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The major forum for scholarship on the Holocaust and other genocides, Holocaust and Genocide Studies is an international journal featuring research articles, interpretive essays, and book reviews in the social sciences and humanities …

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The Holocaust

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 11, 2023 | Original: October 14, 2009

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, Romani people, the intellectually disabled, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The word “holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition during World War II, with mass killing centers in concentration camps. About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.

Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler . Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .

The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf ” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer , becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. 

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

HISTORY Vault: Third Reich: The Rise

Rare and never-before-seen amateur films offer a unique perspective on the rise of Nazi Germany from Germans who experienced it. How were millions of people so vulnerable to fascism?

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland , starting World War II . German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution ) to “the Jewish question.”

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide . Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz , the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum . What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums . Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe . Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations .

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Holocaust and Genocide Studies Scholarly Journal

The major forum for scholarship on the Holocaust and other genocides, Holocaust and Genocide Studies is an international journal featuring research articles, interpretive essays, book reviews, a comprehensive bibliography of recently published relevant works in the social sciences and humanties, and an annual list of major research centers specializing in Holocaust studies.

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In the Shadow of the Holocaust

By Masha Gessen

Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures are the least of it. The memorials that sneak up on you—the monument to burned books, which is literally underground, and the thousands of Stolpersteine , or “stumbling stones,” built into sidewalks to commemorate individual Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, mentally ill people, and others murdered by the Nazis—reveal the pervasiveness of the evils once committed in this place. In early November, when I was walking to a friend’s house in the city, I happened upon the information stand that marks the site of Hitler’s bunker. I had done so many times before. It looks like a neighborhood bulletin board, but it tells the story of the Führer’s final days.

In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, when many of these memorials were conceived and installed, I visited Berlin often. It was exhilarating to watch memory culture take shape. Here was a country, or at least a city, that was doing what most cultures cannot: looking at its own crimes, its own worst self. But, at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way. This is true in the physical, visual sense. Many of the memorials use glass: the Reichstag, a building nearly destroyed during the Nazi era and rebuilt half a century later, is now topped by a glass dome; the burned-books memorial lives under glass; glass partitions and glass panes put order to the stunning, once haphazard collection called “Topography of Terror.” As Candice Breitz, a South African Jewish artist who lives in Berlin, told me, “The good intentions that came into play in the nineteen-eighties have, too often, solidified into dogma.”

Podcast: The Political Scene Masha Gessen talks with Tyler Foggatt.

Among the few spaces where memory representation is not set in apparent permanence are a couple of the galleries in the new building of the Jewish Museum, which was completed in 1999. When I visited in early November, a gallery on the ground floor was showing a video installation called “Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres.” The video was set in Kibbutz Be’eri , the community where, on October 7th, Hamas killed more than ninety people—almost one in ten residents—during its attack on Israel, which ultimately claimed more than twelve hundred lives. In the video, Be’eri residents take turns reciting the lines of a poem by one of the community’s members, the poet Anadad Eldan: “. . . from the swamp between the ribs / she surfaced who had submerged in you / and you are constrained not shouting / hunting for the forms that scamper outside.” The video, by the Berlin-based Israeli artists Nir Evron and Omer Krieger, was completed nine years ago. It begins with an aerial view of the area, the Gaza Strip visible, then slowly zooms in on the houses of the kibbutz, some of which looked like bunkers. I am not sure what the artists and the poet had initially meant to convey; now the installation looked like a work of mourning for Be’eri. (Eldan, who is nearly a hundred years old, survived the Hamas attack.)

Down the hallway was one of the spaces that the architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed the museum, called “voids”—shafts of air that pierce the building, symbolizing the absence of Jews in Germany through generations. There, an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, titled “Fallen Leaves,” consists of more than ten thousand rounds of iron with eyes and mouths cut into them, like casts of children’s drawings of screaming faces. When you walk on the faces, they clank, like shackles, or like the bolt handle of a rifle. Kadishman dedicated the work to victims of the Holocaust and other innocent victims of war and violence. I don’t know what Kadishman, who died in 2015, would have said about the current conflict. But, after I walked from the haunting video of Kibbutz Be’eri to the clanking iron faces, I thought of the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas. Then I thought that, if I were to state this publicly in Germany, I might get in trouble.

