Born in 1904, Brandt played a major role in the first mass killing programme of the Third Reich, the so called 'euthanasia' programme. As Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, Karl Brandt became the highest medical authority in the Nazi regime; he initiated experiments on concentration camps inmates and was eventually put in charge of biological and chemical warfare. How was it that a rational, highly cultured, literate, young professional could come to be responsible for mass murder and criminal human experiments on a previously unimaginable scale? In this riveting biography, Ulf Schmidt explores in detail that Brandt belonged to a generation of a young 'expert elite', who in the 1930s and 1940s were willing, and empowered, to support and conceive an oppressive, militarist, and racist government policy, and ultimately turn its exterminatory potential into reality. Through a critical biography of Brandt, Schmidt re-evaluates the system of communication at the centre of Hitler's regime. The book extends our understanding of the culture of detachment between a regime that was geared towards total destruction, and a government that was almost totally removed from its people.

Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans - many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal - to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ideology? Was there something rotten in the German soul? Or was it - as Christopher Browning argues in this highly influential book - more a matter of conformity, a response to intolerable social and psychological pressure? Ordinary Men is a microhistory, the detailed study of a single unit in the Nazi killing machine. Browning evaluates a wide range of evidence to seek to explain the actions of the "ordinary men" who made up reserve Police Battalion 101, taking advantage of the wide range of resources prepared in the early 1960s for a proposed war crimes trial. He concludes that his subjects were not "evil;" rather, their actions are best explained by a desire to be part of a team, not to shirk responsibility that would otherwise fall on the shoulders of comrades, and a willingness to obey authority. Browning's ability to explore the strengths and weaknesses of arguments - both the survivors' and other historians' - is what sets his work apart from other studies that have attempted to get to the root of the motivations for the Holocaust, and it is also what marks Ordinary Men as one of the most important works of its generation.

In 1944, at the age of fifteen, Marceline Loridan-Ivens was arrested in occupied France, along with her father. They were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and forcibly separated. Though he managed to smuggle one last note to her, Marceline never spoke to her father again. But You Did Not Come Back is Marceline's letter to the father she would never know as an adult. This is a breath-taking memoir by an extraordinary woman, and a deeply moving message from a daughter to a father.

As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, Lisa Appignanesi began to realise how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard since childhood. She had shunned her parents' stories of war-time Poland, but now she set out to find the truth. In her quest she flew to Warsaw - imagining and revisiting a past she never knew. This is the moving story of the Jews who survived outside the camps, but it is also the author's own voyage of self-discovery - a family memoir of the rites of passage of emigration, childhood, and growing up an outsider in a closed community

In February 1945, Israele Zolli, chief rabbi of Rome's ancient Jewish community, shocked his co-religionists in Italy and throughout the Jewish world by converting to Catholicism and taking as his baptismal name, Eugenio, to honor Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) for what Zolli saw as his great humanitarianism toward the Jews during the Holocaust. Almost a half a century after his conversion, Zolli still evokes anger and embarrassment in Italy's Jewish community. This book is the first authoritative treatment of this astonishing story.

What induced Zolli to embrace Catholicism will probably never be known. Nonetheless, by painstaking scholarly detective work, through interviews in Italy and elsewhere, through the unearthing of private papers not previous known to exist, and through the study of previous inaccessible archival materials, the authors have succeeded in explaining why Zolli left the Jewish fold and joined the Catholic Church.

Like Zolli's rabbinical career, Pius XII's long pontificate tells us much about the Church of Rome and its relationship to the Jewish people, particularly with reference to the issue of conversion. The authors focus on the pontiff's World War II policies vis-a-vis the Jews, a subject that has been heatedly debated since Rolf Hochhuth's "The Deputy" was performed in the early 1960s. What Pacelli knew abut the extermination of the Jews and when he knew it, what he said and failed to say, are given special attention in this book. Through the examination of previous scholarship and primary materials (including Pius XI's encyclical on race and anti-Semitism, Pacelli's behavior is evaluated to determine if Zolli accurately gauged the Holy Father's efforts to save Jews. This saga of the two Eugenios will interest historians of the Second World War and the Holocaust and students of history alike.

This volume is part of a comprehensive effort by Professor Rummel to understand and place in historical perspective the entire subject of genocide and mass murder-what is herein called Democide. It is the third in a series of volumes published by Transaction, in which Rummel offers a comprehensive analysis of the 120,000,000 people killed as a result of government action or direct intervention.

Curiously, while we have a considerable body of literature on the Nazi Holocaust, we do not have a total accounting-at least not until now with the issuance of Democide. In addition to the quantitative lacunae, there remains a paucity of theoretical information distinguishing the historical descriptive and the anecdotal accounts. This study of Nazi killings in cold blood is a path-finding effort in political psychology.

