This essay argues that an examination of comedy in the USA reveals the extent to which collective memory of the Holocaust evolved during the 20th and early 21st centuries. Using sources taken from the domain of mainstream American comedy since the 1930s, the analysis evidences how, following an initial reluctance to represent the genocide within…[Read more]

Teaching the Holocaust in School. Greek particularities. The Why

In July 1944, the Red Army was advancing through Eastern Poland when they discovered the first traces of the camps. On reaching Lublin they found an enormous compound behind barbed wire in the city’s suburb of Majdanek. Embedded with the Soviet army were film crews, who made the first images of a Nazi camp, among them the “flight survivors” Olga a…[Read more]

This article is a first original exploration of queer Holocaust history, that is same sex desire between Jews who had been deported to ghettos and concentration camps. The prisoner society in the Nazi camps was characterized by wide-reaching homophobia which used construction of sexual deviance as a tool of othering. It brought about…[Read more]

This short piece reviews Michael Kater’s recent overview of culture in Nazi Germany, taking issue both with its core scholarly contentions and its problematic use of language.

The remote location of Beshankovichy’s mass grave for Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide reflects the exclusion of local Jews during the German occupation of Soviet territories and limits their memory to a few knowledgeable survivors and witnesses. In contrast, local commemorative practices focus on memorials for Soviet soldiers, partisans, and…[Read more]

How did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, survived, and remembered by Jewish youth living in Soviet territory? Anika Walke, Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, examines these important questions in Pioneers and…[Read more]

How should we remember historical moments of violence and loss? What are the links between terrible events like the Holocaust, the mass casualties of World War I, the Armenian Genocide, and crises around the world today? What challenges do historians face as they examine and interpret death and war?

Anika Walke and Jay Winter both face such…[Read more]

Ghettoized Languages: Theresienstadt as Czech-German ‘Coerced Community’
(referring to Adler’s book “Theresienstadt 1941-1945; The Face of a Coerced Community”)
1. Theresienstadts Festungen: Von der josephinischen Architektur zum Militärgefängnis und nationalsozialistischen „Ghetto“
2. Nationen im „Ghetto”
3. Zum Begriff der „Zwangsgemein…[Read more]

Ghettoized Languages: Theresienstadt as Czech-German ‘Coerced Community’
(referring to Adler’s book “Theresienstadt 1941-1945; The Face of a Coerced Community”)
1. Theresienstadts Festungen: Von der josephinischen Architektur zum Militärgefängnis und nationalsozialistischen „Ghetto“
2. Nationen im „Ghetto”
3. Zum Begriff der „Zwangsgemein…[Read more]

Ghettoized Languages: Theresienstadt as Czech-German ‘Coerced Community’
(referring to Adler’s book “Theresienstadt 1941-1945; The Face of a Coerced Community”)
1. Theresienstadts Festungen: Von der josephinischen Architektur zum Militärgefängnis und nationalsozialistischen „Ghetto“
2. Nationen im „Ghetto”
3. Zum Begriff der „Zwangsgemein…[Read more]

In 2013 the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka published a recollection of his childhood in concentration camps, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death. Historians and general audiences praised the poetic and reflective tone of the book. Deported at 11 years of age from Theresienstadt, Kulka spent a year and half at Auschwitz and is one of the very…[Read more]

Overview article on history and logistics of the Westerbork transit camp, making extensive use of the original Westerbork records in the NIOD. The paper also specifies the connection between the Jewish Council in Amsterdam and Westerbork, as well as the set-up of transports and the system of “Sperren”. The article includes a complete and revised…[Read more]