On November 9th, to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Star of David and the phrase “ Nie Wieder Ist Jetzt! ”—“Never Again Is Now!”—was projected in white and blue on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. That day, the Bundestag was considering a proposal titled “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility: Protecting Jewish Life in Germany,” which contained more than fifty measures intended to combat antisemitism in Germany, including deporting immigrants who commit antisemitic crimes; stepping up activities directed against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement; supporting Jewish artists “whose work is critical of antisemitism”; implementing a particular definition of antisemitism in funding and policing decisions; and beefing up coöperation between the German and the Israeli armed forces. In earlier remarks, the German Vice-Chancellor, Robert Habeck, who is a member of the Green Party, said that Muslims in Germany should “clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as not to undermine their own right to tolerance.”

Germany has long regulated the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered and discussed. In 2008, when then Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke before the Knesset, on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, she emphasized Germany’s special responsibility not only for preserving the memory of the Holocaust as a unique historical atrocity but also for the security of Israel. This, she went on, was part of Germany’s Staatsräson —the reason for the existence of the state. The sentiment has since been repeated in Germany seemingly every time the topic of Israel, Jews, or antisemitism arises, including in Habeck’s remarks. “The phrase ‘Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson ’ has never been an empty phrase,” he said. “And it must not become one.”

At the same time, an obscure yet strangely consequential debate on what constitutes antisemitism has taken place. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization, adopted the following definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This definition was accompanied by eleven examples, which began with the obvious—calling for or justifying the killing of Jews—but also included “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

This definition had no legal force, but it has had extraordinary influence. Twenty-five E.U. member states and the U.S. State Department have endorsed or adopted the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing for the withholding of federal funds from colleges where students are not protected from antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A. On December 5th of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution condemning antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A.; it was proposed by two Jewish Republican representatives and opposed by several prominent Jewish Democrats, including New York’s Jerry Nadler.

In 2020, a group of academics proposed an alternative definition of antisemitism, which they called the Jerusalem Declaration . It defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)” and provides examples that help distinguish anti-Israel statements and actions from antisemitic ones. But although some of the preëminent scholars of the Holocaust participated in drafting the declaration, it has barely made a dent in the growing influence of the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2021, the European Commission published a handbook “for the practical use” of the I.H.R.A. definition, which recommended, among other things, using the definition in training law-enforcement officers to recognize hate crimes, and creating the position of state attorney, or coördinator or commissioner for antisemitism.

Germany had already implemented this particular recommendation. In 2018, the country created the Office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism, a vast bureaucracy that includes commissioners at the state and local level, some of whom work out of prosecutors’ offices or police precincts. Since then, Germany has reported an almost uninterrupted rise in the number of antisemitic incidents: more than two thousand in 2019, more than three thousand in 2021, and, according to one monitoring group, a shocking nine hundred and ninety-four incidents in the month following the Hamas attack. But the statistics mix what Germans call Israelbezogener Antisemitismus —Israel-related antisemitism, such as instances of criticism of Israeli government policies—with violent attacks, such as an attempted shooting at a synagogue, in Halle, in 2019, which killed two bystanders; shots fired at a former rabbi’s house, in Essen, in 2022; and two Molotov cocktails thrown at a Berlin synagogue this fall. The number of incidents involving violence has, in fact, remained relatively steady, and has not increased following the Hamas attack.

There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the B.D.S. movement, as was the South African Jewish photographer Adam Broomberg.

In 2019, the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning B.D.S. as antisemitic and recommending that state funding be withheld from events and institutions connected to B.D.S. The history of the resolution is telling. A version was originally introduced by the AfD, the radical-right ethnonationalist and Euroskeptic party then relatively new to the German parliament. Mainstream politicians rejected the resolution because it came from the AfD, but, apparently fearful of being seen as failing to fight antisemitism, immediately introduced a similar one of their own. The resolution was unbeatable because it linked B.D.S. to “the most terrible phase of German history.” For the AfD, whose leaders have made openly antisemitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era nationalist language, the spectre of antisemitism is a perfect, cynically wielded political instrument, both a ticket to the political mainstream and a weapon that can be used against Muslim immigrants.

