Kategoria BISAC: History >> Modern - 20th Century - Holocaust

From January to April 2000 historian David Irving brought a high-profile libel case against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt in the British High Court, charging that Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust (1993), falsely labeled him a Holocaust denier. The question about the evidence for Auschwitz as a death camp played a central role in these proceedings. Irving had based his alleged denial of the Holocaust in part on a 1988 report by an American execution specialist, Fred Leuchter, which claimed that there was no evidence for homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz. In connection with...

The private diary of James G. McDonald (1886-1964) offers a unique and hitherto unknown source on the early history of the Nazi regime and the Roosevelt administration's reactions to Nazi persecution of German Jews. Considered for the post of U.S. ambassador to Germany at the start of FDR's presidency, McDonald traveled to Germany in 1932 and met with Hitler soon after the Nazis came to power. Fearing Nazi intentions to remove or destroy Jews in Germany, in 1933 he became League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and sought aid from the international community to resettle outside...

An important new primary source for Holocaust studies, this unusual memoir contains the recollections of a Holocaust survivor who lived in a small Polish town 55 miles from Warsaw. From his earliest memories of a closely knit community where Jews and Christians lived harmoniously side by side through the horrors of a town torn apart by hatred, Shraga Bielawski details the systematic destruction of Wegrow by the Nazis. How does a town go completely mad? How do neighbors who have attended school together become murderers and victims on opposite sides? What is the process by which an invading...

When Hitler marched into Austria in March 1938, the country's Jewish population numbered nearly 200,000. Those Jews who were able to find refuge in neutral countries were safe; those who fled to countries subsequently overrun by the Nazis were eventually hunted down. Between 1938 and 1945, more than 50,000 Austrian Jews were deported; no more than 2,000 returned. The estimate of Jews caught by the Nazis in neighboring countries is 17,000. Therefore, more than one-third of Austria's Jewish population were killed during this period.

After extensive research of the records at the various...

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, European Jews traveled east to seek refuge in the West. Three thousand refugees transited Japan and China, and more than 21,000 spent the war in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Japanese diplomats in Europe were caught off guard by the flood of visa applicants, and the Foreign Ministry belatedly confronted a refugee problem. Unexpected visitors became uninvited guests. Vice Consul Sugihara Chiune might have faded into history as a minor diplomat in Lithuania had he not issued thousands of transit visas to refugees, including those who fulfilled few visa...

Sharpe examines Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem as a case study of Arendt's theoretical work on judgment. In addition, he seeks to illustrate two dimensions of judgment: modesty--who am I to judge? and arrogance--how dare you judge me? He demonstrates the extent to which modesty and arrogance are linked with distance. The claims who am I to judge? and how dare you judge me? become questions of how much distance--in time, space, and imagination--is necessary or appropriate for judgment. Sharpe sees Eichmann as an unintentionally ironic demonstration of this feature of...

The injustices committed against millions of Europe's Jews did not end with the fall of the Third Reich. Long after the Nazis had seized the belongings of Holocaust victims, Swiss banks concealed and appropriated their assets, demanding that their survivors produce the death certificates or banking records of the depositors in order to claim their family's property--demands that were usually impossible for the petitioners to meet. Now the full account of the Holocaust deposits affair is revealed by the journalist who first broke the story in 1995. Relying on archival and contemporary...

Levin, the journalist who uncovered the affair, describes British policy toward the Jewish people during the Holocaust era, particularly the construction of obstacles that prevented thousands from being saved. Levin then examines Britain's intentional and unabashed use of Holocaust victims and survivors' property after World War II.

This is the first book to describe this affair, which is relatively unknown to the general public, but which has already been described by public figures as one of the most serious incidents of the looting of Holocaust victims' property. Levin documents,...

The Holocaust did not introduce the phenomenon of the bystander, but it did illustrate the terrible consequences of indifference and passivity towards the persecution of others. Although the term was initially applied only to the good Germans--the apathetic citizens who made genocide possible through unquestioning obedience to evil leaders--recent Holocaust scholarship has shown that it applies to most of the world, including parts of the population in Nazi-occupied countries, some sectors within the international Christian and Jewish communities, and the Allied governments themselves....

Gertrude Schneider, a noted Holocaust scholar and survivor, tells the story of German Jews sent east for extermination in 1941-1943, who were instead given a reprieve in order to fill essential jobs in Riga--the capital of Latvia. Amid constant waves of arrivals and killings, these Jews transformed their part of the Riga Ghetto into a structured community. This is the story of the creation and ultimate destruction of that Ghetto community based on extensive research, personal recollections, interviews, and documents from Russian, German, Israeli, and American archives.

The strange...

Robbery can kill. Long before Auschwitz and Treblinka, tens of thousands of Jews died of hunger and disease in Warsaw after the Nazis seized their property and banned them from making a living. In Warsaw and throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, Holocaust plunder was not only a product of murder, Levin argues, but also a tool of murder.

On the eve of the Holocaust, Warsaw was the home of the biggest Jewish community in Europe, some 350,000 Jews. They were a third of the city's total population and owned up to 40% of its land. The Nazis systematically seized their property even...

This book is a frank and hopeful meditation on the recurring tragedy of genocide that should be read by anybody who cares about its prevention. Hirsch argues if we are to successfully confront, prevent, or control the most egregious aspects of genocidal violence, we must create containing political institutions and social mechanisms. But ultimately human nature must change to temper the worst excesses of genocidal violence, given its long and intractable historical presence. Hirsch looks hard at complex realities and proposes how to build a politics of prevention. Focusing on the United...

While the Netherlands had often been thought of as a champion of racial and ethnic tolerance before and during the Second World War, more than 75% of Dutch Jews were killed and those returning after the war were met with subtle but tough anti-Jewish sentiments as they tried to reclaim their former lives. For most survivors, the negative reactions were unexpected and shocking. Before the war, Dutch Jews had become part of the fabric of Dutch life and society, so the obstacles they faced upon their return were particularly painful and difficult to handle. The sobering picture presented in...

Sent across the ocean by their parents and taken in by foster parents and distant relatives, approximately 1,000 children, ranging in age from fourteen months to sixteen years, landed in the United States and out of Hitler's reach between 1934 and 1945. Seventy years after the first ship brought a handful of these children to American shores, the general public and many of the children themselves remain unaware of these rescues, and the fact that they were accomplished despite powerful forces in and outside the government that did not want them to occur. This is the first published...

As the last Holocaust survivors die, their testimonies make the transition from memory to history. In this compelling volume, Yehudi Lindeman, Director of the Living Testimonies Video Archive in Montreal, shares compelling stories of survival and triumph collected from years of interviews with those who lived through the most harrowing decade of the 20th century. Here are 25 tales of courage and loss, representing the experiences of women, men, and children who either survived the death camps or lived in hiding, and of their rescuers and redeemers.

The testimonies included in this...

This extraordinary book is based on more than fifty diaries of Jewish Holocaust victims of all ages, written while the events described were actually taking place. Many of the writers did not survive. Patterson's book is unique not only in the number of diaries and original texts it examines but also in the questions it raises and in the approach it takes from within Jewish traditions and contexts.

Patterson has organized his book around a series of themes that lead to a deeper understanding of the meaning of these works for both their writers and their readers, affirming the...