When Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were united, both had savage racial laws; Hitler and Mussolini viciously denounced the "Jewish manace". In the Second World War Jews who fell into the hands of the German army were consigned almost without exception for the death camps, not one Jew who came under the control of the Italian army ended there. The Italian officers protected not just Italian Jews, but Jewish refugees of every nationality. To the Germans, their actions were inexplicable and subversive. Yet the protectors of the Jews were no philo-Semites, nor were they great respecters of human life. Some of those same officers had sanctioned savage atrocities against Ethiopians and Arabs in the years before the war. They saved the Jews because it was unworthy and immoral to send them to death camps; to sustain morality they risked their careers, and sometimes, their lives. Only a handful of German officers protested; none of them took the same active steps as the Italians. Jonathan Steinberg unravels the motives and forces underpinning Nazism and fascism and offers an insight into the ambivalence inherent within their relationship.

Mimi Rubin had fond memories of growing up in Novy Bohumin, Czechoslovakia, a place that ten thousand people called home. It was a tranquil town until September 1, 1939, when the German army invaded the city. From that day forward, eighteen-yearold Mimi would face some of the harshest moments of her life.

This memoir follows Mimi's story-from her idyllic life in Novy Bohumin before the invasion, to being transported to a Jewish ghetto, to living in three different German concentration camps, and finally, to liberation. It tells of the heartbreaking loss of her parents, grandmother, and countless other friends and relatives. It tells of the tempered joys of being reunited with her sister and of finding love, marrying, and raising a family.

A compelling firsthand account, "Mimi of Novy Bohumin, Czechoslovakia: A Young Woman's Survival of the Holocaust" weaves the personal, yet horrifying, details of Mimi's experience with historical facts about this era in history. This story helps keep alive the memory of the millions of innocent men, women, and children who died in the German concentration camps during the 1930s and 1940s.

Historians have long noted that Jews often appear at the storm center of European history. Nowhere is this more true than when dealing with the tumultuous years between the Nazi seizure of power in Germany on January 30, 1933 and the proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. Yet, the events of Jewish history must also be viewed within the broader contexts of European, American, and global history. Spanning sixteen years of destruction and rebirth, A World in Turmoil is the first book of its kind, an integrated chronology which attempts to provide the researcher with clear and concise data describing the events as they unfolded. From the murder pits of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, to the battlefields in all the major theatres of operation, to the home fronts of all the major and minor combatants, A World in Turmoil covers a broad spectrum of events. Although major events throughout the world are noted, the volume concentrates on events in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. While the volume deals primarily with politics, significant social and intellectual trends are woven into the chronology. Augmented by an introductory essay and postscript to help place events in their historical context, by a bibliography, and by name, place, and subject indexes, the volume provides scholars and researchers alike a basic reference tool on sixteen of the most important years in modern history.

Invisible Ink is the story of Guy Stern's remarkable life. This is not a Holocaust memoir; however, Stern makes it clear that the horrors of the Holocaust and his remarkable escape from Nazi Germany created the central driving force for the rest of his life. Stern gives much credit to his father's profound cautionary words, "You have to be like invisible ink. You will leave traces of your existence when, in better times, we can emerge again and show ourselves as the individuals we are." Stern carried these words and their psychological impact for much of his life, shaping himself around them, until his emergence as someone who would be visible to thousands over the years. This book is divided into thirteen chapters, each marking a pivotal moment in Stern's life. His story begins with Stern's parents-"the two met, or else this chronicle would not have seen the light of day (nor me, for that matter)." Then, in 1933, the Nazis come to power, ushering in a fiery and destructive timeline that Stern recollects by exact dates and calls "the end of [his] childhood and adolescence." Through a series of fortunate occurrences, Stern immigrated to the United States at the tender age of fifteen. While attending St. Louis University, Stern was drafted into the U.S. Army and soon found himself selected, along with other German-speaking immigrants, for a special military intelligence unit that would come to be known as the Ritchie Boys (named so because their training took place at Ft. Ritchie, MD). Their primary job was to interrogate Nazi prisoners, often on the front lines. Although his family did not survive the war (the details of which the reader is spared), Stern did. He has gone on to have a long and illustrious career as a scholar, author, husband and father, mentor, decorated veteran, and friend. Invisible Ink is a story that will have a lasting impact. If one can name a singular characteristic that gives Stern strength time after time, it is his resolute determination to persevere. To that end Stern's memoir provides hope, strength, and graciousness in times of uncertainty.

