The Holocaust

Oxford University Press

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This book examines the relationship between total war, state-organised genocide, and the emergence of modern identity. The Holocaust, Bartov argues, can only be understood within the context of the century's predilection to apply systematic and destructive methods to resolve conflicts over identity.

When the Allies tried German war criminals at the end of World War II they were attempting not only to punish the guilty but also to set down a history of Nazism and of what had happened in Europe. Yet as Donald Bloxham shows in this incisive new account the reality was that these proceedings failed: not only did the guilty often escape punishment but the final solution was largely written out of history in the post-war era.
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Flares of Memory is a collection of 92 stories written by over 40 Jewish survivors and several U.S. Army liberators about their experiences during the Holocaust. The stories collected in this volume were developed in a writing workshop led by Brostoff and Chamovitz for survivors of the Holocaust in the hope of preserving their memories for posterity. The contributors to this collection related their recollections of being children, teenagers, and young adults during the Holocaust. Their individual experiences testify to the horror of the period as well as the moments of courage and luck that allowed them to survive while offering a tribute to the lives and cultures that were destroyed. The volume organizes the stories thematically into chapters, and includes a detailed timeline of the Holocaust, a map of concentration camps, and photographs of their contributors.

Between Dignity and Despair focuses on the everyday tyranny Jews experienced and their reactions to the living nightmare of Nazism. Using a wide variety of sources, including memoirs, diaries, and letters, Kaplan explores the most fundamental aspects of Jewish lives, their homes, families, and communities, and shows how the victims, especially women and families, tried to cope with Nazism as the noose tightened around their daily lives.

Springing from an unprecedented meeting between the sons and daughters of the Holocaust and the children of Nazis, Justice Matters: Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II examines the psychology of hatred and ethnic resentments passed from generation to generation. Weissmark, a social psychologist and the child of Holocaust survivors, argues that justice is quite naturally shaped by emotional responses. In the face of unjust treatment, the natural response is resentment and deep anger - and a desire for revenge. While legal systems offer a structured means for redressing injustice, they often do not redress the emotional pain, which, left unresolved, is then passed along to the next generation – leading to entrenched ethnic tension and group conflict.

How did typhus come to be viewed as a 'Jewish disease' and what was the connection between the anti-typhus measures during the First World War and the Nazi gas chambers and other genocidal medical practices in the Second World War? This powerful book provides valuable new insight into the history of German medicine in its reaction to the international fight against typhus and the perceived threat of epidemics from the East in the early part of the twentieth century. Professor Weindling examines how German bacteriology became increasingly racialised, and how it sought to eradicate the disease by eradication of the perceived carriers. Delousing became a key feature of Nazi preventive medicine during the Holocaust, and gassing a favoured means of eradication of typhus.