Harnessing the Holocaust presents the compelling story of how the Nazi genocide of the Jews became an almost daily source of controversy in French politics. Joan Wolf argues that from the Six-Day War through the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997-98, the Holocaust developed from a Jewish trauma into a metaphor for oppression and a symbol of victimization on a wide scale. Using scholarship from a range of disciplines, Harnessing the Holocaust argues that the roots of Holocaust politics reside in the unresolved dilemmas of Jewish emancipation and the tensions inherent in the revolutionary notion of universalism. Ultimately, the book suggests, the Holocaust became a screen for debates about what it means to be French.

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age explores the nexus of new media and memory practices, raising questions about how advances in digital technologies continue to influence the nature of Holocaust memorialization. Through an in-depth study of the largest and most widely available collection of videotaped interviews with survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, Jeffrey Shandler weighs the possibilities and challenges brought about by digital forms of public memory. The Visual History Archive's holdings are extensive—over 100,000 hours of video, including interviews with over 50,000 individuals—and came about at a time of heightened anxiety about the imminent passing of the generation of Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses. Now, the Shoah Foundation's investment in new digital media is instrumental to its commitment to remembering the Holocaust both as a subject of historical importance in its own right and as a paradigmatic moral exhortation against intolerance. Shandler not only considers the Archive as a whole, but also looks closely at individual survivors' stories, focusing on narrative, language, and spectacle to understand how Holocaust remembrance is mediated.

This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Now in its second edition, this book takes a fresh, probing look at one of the greatest human tragedies in modern history. Beginning with a detailed overview of the history of the Jews and their two-millennia-old struggle with the anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic prejudice and discrimination that set the stage for the Holocaust, David M. Crowe discusses the evolution of Nazi racial policies, beginning with the development of Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic ideas, their importance to the Nazi movement in the 1920s and 1930s, and their expanding role in the evolution of German policies leading to the Final Solution in 1941 – the mass murder of Jews throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. The German program involved the creation of death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka and mass murder sites throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. While the Jews were the principal victims, other groups who were deemed racial or biological threats to Hitler’s goal of creating an Aryan-pure Europe were also targeted, including the Roma and the handicapped. This book discusses Nazi policies in each country in German-occupied Europe as well as the role of Europe’s neutrals in the larger German scheme-of-things. It also takes an in-depth look at liberation, Displaced Persons, the founding of Israel, and efforts throughout the western world to bring Nazi war criminals and their collaborators to justice. This second edition includes a new chapter on the importance of memory and the Holocaust, the evolution of interpretative Holocaust scholarship and media, recent controversies about national responsibility, and the work of Holocaust museums, archives, and libraries in Israel, Germany, Poland, and the United States to promote Holocaust education and memory. It concludes with the rise of Neo-Nazism, white nationalism, and other movements in Germany and the United States, and their relationship to questions about Holocaust memory and its lessons. Comprehensive and offering a detailed historical perspective, this is the perfect resource for those looking to gain a deep understanding of this tragedy.

“A dense and scholarly book about . . . the relationship between the Nazi party and the occult . . . reveals stranger-than-fiction truths on every page.”—Daily Telegraph The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler’s personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander reveals how the Third Reich’s relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire. “[Kurlander] shows how swiftly irrational ideas can take hold, even in an age before social media.”—The Washington Post “Deeply researched, convincingly authenticated, this extraordinary study of the magical and supernatural at the highest levels of Nazi Germany will astonish.”—The Spectator “A trustworthy [book] on an extraordinary subject.”—The Times “A fascinating look at a little-understood aspect of fascism.”—Kirkus Reviews “Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits.”—National Review

Commemorating the Holocaust reveals how and why the Holocaust came to play a prominent role in French and Italian political culture in the period after the end of the Cold War. By charting the development of official, national Holocaust commemorations in France and Italy, Rebecca Clifford explains why the wartime persecution of Jews, a topic ignored or marginalized in political discourse through much of the Cold War period, came to be a subject of intense and often controversial debate in the 1990s and 2000s. How and why were official Holocaust commemorations created? Why did the drive for states to 'remember' their roles in the persecution of Jewish populations accelerate only after the collapse of the Cold War? Who pressed for these commemorations, and what motivated their activism? To what extent was the discourse surrounding national Holocaust commemorations really about the genocide at all? Commemorating the Holocaust explores these key questions, challenging commonly-held assumptions about the origins of and players involved in the creation of Holocaust memorial days. Clifford draws conclusions that shed light both on the state of Holocaust memory in France and Italy, and more broadly on the collective memory of World War II in contemporary Europe.

This remarkable chronicle of life and death in the Jewish Ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, from June 1941 to January 1944, was written under conditions of extreme danger by a Ghetto inmate and secretary of the Jewish Council. After the war, in order to escape from Lithuania, the author was forced to entrust the diary to leaders of the Escape movement; eventually it made its way to his new home in Israel. The diary incorporates Avraham Tory’s collections of official documents, Jewish Council reports, and original photographs and drawings made in the Ghetto. It depicts in grim detail the struggle for survival under Nazi domination, when—if not simply carted off and murdered in a random “action”—Jews were exploited as slave labor while being systematically starved and denied adequate housing and medical care. Through it all, Tory’s overriding purpose was to record the unimaginable events of these years and to memorialize the determination of the Jews to sustain their community life in the midst of the Nazi terror. Of the surviving diaries originating in the principal European Ghettos of this period, Tory’s is the longest written by an adult, a dramatic and horrifying document that makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary history. Tory provides an insider’s view of the desperate efforts of Ghetto leaders to protect Jews. Martin Gilbert’s masterly introduction establishes the authenticity of the diary, presents its events against the backdrop of the war in Europe, and considers the crucial questions of collaboration and resistance.