Between 1941 and 1945, in one of the more curious episodes of racial politics during the Second World War, a small number of Jews were granted the rights of Aryan citizens in the Independent State of Croatia by the pro-Nazi Utasha regime. This study seeks to explain how these exemptions from Ustasha racial laws came to be, and in particular how they were justified by the race theory of the time. Author Nevenko Bartulin explores these questions within the broader histories of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and race in Croatia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tracing Croatian Jews' troubled journey from "Croats of the Mosaic faith" before World War II to their eventual rejection as racial aliens by the Utasha movement.

"A meticulous and shattering investigation of eight horrific pictures..."-L'Arche In December 1941, on a shore near the Latvian city of Liepaja, Nazi death squads (the Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators murdered in three days more than 2,700 Jews. The majority were women and children, most men having already been shot during the summer. The perpetrators took pictures of the December killings. These pictures are among the rare photographs from the first period of the extermination, during which over 800 000 Jews from the Baltic to the Black Sea were shot to death. By showing the importance of photography in understanding persecution, Nadine Fresco offers a powerful meditation on these images while confronting the essential questions of testimony and guilt. From the forward by Dorota Glowackay: Straddling the boundary between historical inquiry and personal reflection, this extraordinary text unfolds as a series of encounters with eponymic Holocaust photographs. Although only a small number of photographs are reproduced here, Fresco provides evocative descriptions of many well-known images: synagogues and Torah scrolls burning on the night of Kristallnacht; deportations to the ghettos and the camps; and, finally, mass executions in the killing fi elds of Eastern Europe. The unique set of photographs included in On the Death of Jews shows groups of women and children from Liepaja (Liepaja), shortly before they were killed in December 1941 in the dunes of Shkede (Skede) on the Baltic Sea. In the last photograph of the series, we see the victims' bodies tumbling into the pit.

This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine.

Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a little extra bread, he agreed to become a 'Sonderkommando', without realising what this entailed. He soon found himself a member of the 'special unit' responsible for removing the corpses from the gas chambers and burning their bodies.

Dispassionately, he details the grim round of daily tasks, evokes the terror inspired by the man in charge of the crematoria, 'Angel of Death' Otto Moll, and recounts the attempts made by some of the prisoners to escape, including the revolt of October 1944.

It is usual to imagine that none of those who went into the gas chambers at Auschwitz ever emerged to tell their tale - but, as a member of a 'Sonderkommando', Shlomo Venezia was given this horrific privilege. He knew that, having witnessed the unspeakable, he in turn would probably be eliminated by the SS in case he ever told his tale. He survived: this is his story.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Taking as its point of departure Omer Bartov's acclaimed Anatomy of a Genocide, this volume brings together previously unknown accounts by three individuals from Buczacz. These rare narratives give personal glimpses into daily life in unsettled times: a Polish headmaster during World War I, a Ukrainian teacher and witness to both Soviet and German rule, and a Jewish radio technician, genocide survivor, and member of the Polish resistance. Together, they offer a prismatic perspective on a world remote from our own that nonetheless helps us understand how people not unlike ourselves responded to mass violence and destruction.

This study investigates the relationship between Lothar-Gunther Buchheim (1918-2007), his bestselling 1973 novel Das Boot (The Boat), and West Germany's Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. As a war reporter during the Battle of the Atlantic, Buchheim benefitted from distinct privileges, yet he was never in a position of power. Almost thirty years later, Buchheim confronted the duality of his own past and railed against what he perceived to be a varnished public memory of the submarine campaign. Michael Rothberg's theory of the implicated beneficiary is used as a lens to view Buchheim and this duality. Das Boot has been retold by others worldwide because many people claim that the story bears an anti-war message. Wolfgang Petersen's critically acclaimed 1981 film and interpretations as a comedy sketch, a theatrical play, and a streamed television sequel have followed. This trajectory of Buchheim's personal memory reflects a process that practitioners of memory studies have described as transnational memory formation. Archival footage, interviews, and teaching materials reflect the relevance of Das Boot since its debut. Given the debates that surrounded Buchheim's endeavors, the question now raised is whether Germany's "mastering the past" serves as a model for other societies analyzing their own histories. Sitting at the intersection of History, Literature and Film Studies, this is an unprecedented case study depicting how the pre- and postwar times affected writers and others caught in the middle of the drama of the era.