While Rummel does not claim to give a definitive accounting, his explanation for the numbers reached-and they are high-is compelling. In addition, we now have a correlation of information on the murder of diverse groups: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukranians, and even Germans themselves. It is now possible to fathom the Nazi genocidal poiicies-which were collective and which were selective.

Rummel's volume is a clear guide to a murky past. It offers the first systematic effort to ascertain the nature and the extent of the Nazi genocide from the point of view of the perpetrator's aims rather than the victims' consequences. This is not a pretty picture, but it is not a partisan one either. The materials are presented in a clinical as well as a systemic fashion.

Rummel has a deep sense of the life-saving instincts of individuals and the life-taking propensities of impersonal state machinery. It is thus, a humanistic effort, one that plumbs the effects of the Nazi war-machine on innocents in order to better understand present conditions. Professionals ranging from social scientists to demographers will find this a quintessential effort at political reconstruction.

To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered? In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the "ethics of Never Again."

In recent years, a lively debate has developed in Poland on the question of what responsibility the Poles share for the mass murder of the Jews, which took place largely on Polish soil. This debate was sparked off by the showing in Poland of Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah , which revealed how deeply-rooted anti-Jewish prejudice could still be found in the Polish countryside. Anti-semitism is something which Poland has preferred to forget. But before the Second World War hostility to the Jews was widespread and this climate of pervasive anti-semitism may have facilitated the Nazis' murderous plans. But Poles now, with great courage, are facing this dark side of their past. This book, translated and edited by a leading British historian of Poland, Antony Polonsky, is a major contribution to the history of the Holocaust. It gathers together the most important contribution to the current debate, revealing the agony many Poles feel about their lack of action during the war.

Estonia is perhaps the only country in Europe that lacks a comprehensive history of its Jewish minority. Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, On the Margins is a truly unique book. Rebuilding a life beyond so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia, and the trauma of Soviet occupation of 1940-41 are among the issues addressed in the book but most profoundly, the book wrestles with the subject of the Holocaust and its legacy in Estonia. Specifically, it examines the quasi-legal system of murder instituted in Nazi-occupied Estonia, confiscation of Jewish property, and Jewish forced labor camps and develops an analysis of the causes of collaboration during the Holocaust. The book also explores the dynamics of war crimes trials in the Soviet Union since the 1960s and so-called denaturalization trials in the United States in the 1980s. The haunting memory of Soviet and Nazi rule, the book concludes, prevents a larger segment of today's Estonian population from facing up to the Holocaust and the universal message that it carries.

Revised and Updated "Brilliantly reconstructs the degradation and drama of Sobibor. . . . A memorable and moving saga, full of anger and anguish, a reminder never to forget." -San Francisco Chronicle On October 14, 1943, six hundred Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it safely into the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the rest of the war. In this edition of Escape from Sobibor, fully updated in 2012, Richard Rashke tells their stories, based on his interviews with eighteen of the survivors. It vividly describes the biggest prisoner escape of World War II. A story of unimaginable cruelty. A story of courage and a fierce desire to live and to tell the world what truly went on behind those barbed wire fences.

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915-1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz's rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz's life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life. From Left to Right is structured in four parts. Part 1 tells the story of Dawidowicz's childhood, adolescence, and college years when she was an immigrant daughter living in New York City. Part 2 narrates Dawidowicz's formative European years in Poland, New York City (when she was enclosed in the European-like world of the New York YIVO), and Germany. Part 3 tells how Dawidowicz became an American while Polish Jewish civilization was still inscribed in her heart and also explores when and how Dawidowicz became the voice of East European Jewry for the American Jewish public. Part 4 exposes the fissure between Dawidowicz's European-inflected diaspora nationalist modern Jewish identity and the shifting definition of American liberalism from the late 1960s forward, which also saw the emergence of neoconservatism. The book includes an interpretation of her memoir From that Place and Time, as well as an appendix of thirty-one previously unpublished letters that illustrate the broad reach of her work and person. Dawidowicz's right-wing politics, sex, and unabashed commitment to Jewish particularism in an East European Jewish key have resulted in scholarly neglect. Therefore, this book is strongly recommended for scholars and general readers interested in Jewish and women's studies.

