Personal narratives of Christians, Gypsies, deaf people, homosexuals, and Blacks who suffered at the hands of the Nazis before and during World War II.
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 put tens of thousands of American civilians, especially Jews, in deadly peril, and yet the US State Department failed to help them. Consequently many suffered and some died. Later, when the United States joined the war against Hitler, many American and, in particular, Jewish American soldiers were captured and
Beginning with two general essays,the book explores Nazi slave labor policies, and Nazi policies in the occupied territories. The remaining chapters examine Nazi treatment of Gypsies, Russian POW's, homosexuals, Catholic activists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and pacifists as well as Nazi medical experimentation policies.
Using the framework of genocide, this volume analyzes the patterns of persecution of the Roma in Nazi-dominated Europe. Detailed case studies of France, Austria, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, and Russia generate a critical mass of evidence that indicates criminal intent on the part of the Nazi regime to destroy the Roma as a distinct group. Other chapters examine the failure of the West German State to deliver justice, the Romani collective memory of the genocide, and the current political and historical debates. As this revealing volume shows, however inconsistent or geographically limited, over time, the mass murder acquired a systematic character and came to include ever larger segments of the Romani population regardless of the social status of individual members of the community.
Drawing on interviews with the black survivors of Nazi concentration camps and archival research in North America, Europe, and Africa, this book documents and analyzes the meaning of Nazism's racial policies towards people of African descent, specifically those born in Germany, England, France, the United States, and Africa, and the impact of that legacy on contemporary race relations in Germany, and more generally, in Europe. The book also specifically addresses the concerns of those surviving Afro-Germans who were victims of Nazism, but have not generally been included in or benefited from the compensation agreements that have been developed in recent years.
When Alice Bennett discovers her older sister, Lou Ella Sutton, has murdered the eleven victims recently shot at a college bar, her life is changed forever. Lou, in a psychotic state, hears voices urging her to kill government agents who are trying to steal her thoughts. This takes her to the bar in Mineral Wells, Oklahoma, where she opens fire on the unsuspecting patrons. As the media vehicles park on their street, Alice’s teenage daughters, Flory and Phoebe, must contend with the backlash from their peers. Rodney, Alice’s husband, watches his business diminish. Alice, overwhelmed with guilt and shame, wonders what she could have done to stop this tragedy. The struggle to come to terms with what Lou did becomes all-consuming for the family. And then there are the victims of this crime who did not survive. Can the Bennetts help these families move forward with their heartbreaking loss?
The Nazis' Last Victims articulates and historically scrutinizes both the uniqueness and the universality of the Holocaust in Hungary, a topic often minimized in general works on the Holocaust. The result of the 1994 conference at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jewry, this anthology examines the effects on Hungary as the last country to be invaded by the Germans. The Nazis' Last Victims questions what Hungarians knew of their impending fate and examines the heightened sense of tension and haunting drama in Hungary, where the largest single killing process of the Holocaust period occurred in the shortest amount of time. Through the combination of two vital components of history writing—the analytical and the recollective—The Nazis' Last Victims probes the destruction of the last remnant of European Jewry in the Holocaust.
In 1949, as Cold War tensions in Europe mounted, French intellectual and former Buchenwald inmate David Rousset called upon fellow concentration camp survivors to denounce the Soviet Gulag as a "hallucinatory repetition" of Nazi Germany's most terrible crime. In Political Survivors, Emma Kuby tells the riveting story of what followed his appeal, as prominent members of the wartime Resistance from throughout Western Europe united to campaign against the continued existence of inhumane internment systems around the world. The International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime brought together those originally deported for acts of anti-Nazi political activity who believed that their unlikely survival incurred a duty to bear witness for other victims. Over the course of the next decade, these pioneering activists crusaded to expose political imprisonment, forced labor, and other crimes against humanity in Franco's Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond. Until now, the CIA's secret funding of Rousset's movement has remained in the shadows. Kuby reveals this clandestine arrangement between European camp survivors and American intelligence agents. She also brings to light how Jewish Holocaust victims were systematically excluded from Commission membership – a choice that fueled the group's rise, but also helped lead to its premature downfall. The history that she unearths provides a striking new vision of how wartime memory shaped European intellectual life and ideological struggle after 1945, showing that the key lessons Western Europeans drew from the war centered on "the camp," imagined first and foremost as a site of political repression rather than ethnic genocide. Political Survivors argues that Cold War dogma and acrimony, tied to a distorted understanding of WWII's chief atrocities, overshadowed the humanitarian possibilities of the nascent anti-concentration camp movement as Europe confronted the violent decolonizing struggles of the 1950s.
In a barren field in the fictional town of Monkhole, Herbert stands watch over the cows-his sole form of amusement-daydreaming of his mother, who has disappeared with a UFO cult, the Overcomers. Meanwhile, his friend Howard works obsessively on a tome about victimology. It may be up to their friend Ruphis to unravel the mystery of the Overcomers, Herbert's battle against gravity, Howard's against the great white wall and the nature of those mysterious lights hovering in the clouds... Travis Jeppesen's debut novel, first published in 2003, set literary culture off balance by giving voice to the demented lifestyle of cultists. Victims returns to reanimate these spectral figures, and the forces and forms hidden in their shadows. "Victims holds a remarkably confident and able line through complicated waters... brilliant." -Tom McCarthy "An artfully fractured vision of memory and escape..." -Village Voice "Jeppesen's novel has the potential to change your life." -Bookslut
The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal. At 9 am on April 13, 1933, deputy prosecutor Josef Hartinger received a telephone call summoning him to the newly established concentration camp of Dachau. Four prisoners had been shot. The SS guards claimed that the men had been trying to escape. But what Hartinger found when he arrived convinced him that something was terribly wrong. All four victims were Jews. Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a legal state detention center for political prisoners. In 1933, that began to change. In Hitler’s First Victims, Timothy W. Ryback evokes a society on the brink—one in which civil liberties are sacrificed to national security, in which citizens increasingly turn a blind eye to injustice, in which the bedrock of judicial accountability chillingly dissolves into the martial caprice of the Third Reich. This is an astonishing portrait of Hitler’s first moments in power, and the true story of one man’s race to expose the Nazis as murderers on the eve of the Holocaust.