Winner of the National Jewish Book Award "An important, revealing story, exceptionally well told." —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Employing the rich testimony of almost three hundred survivors of the slave-labor camps of Starachowice, Poland, Christopher R. Browning draws the experiences of the Jewish prisoners, the Nazi authorities, and the neighboring Poles together into a chilling history of a little-known dimension of the Holocaust. Combining harrowing detail and insightful analysis on the Starachowice camps and their role in the Holocaust, Browning’s history is indispensable scholarship and an unforgettable story of survival.
Draws on the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust-era Starachowice slave-labor camps to examine the Jewish prisoners' fight for survival through a succession of brutal Nazi camp regimes.
While we now have a great number of testimonials to the horrors of the Holocaust from survivors of that dark episode of twentieth-century history, rare are the accounts of what growing up in Nazi Germany was like for people who were reared to think of Adolf Hitler as the savior of his country, and rarer still are accounts written from a female perspective. Ursula Mahlendorf, born to a middle-class family in 1929, at the start of the Great Depression, was the daughter of a man who was a member of the SS at the time of his early death in 1935. For a long while during her childhood she was a true believer in Nazism—and a leader in the Hitler Youth herself. This is her vivid and unflinchingly honest account of her indoctrination into Nazism and of her gradual awakening to all the damage that Nazism had done to her country. It reveals why Nazism initially appealed to people from her station in life and how Nazi ideology was inculcated into young people. The book recounts the increasing hardships of life under Nazism as the war progressed and the chaos and turmoil that followed Germany’s defeat. In the first part of this absorbing narrative, we see the young Ursula as she becomes an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth and then goes on to a Nazi teacher-training school at fifteen. In the second part, which traces her growing disillusionment with and anger at the Nazi leadership, we follow her story as she flees from the Russian army’s advance in the spring of 1945, works for a time in a hospital caring for the wounded, returns to Silesia when it is under Polish administration, and finally is evacuated to the West, where she begins a new life and pursues her dream of becoming a teacher. In a moving Epilogue, Mahlendorf discloses how she learned to accept and cope emotionally with the shame that haunted her from her childhood allegiance to Nazism and the self-doubts it generated.
Provides a cutting-edge, nuanced, and multi-disciplinary picture of the Holocaust from local, transnational, continental, and global perspectives Holocaust Studies is a dynamic field that encompasses discussions on human behavior, extremity, and moral action. A diverse range of disciplines – history, philosophy, literature, social psychology, anthropology, geography, amongst others – continue to make important contributions to its scholarship. A Companion to the Holocaust provides exciting commentaries on current and emerging debates and identifies new connections for research. The text incorporates new language, geographies, and approaches to address the precursors of the Holocaust and examine its global consequences. A team of international contributors provides insightful and sophisticated analyses of current trends in Holocaust research that go far beyond common conceptions of the Holocaust’s causes, unfolding and impact. Scholars draw on their original research to interpret current, agenda-setting historical and historiographical debates on the Holocaust. Six broad sections cover wide-ranging topics such as new debates about Nazi perpetrators, arguments about the causes and places of persecution of Jews in Germany and Europe, and Jewish and non-Jewish responses to it, the use of forced labor in the German war economy, representations of the Holocaust witness, and many others. A masterful framing chapter sets the direction and tone of each section’s themes. Comprising over thirty essays, this important addition to Holocaust studies: Offers a remarkable compendium of systematic, comparative, and precise analyses Covers areas and topics not included in any other companion of its type Examines the ongoing cultural, social, and political legacies of the Holocaust Includes discussions on non-European and non-Western geographies, inter-ethnic tensions, and violence A Companion to the Holocaust is an essential resource for students and scholars of European, German, genocide, colonial and Jewish history, as well as those in the general humanities.
Growing up in a family of Holocaust survivors, Joan Haahr was aware from an early age of the devastation wrought by the Nazis and their sympathizers on Europe's Jewish population during the Holocaust. She also witnessed firsthand the dysfunctions that plagued many of those who had made it out alive. In Prisoners of Memory, Haahr realizes her lifelong ambition to uncover the stories behind the statistics in the Nazi records and learn as much as possible about the pre-war lives, deportations, and deaths of her grandparents and other close family members. Devoting herself fully to this project after retiring from her academic career, Haahr delves into troves of family letters, takes part in numerous conversations with those directly and indirectly affected by World War II, and gathers information from contacts in Germany, archives, and other historical research. In doing so, she seeks to understand the enduring legacy of tragedy as well as of perseverance and hope in the generations that followed the Holocaust in the United States and elsewhere.
The first comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration camps In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945. The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called "the gray zone." In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system. Examining, close up, life and death inside the camps, and adopting a wider lens to show how the camp system was shaped by changing political, legal, social, economic, and military forces, Wachsmann produces a unified picture of the Nazi regime and its camps that we have never seen before. A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the history of the twentieth century.
During World War II at least 13.5 million people were employed as forced labourers in Germany and across the territories occupied by the German Reich. Most came from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, the Baltic countries, France, Poland and Italy. Among them were 8.4 million civilians working for private companies and public agencies in industry, administration and agriculture. In addition, there were 4.6 million prisoners of war and 1.7 million concentration camp prisoners who were either subjected to forced labour in concentration or similar camps or were ‘rented out’ or sold by the SS. While there are numerous publications on forced labour in National Socialist Germany during World War II, this publication combines a historical account of events with the biographies and memories of former forced labourers from twenty-seven countries, offering a comparative international perspective.
At last, the everyday fighting men who were the first Americans to know the full and horrifying truth about the Holocaust share their astonishing stories. Here we meet the brave souls who--now in their eighties and nineties--have chosen at last to share their stories.
"In the wake of the Second World War, how were the Allies to respond to the enormous crime of the Holocaust? Even in an ideal world, it would have been impossible to bring all the perpetrators to trial. Nevertheless, an attempt was made to prosecute some. Most people have heard of the Nuremberg trial and the Eichmann trial, though they probably have not heard of the Kharkov Trial--the first trial of Germans for Nazi-era crimes--or even the Dachau Trials, in which war criminals were prosecuted by the American military personnel on the former concentration camp grounds. This book uncovers ten "forgotten trials" of the Holocaust, selected from the many Nazi trials that have taken place over the course of the last seven decades. It showcases how perpetrators of the Holocaust were dealt with in courtrooms around the world--in the former Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Israel, France, Poland, the United States and Germany--revealing how different legal systems responded to the horrors of the Holocaust. The book provides a graphic picture of the genocidal campaign against the Jews through eyewitness testimony and incriminating documents and traces how the public memory of the Holocaust was formed over time. The volume covers a variety of trials--of high-ranking statesmen and minor foot soldiers, of male and female concentration camps guards and even trials in Israel of Jewish Kapos--to provide the first global picture of the laborious efforts to bring perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice. As law professors and litigators, the authors provide distinct insights into these trials. "--
An expanded edition of the powerful memoir about two sisters' determination to survive during the Holocaust featuring new and never before revealed information about the first transport of women to Auschwitz In March 1942, Rena Kornreich and 997 other young women were rounded up and forced onto the first Jewish transport of women to Auschwitz. Soon after, Rena was reunited with her sister Danka at the camp, beginning a story of love and courage that would last three years and forty-one days. From smuggling bread for their friends to narrowly escaping the ever-present threats that loomed at every turn, the compelling events in Rena’s Promise remind us that humanity and hope can survive inordinate brutality.