The B.D.S. movement, which is inspired by the boycott movement against South African apartheid, seeks to use economic pressure to secure equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, end the occupation, and promote the return of Palestinian refugees. Many people find the B.D.S. movement problematic because it does not affirm the right of the Israeli state to exist—and, indeed, some B.D.S. supporters envision a total undoing of the Zionist project. Still, one could argue that associating a nonviolent boycott movement, whose supporters have explicitly positioned it as an alternative to armed struggle, with the Holocaust is the very definition of Holocaust relativism. But, according to the logic of German memory policy, because B.D.S. is directed against Jews—although many of the movement’s supporters are also Jewish—it is antisemitic. One could also argue that the inherent conflation of Jews with the state of Israel is antisemitic, even that it meets the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism. And, given the AfD’s involvement and the pattern of the resolution being used largely against Jews and people of color, one might think that this argument would gain traction. One would be wrong.

The German Basic Law, unlike the U.S. Constitution but like the constitutions of many other European countries, has not been interpreted to provide an absolute guarantee of freedom of speech. It does, however, promise freedom of expression not only in the press but in the arts and sciences, research, and teaching. It’s possible that, if the B.D.S. resolution became law, it would be deemed unconstitutional. But it has not been tested in this way. Part of what has made the resolution peculiarly powerful is the German state’s customary generosity: almost all museums, exhibits, conferences, festivals, and other cultural events receive funding from the federal, state, or local government. “It has created a McCarthyist environment,” Candice Breitz, the artist, told me. “Whenever we want to invite someone, they”—meaning whatever government agency may be funding an event—“Google their name with ‘B.D.S.,’ ‘Israel,’ ‘apartheid.’ ”

A couple of years ago, Breitz, whose art deals with issues of race and identity, and Michael Rothberg, who holds a Holocaust studies chair at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to organize a symposium on German Holocaust memory, called “We Need to Talk.” After months of preparations, they had their state funding pulled, likely because the program included a panel connecting Auschwitz and the genocide of the Herero and the Nama people carried out between 1904 and 1908 by German colonizers in what is now Namibia. “Some of the techniques of the Shoah were developed then,” Breitz said. “But you are not allowed to speak about German colonialism and the Shoah in the same breath because it is a ‘levelling.’ ”

The insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust and the centrality of Germany’s commitment to reckoning with it are two sides of the same coin: they position the Holocaust as an event that Germans must always remember and mention but don’t have to fear repeating, because it is unlike anything else that’s ever happened or will happen. The German historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, who heads the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, in Berlin, has argued that unified Germany turned the reckoning with the Holocaust into its national idea, and as a result “any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself, through comparisons with other German crimes or other genocides, can [be] and is being perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation-state.” Perhaps that’s the meaning of “Never again is now.”

Some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust spent the rest of their lives trying to tell the world that the horror, while uniquely deadly, should not be seen as an aberration. That the Holocaust happened meant that it was possible—and remains possible. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive, systematic, and efficient nature of the Holocaust was a function of modernity—that, although it was by no means predetermined, it fell in line with other inventions of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno studied what makes people inclined to follow authoritarian leaders and sought a moral principle that would prevent another Auschwitz.

In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.”

The occasion for Arendt’s letter was a planned visit to the United States by the party’s leader, Menachem Begin. Albert Einstein, another German Jew who fled the Nazis, added his signature. Thirty years later, Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. Another half century later, in Berlin, the philosopher Susan Neiman, who leads a research institute named for Einstein, spoke at the opening of a conference called “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” She suggested that she might face repercussions for challenging the ways in which Germany now wields its memory culture. Neiman is an Israeli citizen and a scholar of memory and morals. One of her books is called “ Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil .” In the past couple of years, Neiman said, memory culture had “gone haywire.”

