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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War > The Holocaust
When the Holocaust broke out in Europe, Hansi and Joel Brand were
joined by Israel (Rezso) Kasztner to launch an organized effort to
save thousands of human lives. Their efforts, which involved
playing a dangerous bluffing game against the Nazi regime, helped
to end the Auschwitz extermination. Their success put them at odds
with the political machine of the young state of Israel.
Politicians wanted the public to believe that there was nothing
they could do, a sentiment which many still believe to this day.
This cover-up led to Israel's first politically-motivated homicide.
Between the French defeat in 1940 and liberation in 1944, the Nazis
killed almost 80,000 of France's Jews, both French and foreign.
Since that time, this tragedy has been well-documented. But there
are other stories hidden within it--ones neglected by historians.
In fact, 75% of France's Jews escaped the extermination, while 45%
of the Jews of Belgium perished, and in the Netherlands only 20%
survived. The Nazis were determined to destroy the Jews across
Europe, and the Vichy regime collaborated in their deportation from
France. So what is the meaning of this French exception? Jacques
Semelin sheds light on this 'French enigma', painting a radically
unfamiliar view of occupied France. His is a rich, even-handed
portrait of a complex and changing society, one where helping and
informing on one's neighbours went hand in hand; and where small
gestures of solidarity sat comfortably with anti-Semitism. Without
shying away from the horror of the Holocaust's crimes, this seminal
work adds a fresh perspective to our history of the Second World
War.
Eighty years ago the largest genocide ever occurred in Nazi Europe.
This began with the mass extermination of patients with neurologic
and psychiatric disorders that Hitler's regime considered "useless
eaters". The neuropsychiatric profession was systematically
"cleansed" beginning in 1933, but racism and eugenics had
infiltrated the specialty long before that. With the installation
of Nazi-principled neuroscientists, mass forced sterilization was
enacted, which transitioned to patient murder by the start of World
War II. But the murder of roughly 275,000 patients was not enough.
The patients' brains were stored and used in scientific
publications both during and long after the war. Also, patients
themselves were used for unethical experiments. Relatively few
neuroscientists resisted the Nazis, with some success in the
occupied countries. Most neuroscientists involved in unethical
actions continued their careers unscathed after the war. Few
answered for their actions, and few repented. The legacy of such a
depraved era in the history of neuroscience and medical ethics is
that codes now exist to protect patients and research subjects. But
this protection is possibly subject to political extremes and
individual neuroscientists can only protect patients and colleagues
if they understand the dangers of a utilitarian, unethical, and
uncompassionate mindset. Brain Science under the Swastika is the
only comprehensive and scholarly published work regarding the
ethical and professional abuses of neuroscientists during the Nazi
era. The author has crafted a scathing tour de force exploring the
extremes of ethical abuse, but also ways that this can be resisted
and hopefully prevented by future generations of neuroscientists
and physicians
The second and concluding volume of the definitive two-volume
account of the Holocaust With THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION,
Friedlander completes his work on Nazi Germany and the Jews. The
book describes and interprets the history of the persecution and
murder of the Jews throughout occupied Europe. The implementation
of German extermination policies and measures depended on the
submissiveness of political authorities, the assistance of local
police forces and the passivity or co-operation of the populations,
primarily of their political and spiritual elites. The
implementation also depended on the readiness of the victimes to
submit to orders, often with the hope of modifying them or
surviving long enough to escape the German vice. This multifaceted
representation - at all levels and in all different places -
enhances the perception of the magnitude, complexity and
interrelatedness of the multiple components of this history. Based
on a vast variety of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices,
Friedlander manages to avoid domesticating the memory of
unparalleled and horrific events. The convergence of these various
aspects gives THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION its unique aulity. In this
work the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive
representation.
A powerful account of Jewish resistence in Nazi-occupied Europe and
why such resistance was so remarkable. Most popular accounts of the
Holocaust typically cast Jewish victims as meek and ask, "Why
didn't Jews resist?" But we know now that Jews did resist, staging
armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied
Europe. In Hope and Honor, Rachel L. Einwohner illustrates the
dangers in attempting resistance under unimaginable conditions and
shows how remarkable such resistance was. She draws on oral
testimonies, published and unpublished diaries and memoirs, and
other written materials produced both by survivors and those who
perished to show how Jews living under Nazi occupation in the
ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, and Lodz reached decisions about
resistance. Using methods of comparative-historical sociology,
Einwohner shows that decisions about resistance rested on Jews'
assessments of the threats facing them, and somewhat ironically,
armed resistance took place only once activists reached the
critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival. Rather than
ask the typical question of why Jews generally didn't resist, this
powerful account of Jewish resistance seeks to explain why they
resisted at all when there was no hope for success, and they faced
almost certain death.