The fateful story of Adolf Hitler's transformation from awkward, feckless loner to lethal, charismatic demagogue. The story of the making of Adolf Hitler that we are all familiar with is the one Hitler himself wove in his 1924 trial, and then expanded upon in Mein Kampf. It tells of his rapid emergence as National Socialist leader in 1919, and of how he successfully rallied most of Munich and the majority of Bavaria's establishment to support the famous beer-hall putsch of 1923. It is an account which has largely been taken at face value for over ninety years. Yet, on closer examination, Hitler's account of his experiences in the years immediately following the First World War turns out to be every bit as unreliable as his account of his experiences as a soldier during the war itself. In Becoming Hitler, Thomas Weber continues from where he left off in his previous book, Hitler's First War, stripping away the layers of myth and fabrication in Hitler's own tale to tell the real story of Hitler's politicization and radicalization in post-First World War Munich. It is the gripping account of how an awkward and unemployed loner with virtually no recognizable leadership qualities and fluctuating political ideas turned into the charismatic, self-assured, virulently anti-Semitic leader with an all-or-nothing approach to politics with whom the world was soon to become tragically familiar. As Weber clearly shows, far from the picture of a fully-formed political leader which Hitler wanted to portray in Mein Kampf, his ideas and priorities were still very uncertain and largely undefined in early 1919 - and they continued to shift until 1923. It was the failed Ludendorff putsch of November 1923 - and the subsequent Ludendorff trial - which was to prove the making of Hitler. And he was not slow to spot the opportunity that it offered. As the movers and shakers of Munich's political scene tried to blame everything on him in the course of the trial, Hitler was presented with a golden opportunity to place himself at the centre of attention, turning what had been the 'Ludendorff trial' into the 'Hitler trial'. Henceforth, he would no longer be merely a local Bavarian political leader. From now on, he would present himself as a potential 'national saviour'. In the months after the trial, Hitler cemented this myth by writing Mein Kampf from his comfortable prison cell. His years of metamorphosis were now behind him. His years as Fuhrer were soon to come.

Seven decades after the destruction of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian genocide remains largely ignored by governments and forgotten by the world public, even though the annihilation of Armenians was headlined around the world in 1915. Scholarly investigation of the Armenian genocide is just beginning, made more difficult by the tendency of many establishment figures to rationalize the past and the attempt of perpetrator governments and their successors to deny the past.

This volume is a pioneering collective attempt to assess and analyze the Armenian genocide from differing perspectives, including history, political science, ethics, religion, literature, and psychiatry. Focusing on the general implications of denial, rationalization, and responsibility, it is particularly important as a precursor to the study of the Holocaust and other genocides.

Contents: Israel Charny, "Preface"; Terrence Des Pres, "Introduction"; Richard G. Hovannisian, "The Historical Dimensions of the Armenian Question, 1878-1923"; Leo Kuper, "The Turkish Genocide of the Armenians, 1915-1917"; Robert Melson, "Provocation of Nationalism: A Critical Inquiry into the Armenian Genocide of 1915"; Richard Hrair Dekmejian, "Determinants of Genocide: Armenians and Jews as Case Studies"; Marjorie Housepian-Dobkin, "What Genocide? What Holocaust? News from Turkey, 1915-1923: A Case Study"; Richard G. Hovannisian, "The Armenian Genocide and Denial Patterns"; Vigen Guroian, "Collective Responsibility and Official Excuse Making: The Case of the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians"; Leo Hamalian, "The Armenian Genocide and the Literary Imagination"; Vahe Oshagan, "The Impact of the Genocide on Western Armenian Letters"; Levon Boyajian and Haigaz Grigorian, "Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide"; Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, "An Oral History Perspective on Responses to the Armenian Genocide."

According to most historians, the Holocaust in Hungary represented a unique chapter in the singular history of what the Nazis termed as the "Final Solution" of the "Jewish question" in Europe. More than seventy years after the Shoah, the origins and prehistory as well as the implementation and aftermath of the genocide still provide ample ground for scholarship. In fact, Hungarian historians began to seriously deal with these questions only after the 1980s. Since then, however, a consistently active and productive debate has been waged about the history and interpretation of the Holocaust in Hungary and with the passage of time, more and more questions have been raised in connection with its memorialization. This volume includes twelve selected scholarly papers thematically organized under four headings: 1. The newest trends in the study of the Holocaust in Hungary. 2. The anti-Jewish policies of Hungary during the interwar period 3. The Holocaust era in Hungary 4. National and international aspects of Holocaust remembrance. The studies reflect on the anti-Jewish atmosphere in Hungary during the interwar period; analyze the decision-making process that led to the deportations, and the options left open to the Hungarian government. They also provide a detailed presentation of the Holocaust in Transylvania and describe the experience of Hungarian Jewish refugees in Austria after the end of the war.

More than fifty years after its first publication, Doubleday's definitive edition of Anne Frank's famous diary generated an extraordinary amount of excitement when it was published in early 1995. Enthusiastically received by critics and readers alike, it reigned for nine weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and will remain for all time the version that millions of readers will cherish.In a handsome package with flaps, rough front, and printed endpapers, this Anchor trade paperback will be the perfect gift for anyone who seeks insight into the indestructible nature of the human spirit.

