I’m a German History professor who focuses on the Holocaust, but I’ve been educating myself on the topic since 5th grade, when a friend suggested some children’s literature on the Holocaust. So, I guess this is a topic that has interested me for some thirty years now. I can’t stop asking why, I can’t stop reading, and I can’t stop educating, especially as Holocaust denial and antisemitism are on the rise. History, in general, can teach us so much about who we are and who we have the potential to become. The Holocaust is a prime example of what happens when humanity fails to achieve its potential.
I wrote...
Submerged on the Surface: The Not-So-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941–1945
Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that “hidden” Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.
Even after years of studying the Holocaust, I remain overwhelmed by the enormity of the horrors, and there are still times when I find my faith in humanity wavering and all I can think to ask in anger and confusion is “Why?” I know I’m not alone. Peter Hayes’s masterful book is the result of an entire career centered on asking that very question. The outcome is an incredibly readable, insightful, and thought-provoking account of the Holocaust that doesn’t shy away from answering the big questions. After reading it, one might still ask “why,” but it won’t be out of frustration, anger, and confusion, but rather out of a desire to keep learning more about one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of humanity.
Peter Hayes has been teaching Holocaust studies for decades and Why? grows out of the questions he's encountered from his students. Despite the outpouring of books, films, memorials, museums and courses devoted to the subject, a coherent explanation of why such carnage erupted still eludes people. Numerous myths have sprouted, many to console us that things could have gone differently if only some person or entity had acted more bravely or wisely; others cast new blame on favourite or surprising villains or even on historians.
Why? dispels many legends and debunks the most prevalent ones, including the claim that the…
One of the most difficult facets of Nazism for my college students to grasp is that the Nazis had a sense of ethics and morals. It’s easy to look at the horrors of Nazism, rightfully condemn the Nazis as monstrous, and congratulate ourselves on having the moral and ethical fiber that would never allow us to engage in such atrocities. The thing is, though, that so much of the evil committed in this world is committed by people who think they are doing what’s right. Koonz’s examination of Nazi morals is an uncomfortable read but a necessary one. It forced me and it forces my students to confront the unpleasant truth that evil also has a sense of “moral” and “immoral.”
The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders.
Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces the transformation of longtime Nazis' vulgar anti-Semitism into a racial ideology that seemed credible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challenging…
With a narrative of just over 650 pages, this is thebook for the reader out there who wants it all: the names, the dates, the facts, the figures, the individual experience, and the analysis, all wrapped up in an engrossing, readable narrative. Friedländer’s impeccable scholarship speaks to the historian in me, but, more importantly, it speaks to the humanity in me. When I sat down to read this second volume, I wasn’t struck by how thick it was. I was struck by the magnitude of tragedy that the book represented. For the reader who has read widely on the Holocaust, in particular, this book will answer many of your questions. What appeals to me most, though, is the historical data never obscures the victims or their experiences.
A magisterial history of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the regime's policies towards them in the years prior to World War II and the Holocaust. Written by arguably the world's leading scholar on the subject.
Himself a survivor, Friedlander has been a leading figure in Holocaust studies for decades and this book represents a definitive summing up of his research and that of hundreds of other historians.
NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS: THE YEARS OF PERSECUTION is perhaps the richest examination of the subject yet written, and, crucially, one that never loses sight of the experiences of individuals in…
Reading about the Holocaust in high school and college, it was easy for me to see WWII Europe in a binary of “Nazis vs. Everybody Else.” This book utterly destroyed that illusion, and it remains today one of the most disturbing books I have ever read about the Holocaust. In the summer of 1941, without any prompting from the Nazis, the gentile half of the Polish town of Jedwabne slaughtered the Jewish half of the town in a single day. This truly horrifying story, hidden for over half a century, is a reminder that the evils unleashed by the Nazis did not remain confined to the Germans. The Holocaust occurred on many fronts: the town of Jedwabne was one of them.
A landmark book that changed the story of Poland's role in the Holocaust
On July 10, 1941, in Nazi-occupied Poland, half of the town of Jedwabne brutally murdered the other half: 1,600 men, women, and children-all but seven of the town's Jews. In this shocking and compelling classic of Holocaust history, Jan Gross reveals how Jedwabne's Jews were murdered not by faceless Nazis but by people who knew them well-their non-Jewish Polish neighbors. A previously untold story of the complicity of non-Germans in the extermination of the Jews, Neighbors shows how people victimized by the Nazis could at the same…
This book is a staple of the course I teach on the Holocaust. It is also the book most likely to provoke intense debate among my students. The book isn’t concerned with why Nazis so willingly participated in the Holocaust. It’s concerned with why Germans who weren’t Nazis and never really showed any affinity for Nazism also actively participated in the Holocaust. The answers Browning provides are disturbing, thought-provoking, compelling, and on more than one occasion have kept me awake at night. Browning’s book is a must-read in the field of Holocaust Studies and has been for thirty years. For the person who has ever asked themselves how they might respond in such a situation, Browning’s study of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 offers a chilling explanation.
Christopher R. Browning's shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews-now with a new afterword and additional photographs. Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including…
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives about adoption, exposing the fallacy that adoption is always good.
In this story, I reckon with the pain and unanswered questions of my own experience and explore broader issues surrounding adoption in the United States, including changing legal policies, sterilization, and compulsory relinquishment programs, forced assimilation of babies of color and Indigenous babies adopted into white families, and other liabilities affecting women, mothers, and children. Now is the moment we must all hear these stories.
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
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