Things We Couldn't Say is the true story of Diet Eman, a young
Dutch woman, who, with her fiance, Hein Sietsma, risked everything
to rescue imperiled Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War
II. Throughout the years that Diet and Hein aided the
Resistance--work that would cost Diet her freedom and Hein his
life--their courageous effort ultimately saved hundreds of Dutch
Jews. Now available in paperback, Things We Couldn't Say tells an
unforgettable story of heroism, faith, and--above all--love.
This book presents the first comparative study of the works of
Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion in relation
to their vigorous struggles against Nazi aggression during World
War II and the Holocaust. It illuminates ways in which their early
lives conditioned both their political engagements during wartime
and their extraordinary literary creations empowered by what Lara
R. Curtis refers to as modes of 'writing resistance.' With skillful
recourse to a remarkable variety of genres, they offer compelling
autobiographical reflections, vivid chronicles of wartime
atrocities, eyewitness accounts of victims, and acute perspectives
on the political implications of major events. Their sensitive
reflections of gendered subjectivity authenticate the myriad voices
and visions they capture. In sum, this book highlights the lives
and works of three courageous women who were ceaselessly committed
to a noble cause during the Holocaust and World War II.
Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis
of the Holocaust-perpetrators, victims, and bystanders-it is the
last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described
by Hilberg as those who were "once a part of this history,"
bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to
understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of
historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor
the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical,
conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case
studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex
social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.
On April 15, 1945, Brigadier H. L. Glyn Hughes entered
Bergen-Belsen for the first time. Waiting for him were 10,000
unburied, putrefying corpses and 60,000 living prisoners, starving
and sick. One month earlier, 15-year-old Rachel Genuth arrived at
Bergen-Belsen; deported with her family from Sighet, Hungary, in
May of 1944, Rachel had by then already endured Auschwitz, the
Christianstadt labor camp, and a forced march through the
Sudetenland. In To Meet In Hell, Bernice Lerner follows both Hughes
and Genuth as they move across Europe toward Bergen-Belsen in the
final, brutal year of World War II. The book begins at the end:
with Hughes's searing testimony at the September 1945 trial of
Josef Kramer, commandant of Bergen-Belsen, along with forty-four SS
and guards. 'I have been a doctor for thirty years and seen all the
horrors of war,' Hughes said, 'but I have never seen anything to
touch it.' The narrative then jumps back to the spring of 1944,
following both Hughes and Rachel as they navigate their respective
forms of wartime hell until confronting the worst: Christianstadt's
prisoners, including Rachel, are deposited in Bergen-Belsen, and
the British Second Army, having finally breached the fortress of
Germany, assumes control of the ghastly camp after a negotiated
surrender. Though they never met, it was Hughes's commitment to
helping as many prisoners as possible that saved Rachel's life.
Drawing on a wealth of sources, including Hughes's papers, war
diaries, oral histories, and interviews, this gripping volume
combines scholarly research with narrative storytelling in
describing the suffering of Nazi victims, the overwhelming presence
of death at Bergen-Belsen, and characters who exemplify the human
capacity for fortitude. Lerner, Rachel's daughter, has special
insight into the torment her mother suffered. The first book to
pair the story of a Holocaust victim with that of a liberator, To
Meet In Hell compels readers to consider the full, complex humanity
of both.
The Holocaust Memoir Digest consists of detailed summaries of the
published memoirs of Holocaust survivors. For some survivors, the
need to write and record their eyewitness accounts began as soon as
the war ended; for others, it is their advancing years that have
created the impetus to publish their personal testimonies. These
memoirs have become a body of knowledge, which the Holocaust Memoir
Digest presents in a standardized format. The Digest uses
quotations from each memoir to convey the experiences, personality
and perspective of the author in a concise and comprehensive
manner.