Germany’s anti-B.D.S. resolution, for example, has had a distinct chilling effect on the country’s cultural sphere. The city of Aachen took back a ten-thousand-euro prize it had awarded to the Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad; the city of Dortmund and the jury for the fifteen-thousand-euro Nelly Sachs Prize similarly rescinded the honor that they had bestowed on the British-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie. The Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe had his invitation to a major festival questioned after the federal antisemitism commissioner accused him of supporting B.D.S. and “relativizing the Holocaust.” (Mbembe has said that he is not connected with the boycott movement; the festival itself was cancelled because of COVID .) The director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Peter Schäfer, resigned in 2019 after being accused of supporting B.D.S.—he did not, in fact, support the boycott movement, but the museum had posted a link, on Twitter, to a newspaper article that included criticism of the resolution. The office of Benjamin Netanyahu had also asked Merkel to cut the museum’s funding because, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s opinion, its exhibition on Jerusalem paid too much attention to the city’s Muslims. (Germany’s B.D.S. resolution may be unique in its impact but not in its content: a majority of U.S. states now have laws on the books that equate the boycott with antisemitism and withhold state funding from people and institutions that support it.)

After the “We Need to Talk” symposium was cancelled, Breitz and Rothberg regrouped and came up with a proposal for a symposium called “We Still Need to Talk.” The list of speakers was squeaky clean. A government entity vetted everyone and agreed to fund the gathering. It was scheduled for early December. Then Hamas attacked Israel . “We knew that after that every German politician would see it as extremely risky to be connected with an event that had Palestinian speakers or the word ‘apartheid,’ ” Breitz said. On October 17th, Breitz learned that funding had been pulled. Meanwhile, all over Germany, police were cracking down on demonstrations that call for a ceasefire in Gaza or manifest support for Palestinians. Instead of a symposium, Breitz and several others organized a protest. They called it “We Still Still Still Still Need to Talk.” About an hour into the gathering, police quietly cut through the crowd to confiscate a cardboard poster that read “From the River to the Sea, We Demand Equality.” The person who had brought the poster was a Jewish Israeli woman.

The “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility” proposal has since languished in committee. Still, the performative battle against antisemitism kept ramping up. In November, the planning of Documenta, one of the art world’s most important shows, was thrown into disarray after the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung dug up a petition that a member of the artistic organizing committee, Ranjit Hoskote, had signed in 2019. The petition, written to protest a planned event on Zionism and Hindutva in Hoskote’s home town of Mumbai, denounced Zionism as “a racist ideology calling for a settler-colonial, apartheid state where non-Jews have unequal rights, and in practice, has been premised on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on it under the heading “Antisemitism.” Hoskote resigned and the rest of the committee followed suit. A week later, Breitz read in a newspaper that a museum in Saarland had cancelled an exhibit of hers, which had been planned for 2024, “in view of the media coverage about the artist in connection with her controversial statements in the context of Hamas’ war of aggression against the state of Israel.”

This November, I left Berlin to travel to Kyiv, traversing, by train, Poland and then Ukraine. This is as good a place as any to say a few things about my relationship to the Jewish history of these lands. Many American Jews go to Poland to visit what little, if anything, is left of the old Jewish quarters, to eat food reconstructed according to recipes left by long-extinguished families, and to go on tours of Jewish history, Jewish ghettos, and Nazi concentration camps. I am closer to this history. I grew up in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-seventies, in the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust, because only a part of my family had survived it and because Soviet censors suppressed any public mention of it. When, around the age of nine, I learned that some Nazi war criminals were still on the loose, I stopped sleeping. I imagined one of them climbing in through our fifth-floor balcony to snatch me.

During summers, our cousin Anna and her sons would visit from Warsaw. Her parents had decided to kill themselves after the Warsaw Ghetto burned down. Anna’s father threw himself in front of a train. Anna’s mother tied the three-year-old Anna to her waist with a shawl and jumped into a river. They were plucked out of the water by a Polish man, and survived the war by hiding in the countryside. I knew the story, but I wasn’t allowed to mention it. Anna was an adult when she learned that she was a Holocaust survivor, and she waited to tell her own kids, who were around my age. The first time I went to Poland, in the nineteen-nineties, was to research the fate of my great-grandfather, who spent nearly three years in the Białystok Ghetto before being killed in Majdanek.

