences, Shneer argues, the Holocaust by bullets in the Soviet Union make "Grief" a quintessential Soviet image of Nazi genocide.

The Nazi regime opened its first concentration camps within weeks of coming to power, but with the exception of Dachau the history of these early, improvised camps and their inmates is not yet widely known. Gabriele Herz's memoir, published for the first time, is a unique record of a Jewish woman's detention in the first women's concentration camp in Moringen (housed in part of an old-established workhouse), at a time when most other inmates were communists or Jehovah's Witnesses. This original translation of her wry and perceptive memoir is accompanied by an extensive introduction that sets Herz's experience in the history both of political detention under the Nazi regime and of the German workhouse system.

This book explores portrayals of Anne Frank in American literature, where she is often invoked, if problematically, as a means of encouraging readers to think widely about persecution, genocide, and victimisation; often in relation to gender, ethnicity, and race. It shows how literary representations of Anne Frank in America over the past 50 years reflect the continued dominance of the American dramatic adaptations of Frank's Diary in the 1950s, and argues that authors feel compelled to engage with the problematic elements of these adaptations and their iconic power. At the same time, though, literary representations of Frank are associated with the adaptations; critics often assume that these texts unquestioningly perpetuate the problems with the adaptations. This is not true. This book examines how American authors represent Frank in order to negotiate difficult questions relating to representation of the Holocaust in America, and in order to consider gender, coming of age, and forms of inequality in American culture in various historical moments; and of course, to consider the ways Frank herself is represented in America. This book argues that the most compelling representations of Frank in American literature are alert to their own limitations, and may caution against making Frank a universal symbol of goodness or setting up too easy identifications with her. It will be of great interest to researchers and students of Frank, the Holocaust in American fiction and culture, gender studies, life writing, young adult fiction, and ethics.

"The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010" is the first major study of how postwar Italy confronted, or failed to confront, the Holocaust. Fascist Italy was the model for Nazi Germany, and Mussolini was Hitler's prime ally in the Second World War. But Italy also became a theater of war and a victim of Nazi persecution after 1943, as resistance, collaboration, and civil war raged. Many thousands of Italians--Jews and others--were deported to concentration camps throughout Europe. After the war, Italian culture produced a vast array of stories, images, and debate through which it came to terms with the Holocaust's difficult legacy. Gordon probes a rich range of cultural material as he paints a picture of this shared encounter with the darkest moment of twentieth-century history. His book explores aspects of Italian national identity and memory, offering a new model for analyzing the interactions between national and international images of the Holocaust.

This invaluable work traces the role of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, the core group of Himmler's murder units involved in the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," during and immediately after the German campaign in Poland in 1939. In addition to relevant Einsatzgruppen reports, the book includes key documents from other sources, especially eyewitness accounts from victims or onlookers. Such accounts provide an alternative, often much more realistic, perspective on the nature and consequences of the actions previously known only through documentation generated by the perpetrators. With carefully selected primary sources contextualized by the authors' clear narrative, this work fills an important gap in our understanding of a crucial period in the evolution of policies directed against Jews, Poles, and others deemed dangerous or inferior by the Third Reich. Supplemented by maps and photographs, this book will be an essential reference and research tool.

This interdisciplinary collection of primary and secondary readings encourages scholars and students to engage critically with current debates about the origins, implementation and postwar interpretation of the Holocaust.
Interdisciplinary content encourages students to engage with philosophical, political, cultural and literary debate as well as historiographical issues.
Integrates oral histories and testimonies from both victims and perpetrators, including Jewish council leaders, victims of ghettos and camps, SS officials and German soldiers.
Subsections can be used as the basis for oral or written exercises.
Whole articles or substantial extracts are included wherever possible.