Seven years after the death of his mother, Malka, Stanley A.
Goldman traveled to Israel to visit her best friend during the
Holocaust. The best friend's daughter showed Goldman a pamphlet she
had acquired from the Israeli Holocaust Museum that documented
activities of one man's negotiations with the Nazi's interior
minister and SS head, Heinrich Himmler, for the release of the
Jewish women from the concentration camp at Ravensbruck. While
looking through the pamphlet, the two discovered a picture that
could have been their mothers being released from the camp. Wanting
to know the details of how they were saved, Goldman set out on a
long and difficult path to unravel the mystery. After years of
researching the pamphlet, Goldman learned that a German Jew named
Norbert Masur made a treacherous journey from the safety of Sweden
back into the war zone in order to secure the release of the Jewish
women imprisoned at the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Masur not
only succeeded in his mission against all odds but he contributed
to the downfall of the Nazi hierarchy itself. This amazing,
little-known story uncovers a piece of history about the
undermining of the Nazi regime, the women of the Holocaust, and the
strained but loving relationship between a survivor and her son.
History, Trauma and Shame provides an in-depth examination of the
sustained dialogue about the past between children of Holocaust
survivors and descendants of families whose parents were either
directly or indirectly involved in Nazi crimes. Taking an
autobiographical narrative perspective, the chapters in the book
explore the intersection of history, trauma and shame, and how
change and transformation unfolds over time. The analyses of the
encounters described in the book provides a close examination of
the process of dialogue among members of The Study Group on
Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust (PAKH), exploring
how Holocaust trauma lives in the 'everyday' lives of descendants
of survivors. It goes to the heart of the issues at the forefront
of contemporary transnational debates about building relationships
of trust and reconciliation in societies with a history of genocide
and mass political violence. This book will be great interest for
academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the
study of social psychology, Holocaust or genocide studies, cultural
studies, reconciliation studies, historical trauma and
peacebuilding. It will also appeal to clinical psychologists,
psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, as well as upper-level
undergraduate students interested in the above areas.
This book offers a study of the Jewish community in Kielce and its
environs during World War II and the Holocaust. It is the first of
its kind in providing a comprehensive account of Kielce's Jews and
their history as victims under the German occupation. The book
focuses in particular on Jewish-Polish relations in the Kielce
region; the deportation of the Jews of Kielce and its surrounding
areas to the Treblinka death camp; the difficulties faced by those
attempting to help and save them; and daily life in the Small
Ghetto from September 1942 until late May 1943.
In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas
to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to
arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John
Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk's legal odyssey began in 1975, when American
investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland
autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in Nazi
genocide. In the years that followed, Demjanjuk was twice stripped
of his American citizenship and sentenced to death by a Jerusalem
court as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka--only to be cleared in
one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in legal
history. Finally, in 2011, after eighteen months of trial, a court
in Munich convicted the native Ukrainian of assisting Hitler's SS
in the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern
Poland. An award-winning novelist as well as legal scholar, Douglas
offers a compulsively readable history of Demjanjuk's bizarre case.
The Right Wrong Man is both a gripping eyewitness account of the
last major Holocaust trial to galvanize world attention and a vital
meditation on the law's effort to bring legal closure to the most
horrific chapter in modern history.
Given their geographical separation from Europe, ethno-religious
and cultural diversity, and subordinate status within the Nazi
racial hierarchy, Middle Eastern societies were both hospitable as
well as hostile to National Socialist ideology during the 1930s and
1940s. By focusing on Arab and Turkish reactions to German
anti-Semitism and the persecution and mass-murder of European Jews
during this period, this expansive collection surveys the
institutional and popular reception of Nazism in the Middle East
and North Africa. It provides nuanced and scholarly yet accessible
case studies of the ways in which nationalism, Islam,
anti-Semitism, and colonialism intertwined, all while sensitive to
the region's political, cultural, and religious complexities.