The Holocaust memory wars in Poland have run in parallel with Germany’s. The ideas being battled out in the two countries are different, but one consistent feature is the involvement of right-wing politicians in conjunction with the state of Israel. As in Germany, the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands saw ambitious memorialization efforts, both national and local, that broke through the silence of the Soviet years. Poles built museums and monuments that commemorated the Jews killed in the Holocaust—which claimed half of its victims in Nazi-occupied Poland—and the Jewish culture that was lost with them. Then the backlash came. It coincided with the rise to power of the right-wing, illiberal Law and Justice Party, in 2015. Poles now wanted a version of history in which they were victims of the Nazi occupation alongside the Jews, whom they tried to protect from the Nazis.

This was not true: instances of Poles risking their lives to save Jews from the Germans, as in the case of my cousin Anna, were exceedingly rare, while the opposite—entire communities or structures of the pre-occupation Polish state, such as the police or city offices, carrying out the mass murder of Jews—was common. But historians who studied the Poles’ role in the Holocaust came under attack . The Polish-born Princeton historian Jan Tomasz Gross was interrogated and threatened with prosecution for writing that Poles killed more Polish Jews than Germans. The Polish authorities hounded him even after he retired. The government squeezed Dariusz Stola, the head of POLIN , Warsaw’s innovative museum of Polish Jewish history, out of his post. The historians Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking were dragged into court for writing that the mayor of a Polish village had been a collaborator in the Holocaust.

When I wrote about Grabowski and Engleking’s case, I received some of the scariest death threats of my life. (I’ve been sent a lot of death threats; most are forgettable.) One, sent to a work e-mail address, read, “If you keep writing lies about Poland and the Poles, I will deliver these bullets to your body. See the attachment! Five of them in every kneecap, so you won’t walk again. But if you continue to spread your Jewish hatred, I will deliver next 5 bullets in your pussy. The third step you won’t notice. But don’t worry, I’m not visiting you next week or eight weeks, I’ll be back when you forget this e-mail, maybe in 5 years. You’re on my list. . . .” The attachment was a picture of two shiny bullets in the palm of a hand. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, headed by a government appointee, tweeted a condemnation of my article, as did the account of the World Jewish Congress. A few months later, a speaking invitation to a university fell through because, the university told my speaking agent, it had emerged that I might be an antisemite.

Throughout the Polish Holocaust-memory wars, Israel maintained friendly relations with Poland. In 2018, Netanyahu and the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, issued a joint statement against “actions aimed at blaming Poland or the Polish nation as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators of different nations.” The statement asserted, falsely, that “structures of the Polish underground state supervised by the Polish government-in-exile created a mechanism of systematic help and support to Jewish people.” Netanyahu was building alliances with the illiberal governments of Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, in part to prevent an anti-occupation consensus from solidifying in the European Union. For this, he was willing to lie about the Holocaust.

Each year, tens of thousands of Israeli teen-agers travel to the Auschwitz museum before graduating from high school (though last year the trips were called off over security issues and the Polish government’s growing insistence that Poles’ involvement in the Holocaust be written out of history). It is a powerful, identity-forming trip that comes just a year or two before young Israelis join the military. Noam Chayut, a founder of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group in Israel, has written of his own high-school trip, which took place in the late nineteen-nineties, “Now, in Poland, as a high-school adolescent, I began to sense belonging, self-love, power and pride, and the desire to contribute, to live and be strong, so strong that no one would ever try to hurt me.”

Chayut took this feeling into the I.D.F., which posted him to the occupied West Bank. One day he was putting up property-confiscation notices. A group of children was playing nearby. Chayut flashed what he considered a kind and non-threatening smile at a little girl. The rest of the children scampered off, but the girl froze, terrified, until she, too, ran away. Later, when Chayut published a book about the transformation this encounter precipitated, he wrote that he wasn’t sure why it was this girl: “After all, there was also the shackled kid in the Jeep and the girl whose family home we had broken into late at night to remove her mother and aunt. And there were plenty of children, hundreds of them, screaming and crying as we rummaged through their rooms and their things. And there was the child from Jenin whose wall we blasted with an explosive charge that blew a hole just a few centimeters from his head. Miraculously, he was uninjured, but I’m sure his hearing and his mind were badly impaired.” But in the eyes of that girl, on that day, Chayut saw a reflection of annihilatory evil, the kind that he had been taught existed, but only between 1933 and 1945, and only where the Nazis ruled. Chayut called his book “ The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust .”