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando-the "special squads," composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process-buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these "Scrolls of Auschwitz," which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp's liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

Holocaust Education: Promise, Practice, Power and Potential provides timely studies of some of the most pressing issues in teaching and learning about the Holocaust around the world. Europe is experiencing both anti-Semitic attacks, many by radicals claiming the banner of Islam, and the resurgence of right wing movements that are openly hostile to minority rights, particularly for marginalized and vulnerable groups like the Roma/Sinti, and Muslim refugees. Can Holocaust education, an encounter with the most extreme racial ideology to afflict the continent, reduce violence and prejudice against Jewish and other minority groups? The important studies in this volume address these and other pressing issues for the field, including the progress of Central and Eastern European countries that experienced both Soviet hegemony and Nazi terror in grappling with the history of the Holocaust. This book was originally published as a special issue of Intercultural Education.

The collecting of Holocaust artifacts can often result in an emotional and historical dilemma. Survivors and some militaria collectors regard these items as "stained" with the blood of Holocaust victims, and therefore should not be bought and sold. However, to honor the memory of those who perished and to keep a proper historical record, these items must be preserved. While a small contingent of collectors deal in Holocaust artifacts, the vast majority of Holocaust-oriented artifacts are purchased by individuals who intend to donate these items to museums. This book is a reference and resource guide to help determine the authenticity of these artifacts, and provides a detailed look at various Holocaust-related artifacts in a manner that follows the experiences of the survivors and victims. As an example; the Germans identified some individuals with outward markings, forced them to register, pressed them into forced labor, ghettoized, and eventually deported them to concentration camps or labor facilities, and due to the different times that these activities took place in conquered and occupied countries, they are distinguished here by the action rather than by a general timeline (for example, Jews in occupied Poland were forced to wear "Jewish badges" in 1939, while this did not occur in Germany until 1941). The Holocaust is a difficult period of history to examine, and although some of the photographs contained in this book are horrific in nature, this book in no way trivializes the magnitude of the Holocaust by discussing the collection and identification of Holocaust-related artifacts. The issue at hand is the callous disregard by those who profit from the Holocaust by manufacturing and selling counterfeit and fake items. Alec Tulkoff has been a collector of World War II militaria for the past twenty-five years. Over the past seven years he has taken an interest in Holocaust history and artifacts. During the past two years, while working at the SHOAH Visual History Foundation as a cataloguer, he compiled the information and materials contained in this book. As a cataloguer in the Foundation, he had the opportunity to hear hundreds of first hand Holocaust survivor testimonies. Tulkoff has worked hard in combating the vast amount of Holocaust artifact fraud that has spread in the collecting community and has posted a website dealing with this fraud and also publishes a quarterly newsletter on this topic.

For decades, historians have debated how and to what extent the Holocaust penetrated the German national consciousness between 1933 and 1945. How much did "ordinary" Germans know about the subjugation and mass murder of the Jews, when did they know it, and how did they respond collectively and as individuals? This compact volume brings together six historical investigations into the subject from leading scholars employing newly accessible and previously underexploited evidence. Ranging from the roots of popular anti-Semitism to the complex motivations of Germans who hid Jews, these studies illuminate some of the most difficult questions in Holocaust historiography, supplemented with an array of fascinating primary source materials.

As child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl's cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna's Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed. Unearthed is the story of Meryl's search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin-her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl's search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?

How did the academy react to the rise, dominance, and ultimate fall of Germany's Third Reich? Did German professors of the humanities have to tell themselves lies about their regime's activities or its victims to sleep at night? Did they endorse the regime? Or did they look the other way, whether out of deliberate denial or out of fear for their own personal safety? The Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich is a collection of groundbreaking essays that shed light on this previously overlooked piece of history. The Betrayal of the Humanities accepts the regrettable news that academics and intellectuals in Nazi Germany betrayed the humanities, and explores what went wrong, what occurred at the universities, and what happened to the major disciplines of the humanities under National Socialism. The Betrayal of the Humanities details not only how individual scholars, particular departments, and even entire universities collaborated with the Nazi regime but also examines the legacy of this era on higher education in Germany. In particular, it looks at the peculiar position of many German scholars in the post-war world having to defend their own work, or the work of their mentors, while simultaneously not appearing to accept Nazism.

Commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of "monument fatigue", a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. This book examines the Holocaust via three sites of murder by the Nazis: the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography, the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered, allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present. This leads to an examination of the role of the environment, or, more particularly, the ways in which the natural environment, co-opted in the process of killing, becomes a medium for remembrance.

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.