Perfect for readers of Last Stop Auschwitz, The Volunteer and The Tattooist of Auschwitz 'This is an extraordinary biography. A gripping narrative that opens as derring-do wartime escape drama rapidly turns into a horror story about man's inhumanity to man...Important and unforgettable' JONATHAN DIMBLEBY The awe-inspiring and gripping true story of the young man who survived not one, but three concentration camps, only - in the final days of the war - to be bombed while aboard a Nazi prison boat. Stowed away on top of a train, twenty-year-old Wim Aloserij escapes the obligatory work camps in Nazi-ruled Germany in 1943. The young man from Amsterdam then goes into hiding on a farm - sleeping in a wooden chest hidden underground. But it's not to last. In the cover of night, Wim is captured during a raid and transported to the infamous Gestapo prison in Amsterdam. There, his life changes forever as he is thrown into the nightmare of the Holocaust and transported to Camp Amersfoort - the first of three concentration camps he must endure. Drawing on the lessons he learned as a child as the victim of an alcoholic and abusive father, Wim is forced to adapt quickly and urgently to his hellish surroundings. However, it is with the end of the war in sight, that Wim must draw on every last strength he has when he finds himself caught in the very centre of Allied-Nazi crossfire. At the age of 94, Wim finally felt ready to tell his incredible story, which he kept secret for most of his life. A true story of bravery, courage and resilience, The Last Survivor will leave you amazed by one young man's determination - against the odds - to survive.

This is the only book from the perspective of the defendant who emerged victorious. It features reviews on book pages of national newspapers, and in history magazines. Deborah Lipstadt chronicles her five-year legal battle with David Irving that culminated in a sensational trial in 2000. In her acclaimed 1993 book "Denying the Holocaust", Deborah Lipstadt called David Irving, a prolific writer of books on World War II, "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial", a conclusion she reached after closely examining his books, speeches, interviews, and other copious records. The following year, after Lipstadt's book was published in the UK, Irving filed a libel suit against Lipstadt and her UK publisher, Penguin. Lipstadt prepared her defence with the help of first-rate team of solicitors, historians, and experts. The dramatic trial, which unfolded over the course of 10 weeks, ultimately exposed the prejudice, extremism, and distortion of history that defined Irving's work. Lipstadt's victory was proclaimed on the front page of major newspapers around the world, with the "Daily Telegraph" proclaiming that the trial did "for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations." Part history, part real life courtroom drama, "History On Trial" is Lipstadt's riveting, blow-by-blow account of the trial that tested the standards of historical and judicial truths and resulted in a formal denunciation of a Holocaust denier, crippling the movement for years to come.

In this vivid memoir originally published in German, Anne Groschler (1888-1982) recounts her 1944 escape from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Mandatory Palestine via "Transport 222", an exchange transport of 222 Jews for "Aryan" prisoners of war. In the most detailed contribution of the exchange ever published, Groschler paints an authentic picture of life before WWII amongst the upper echelons of German society, her ultimate persecution and escape to Holland where she was betrayed, the horrors of life in the Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen camps, and her eventual flight via "Transport 222" to Palestine. Written immediately after her liberation in 1944, this unique document captures a little-known chapter of Holocaust history.

This is the first attempt to explain how Jewish doctors survived extreme adversity in Auschwitz where death could occur at any moment. The ordinary Jewish slave labourer survived an average of fifteen weeks. Ross Halpin discovers that Jewish doctors survived an average of twenty months, many under the same horrendous conditions as ordinary prisoners. Despite their status as privileged prisoners Jewish doctors starved, froze, were beaten to death and executed. Many Holocaust survivors attest that luck, God and miracles were their saviors. The author suggests that surviving Auschwitz was far more complex. Interweaving the stories of Jewish doctors before and during the Holocaust Halpin develops a model that explains the anatomy of survival. According to his model the genesis of survival of extreme adversity is the will to live which must be accompanied by the necessities of life, specific personal traits and defence mechanisms. For survival all four must co-exist.

