This collection offers a series of essays that explore the historical culture the holocaust has engendered in Europe, Israel and the USA, the politics of its reception and representation, the motivations for and effectiveness of commemorating it, and the creative and didactic practices it has generated in contemporary literature, art, and thought.

Since the 1990s scholars have focused heavily on the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and have presented a complex and diverse picture of perpetrators. This book provides a unique overview of the current state of research on perpetrators. The overall focus is on the key question that it still disputed: How do ordinary people become mass murderers?

This collection brings together international scholars pursuing cutting-edge research on spatial identities under National Socialism. They demonstrate that the spatial identities of the Third Reich can be approached as a history of interrelated dimensions; Heimat, region and Empire were constantly reconstructed through this interrelationship.