The man the New York Times has called "the preeminent scholar of the Holocaust" tells the stories of those who caused, experienced, and witnessed the great human catastrophe.

This volume examines the politics of history and memory in Germany today through a review and analysis of seminal developments in the current discourse on 1933 – 1945. An interdisplicinary work, this book examines questions of representing the past from the perspective of literary studies, social psychology, film studies, history, and cultural studies. Themes include transgenerational memory and remembrance, the air war and German literature, commemoration and silences, transnational reconciliation, and historical consciousness in the German present. The collected essays make clear that as the current discourse contributes toward an historically informed, differentiated understanding of individuals’ roles in the Third Reich and World War Two, victim and perpetrator identities cannot be defined as exclusive from one another. The discourse emphasizes personal over collective experience and answers questions of responsibility and guilt on the individual level.

The image of the Third Reich as a monolithic state presiding over the brainwashed, fanatical masses, retains a tenacious grip on the general public's imagination. However, a growing body of research on the social history of the Nazi years has revealed the variety and complexity of the relationships between the Nazi regime and the German people. This volume makes this new research accessible to undergraduate and graduate students alike.

How was it possible that, in a rather peaceful and, to all intents and purposes, not particularly antisemitic Dutch society, more than 75% of the Jewish population were arrested, deported or murdered in concentration camps during the Shoah? Can all of this be blamed on the Nazi occupiers? The eminent historian, Hans Derks, explains this mystery for the first time by looking closely at the social and religious characteristics of Dutch society. He also unveils the extensive collaboration of the country's state-bureaucracy with the German authorities. This uniquely perpetratororiented book about the Dutch Shoah offers shocking conclusions about the persistent contribution of Dutch scholars to racist ideologies and eugenic measures aimed at creating a new, racially pure Dutch society under an authoritarian leadership.

Unrivaled in scope, "Holocaust" is a story of all Europe, of the vast sweep of events in which this great atrocity was rooted, from the Middle Ages to the modern era.

Hilberg distills a lifetime of scholarly investigation into an indispensable primer on the use of sources in the writing of Holocaust history.

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

Co-winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research From January 1945, in the last months of the Third Reich, about 250,000 inmates of concentration camps perished on death marches and in countless incidents of mass slaughter. They were murdered with merciless brutality by their SS guards, by army and police units, and often by gangs of civilians as they passed through German and Austrian towns and villages. Even in the bloody annals of the Nazi regime, this final death blow was unique in character and scope. In this first comprehensive attempt to answer the questions raised by this final murderous rampage, the author draws on the testimonies of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Hunting through archives throughout the world, Daniel Blatman sets out to explain—to the extent that is possible—the effort invested by mankind’s most lethal regime in liquidating the remnants of the enemies of the “Aryan race” before it abandoned the stage of history. What were the characteristics of this last Nazi genocide? How was it linked to the earlier stages, the slaughter of millions in concentration camps? How did the prevailing chaos help to create the conditions that made the final murderous rampage possible? In its exploration of a topic nearly neglected in the current history of the Shoah, this book offers unusual insight into the workings, and the unraveling, of the Nazi regime. It combines micro-historical accounts of representative massacres with an overall analysis of the collapse of the Third Reich, helping us to understand a seemingly inexplicable chapter in history.

For decades, historians have debated how and to what extent the Holocaust penetrated the German national consciousness between 1933 and 1945. How much did “ordinary” Germans know about the subjugation and mass murder of the Jews, when did they know it, and how did they respond collectively and as individuals? This compact volume brings together six historical investigations into the subject from leading scholars employing newly accessible and previously underexploited evidence. Ranging from the roots of popular anti-Semitism to the complex motivations of Germans who hid Jews, these studies illuminate some of the most difficult questions in Holocaust historiography, supplemented with an array of fascinating primary source materials.

The first comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration camps In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945. The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called "the gray zone." In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system. Examining, close up, life and death inside the camps, and adopting a wider lens to show how the camp system was shaped by changing political, legal, social, economic, and military forces, Wachsmann produces a unified picture of the Nazi regime and its camps that we have never seen before. A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the history of the twentieth century.