A challenging account of the systematic and brutal slaughter of Jews in Latvia during the Second World War.

"The untold story of a Latvian Nazi's gruesome crimes and an Israeli spy's epic journey to bring him to justice, a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis."--

Covers the anti-semitic activities of the Nazis all over the globe, refuting common myths about the Holocaust, including the perception that Jews went peacefully to their deaths.

City of Life, City of Death: Memories of Riga is Max Michelson's stirring and haunting personal account of the Soviet and German occupations of Latvia and of the Holocaust. Michelson had a serene boyhood in an upper middle-class Jewish family in Riga, Latvia--at least until 1940, when the fifteen-year old Michelson witnessed the annexation of Latvia by the Soviet Union. Private properties were nationalized, and Stalin's terror spread to Soviet Latvia. Soon after, Michelson's family was torn apart by the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. He quickly lost his entire family, while witnessing the unspeakable brutalities of war and genocide. Michelson's memoir is an ode to his lost family; it is the speech of their muted voices and a thank you for their love. Although badly scarred by his experiences, like many other survivors he was able to rebuild his life and gain a new sense of what it means to be alive. His experiences will be of interest to scholars of both the Holocaust and Eastern European history, as well as the general reader.

This book is a study of the legal reckoning with the crimes of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police and its political dimensions in the Soviet Union, West and East Germany, and the United States in the context of the Cold War. Decades of work by prosecutors have established the facts of Latvian collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. No group made a deeper mark in the annals of atrocity than the men of the so-called 'Arajs Kommando' and their leader, Viktors Arājs, who killed tens of thousands of Jews on Latvian soil and participated in every aspect of the 'Holocaust by Bullets.' This study also has significance for coming to terms with Latvia’s encounter with Nazism – a process that was stunted and distorted by Latvia’s domination by the USSR until 1991. Examining the country’s most notorious killers, their fates on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and contemporary Latvians’ responses in different political contexts, this volume is a record of the earliest phases of this process, which must now continue and to which this book contributes.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: “This valuable resource covers an aspect of the Holocaust rarely addressed and never in such detail.” —Library Journal This is the first volume in a monumental seven-volume encyclopedia, reflecting years of work by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which will describe the universe of camps and ghettos—many thousands more than previously known—that the Nazis and their allies operated, from Norway to North Africa and from France to Russia. For the first time, a single reference work will provide detailed information on each individual site. This first volume covers three groups of camps: the early camps that the Nazis established in the first year of Hitler’s rule, the major SS concentration camps with their constellations of subcamps, and the special camps for Polish and German children and adolescents. Overview essays provide context for each category, while each camp entry provides basic information about the site’s purpose; prisoners; guards; working and living conditions; and key events in the camp’s history. Material from personal testimonies helps convey the character of the site, while source citations provide a path to additional information.

"An account of the days surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor is presented through the experiences of witnesses ranging from Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kennedy to Mao Tse-tung and the Jewish inmates of the Warsaw ghetto, "--NoveList.

Unlike many Holocaust books, which deal primarily with the concentration camps, this book focuses on Jewish life before Jews lost their autonomy and fell totally under Nazi power. These essays concern various aspects of Jewish daily life and governance, such as the Judenrat, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, religious life, housing, death, smuggling, art, and the struggle for survival while under siege by the Nazi regime. Written by survivors of the ghettos throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, this collection contains historical and cultural articles by prominent scholars, an essay on Holocaust theatre, and an article on teaching the Holocaust to students.

Provides a cutting-edge, nuanced, and multi-disciplinary picture of the Holocaust from local, transnational, continental, and global perspectives Holocaust Studies is a dynamic field that encompasses discussions on human behavior, extremity, and moral action. A diverse range of disciplines – history, philosophy, literature, social psychology, anthropology, geography, amongst others – continue to make important contributions to its scholarship. A Companion to the Holocaust provides exciting commentaries on current and emerging debates and identifies new connections for research. The text incorporates new language, geographies, and approaches to address the precursors of the Holocaust and examine its global consequences. A team of international contributors provides insightful and sophisticated analyses of current trends in Holocaust research that go far beyond common conceptions of the Holocaust’s causes, unfolding and impact. Scholars draw on their original research to interpret current, agenda-setting historical and historiographical debates on the Holocaust. Six broad sections cover wide-ranging topics such as new debates about Nazi perpetrators, arguments about the causes and places of persecution of Jews in Germany and Europe, and Jewish and non-Jewish responses to it, the use of forced labor in the German war economy, representations of the Holocaust witness, and many others. A masterful framing chapter sets the direction and tone of each section’s themes. Comprising over thirty essays, this important addition to Holocaust studies: Offers a remarkable compendium of systematic, comparative, and precise analyses Covers areas and topics not included in any other companion of its type Examines the ongoing cultural, social, and political legacies of the Holocaust Includes discussions on non-European and non-Western geographies, inter-ethnic tensions, and violence A Companion to the Holocaust is an essential resource for students and scholars of European, German, genocide, colonial and Jewish history, as well as those in the general humanities.

“Books about Nazism are endless, but The War Against the Jews comes to us as a major work of synthesis, providing for the first time a full account of the Holocaust. . . . Dawidowicz has produced a work of high scholarship and profound moral impact.”—Irving Howe, front page review in The New York Times Book Review Here is the unparalleled account of the most awesome and awful chapter in the moral history of humanity. Lucid, chilling and comprehensive, Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s classic tells the complete story of the Nazi Holocaust—from the insidious evolution of German Anti-Semitism to the ultimate tragedy of the Final Solution. “A literary-historical shocker . . . Lucy S. Dawidowicz lifts the bloodstained curtain from Germany’s war against the Jews.”—Houston Post