This book explores, for the first time, the impact of the Holocaust on the gender identities of Jewish men. Drawing on historical and sociological arguments, it specifically looks at the experiences of men in France, Holland, Belgium, and Poland. Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust starts by examining the gendered environment and ideas of Jewish masculinity during the interwar period and in the run-up to the Holocaust. The volume then goes on to explore the effect of Nazi persecution on various elements of male gender identity, analysing a wide range of sources including diaries and journals written at the time, underground ghetto newspapers and numerous memoirs written in the intervening years by survivors. Taken together, these sources show that Jewish masculinities were severely damaged in the initial phases of persecution, particularly because men were unable to perform the gendered roles they expected of themselves. More controversially, however, Maddy Carey also shows that the escalation of the persecution and later enclosure - whether through ghettoisation or hiding - offered men the opportunity to reassert their masculine identities. Finally, the book discusses the impact of the Holocaust on the practice of fatherhood and considers its effect on the transmission of masculinity. This important study breaks new ground in its coverage of gender and masculinities and is an important text for anyone studying the history of the Holocaust.

A gripping memoir written by a 96-year-old Jewish Holocaust survivor about his escape from Nazi-occupied Poland in the 1930's and his adventures with the French Resistance during World War II In 1937, as the Nazi Party tightened its grip on the city of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), Justus Rosenberg's parents made the wrenching decision to send their son to Paris, where he would have the hope of finishing high school and going on to university in safety. He was sixteen years old, and he would not see his family again for sixteen years more. Even after war broke out in 1939, life in France was peaceful for a time-but when the Nazis pushed toward Paris in the spring of 1940, Justus was forced to flee south to Toulouse. There, a chance meeting put Justus in contact with Varian Fry, the American journalist who ran a refugee network that aided several thousand Jews in escaping Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. With his German background, understanding of French cultural, and fluency in several languages, including English, Justus was ideally positioned to thrive in Fry's network, coming to master an underworld of counterfeit documents, whispered passwords, black market currency, opportunistic gangsters, and clandestine mountain passes. Justus would spend the rest of the war working for Fry and later the French Resistance, helping to provide safe passage for many intellectuals and artists on the run from the Nazis, among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst. Along the way, he would have a number of close scrapes of his own: on one occasion, he was rounded up to be sent to a labor camp in Poland, and had to make a daring escape to save his life; on another, he narrowly survived after his jeep hits a landmine. An epic saga of survival, with the soul of a spy thriller, The Art of Resistance is also an uplifting story of personal triumph. (Several years after the war, Justus was finally able to track down his family, who he feared had died at the Nazis' hands.) As Justus writes, "I survived the war through a rare combination of good fortune, resourcefulness, optimism, and, most important, the kindness of many good people."

Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that "hidden" Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable-whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

Originally published in 1969, this book discusses the many factors which atomised German society from 1870 onwards and thus assisted Nazi evil, and it shows that Hitler and Nazism were mere phenomena of a mass age. The author wrote with the twin qualifications as historian and survivor of the camps. To have lived through it and then dissect it as a scholar is an astonishing achievement and it is this achievement that this book records.

The history of spatial identities in the Third Reich is best approached not as the history of a singular ideology of place, but rather, as a history of interrelated spaces. National Socialists, it is clear, attached great importance to place: it was at the heart of their utopian political project, which was about re-making territories as well as people's relationships with them. But in this project, Heimat, region and Empire did not constitute separate realms for political interventions. Rather, in the Third Reich, as in the preceding periods of German history, Heimat, region and Empire were constantly imagined, constructed and re-moulded through their relationship with one another. This collection brings together an exciting mixture of international scholars who are currently pursuing cutting-edge research on spatial identities under National Socialism. They uncover more differentiated spatial imaginaries at the heart of Nazi ideology than were previously acknowledged, and will fuel a growing scepticism about generic national narratives.