How the American High Commissioner for Germany set in motion a
process that resulted in every non-death-row-inmate walking free
after the Nuremberg trials After Nuremberg is about the fleeting
nature of American punishment for German war criminals convicted at
the twelve Nuremberg trials of 1946-1949. Because of repeated
American grants of clemency and parole, ninety-seven of the 142
Germans convicted at the Nuremberg trials, many of them major
offenders, regained their freedom years, sometimes decades, ahead
of schedule. High-ranking Nazi plunderers, kidnappers, slave
laborers, and mass murderers all walked free by 1958. High
Commissioner for Occupied Germany John J. McCloy and his successors
articulated a vision of impartial American justice as inspiring and
legitimizing their actions, as they concluded that German war
criminals were entitled to all the remedies American laws offered
to better their conditions and reduce their sentences. Based on
extensive archival research (including newly declassified
material), this book explains how American policy makers' best
intentions resulted in a series of decisions from 1949-1958 that
produced a self-perpetuating bureaucracy of clemency and parole
that "rehabilitated" unrepentant German abettors and perpetrators
of theft, slavery, and murder while lending salience to the most
reactionary elements in West German political discourse.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is considered one of the most
influential philosophers of the twentieth century in spite of his
well-known transgressions-his complicity with National Socialism
and his inability to show remorse or compassion for its victims. In
The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow, Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes
in a debate that has seen much attention in scholarly and popular
media from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism
and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger's
work. Wolfson sets out to probe Heidegger's writings to expose what
remains unthought. In spite of Heidegger's explicit anti-Semitic
statements, Wolfson reveals some crucial aspects of his
thinking-including criticism of the biological racism and militant
apocalypticism of Nazism-that betray an affinity with dimensions of
Jewish thought: the triangulation of the concepts of homeland,
language, and peoplehood; Jewish messianism and the notion of
historical time as the return of the same that is always different;
inclusion, exclusion, and the status of the other; the problem of
evil in kabbalistic symbolism. Using Heidegger's own methods,
Wolfson reflects on the inextricable link of truth and untruth and
investigates the matter of silence and the limits of speech. He
challenges the tendency to bifurcate the relationship of the
political and the philosophical in Heidegger's thought, but parts
company with those who write off Heidegger as a Nazi ideologue.
Ultimately, The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow argues, the
greatness and relevance of Heidegger's work is that he presents us
with the opportunity to think the unthinkable as part of our
communal destiny as historical beings.
'Impossible to put down ... This is a book about coming out of
hell, about great evil, about the triumph of the human spirit, and
about the great goodness on the part of those who helped. One is
left with hope, and admiration' Julia Neuberger, THE TIMES 'A story
of human resilience, fortitude and victory that restores the
readers' hope for mankind' SUNDAY TIMES 'This is the story of human
beings sucked into a vortex of destruction in which family,
identity, religion and culture were all ripped away. A sense of
near-miraculous calm descends when the Boys finally arrive in
Britain, when human fortitude finally prevails over absolute evil'
David Cesarani, TLS In August 1945, the first of 732 child
survivors of the Holocaust reached Britain. First settled in the
Lake District, they formed a tightly knit group of friends whose
terrible shared experience is almost beyond imagining. This is
their story, which begins in the lost communities of pre-World War
II central Europe, moves through ghetto, concentration camp and
death march, to liberation, survival, and finally, fifty years
later, a deeply moving reunion. Martin Gilbert has brought together
the recollections of this remarkable group of survivors to tell
their astonishing stories.
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.
"Anyone who survived the exterminations camps must have an
untypical story to tell. The typical camp story of the millions
ended in death ... We, the few who survived the war and the
majority who perished in the camps, did not use and would not have
understood terms such as 'holocaust' or 'death march.' These were
coined later, by outsiders." Boy 30529 tells the story of a child
who at the age of twelve lost everything: hope, home, and even his
own identity. Born into a respectable Czech family, Felix's early
years were idyllic. But when Nazi persecution threatened in 1938,
his father travelled to England, hoping to arrange for his family
to emigrate there. His efforts came too late, and his wife and
children fell into the hands of the Fascist occupiers. Thus begins
a harrowing tale of survival, horror and determination. Over the
following years, Felix survived five concentration camps, including
Terezin, Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as, by the skin of his
teeth, the Death March from Blechhammer in 1945. Losing both his
brother and mother in the camps, Felix was liberated at Buchenwald
and eventually reunited at the age of seventeen with his father in
Britain, where they built a new life together. Boy 30529 is an
extraordinary memoir, as well as a meditation on the nature of
memory. It helps us understand why the Holocaust remains a singular
presence at the heart of historical debate.
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