I took the train from the Polish border to Kyiv. Nearly thirty-four thousand Jews were shot at Babyn Yar, a giant ravine on the outskirts of the city, in just thirty-six hours in September, 1941. Tens of thousands more people died there before the war was over. This was what is now known as the Holocaust by bullets. Many of the countries in which these massacres took place—the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine—were re-colonized by the Soviet Union following the Second World War. Dissidents and Jewish cultural activists risked their freedom to maintain a memory of these tragedies, to collect testimony and names, and, where possible, to clean up and protect the sites themselves. After the fall of the Soviet Union, memorialization projects accompanied efforts to join the European Union. “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, “ Postwar .”

In the Rumbula forest, outside of Riga, for example, where some twenty-five thousand Jews were murdered in 1941, a memorial was unveiled in 2002, two years before Latvia was admitted to the E.U. A serious effort to commemorate Babyn Yar coalesced after the 2014 revolution that set Ukraine on an aspirational path to the E.U. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, in February, 2022, several smaller structures had been completed and ambitious plans for a larger museum complex were in place. With the invasion, construction halted. One week into the full-scale war, a Russian missile hit directly next to the memorial complex, killing at least four people. Since then, some of the people associated with the project have reconstituted themselves as a team of war-crimes investigators.

The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has waged an earnest campaign to win Israeli support for Ukraine. In March, 2022, he delivered a speech to the Knesset, in which he didn’t stress his own Jewish heritage but focussed on the inextricable historical connection between Jews and Ukrainians. He drew unambiguous parallels between the Putin regime and the Nazi Party. He even claimed that eighty years ago Ukrainians rescued Jews. (As with Poland, any claim that such aid was widespread is false.) But what worked for the right-wing government of Poland did not work for the pro-Europe President of Ukraine. Israel has not given Ukraine the help it has begged for in its war against Russia, a country that openly supports Hamas and Hezbollah.

Still, both before and after the October 7th attack, the phrase I heard in Ukraine possibly more than any other was “We need to be like Israel.” Politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and ordinary Ukrainians identify with the story Israel tells about itself, that of a tiny but mighty island of democracy standing strong against enemies who surround it. Some Ukrainian left-wing intellectuals have argued that Ukraine, which is fighting an anti-colonial war against an occupying power, should see its reflection in Palestine, not Israel. These voices are marginal and most often belong to young Ukrainians who are studying or have studied abroad. Following the Hamas attack, Zelensky wanted to rush to Israel as a show of support and unity between Israel and Ukraine. Israeli authorities seem to have other ideas—the visit has not happened.

While Ukraine has been unsuccessfully trying to get Israel to acknowledge that Russia’s invasion resembles Nazi Germany’s genocidal aggression, Moscow has built a propaganda universe around portraying Zelensky’s government, the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainian people as Nazis. The Second World War is the central event of Russia’s historical myth. During Vladimir Putin’s reign, as the last of the people who lived through the war have been dying, commemorative events have turned into carnivals that celebrate Russian victimhood. The U.S.S.R. lost at least twenty-seven million people in that war, a disproportionate number of them Ukrainians. The Soviet Union and Russia have fought in wars almost continuously since 1945, but the word “war” is still synonymous with the Second World War and the word “enemy” is used interchangeably with “fascist” and “Nazi.” This made it that much easier for Putin, in declaring a new war, to brand Ukrainians as Nazis.

Netanyahu has compared the Hamas murders at the music festival to the Holocaust by bullets. This comparison, picked up and recirculated by world leaders, including President Biden, serves to bolster Israel’s case for inflicting collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Similarly, when Putin says “Nazi” or “fascist,” he means that the Ukrainian government is so dangerous that Russia is justified in carpet-bombing and laying siege to Ukrainian cities and killing Ukrainian civilians. There are significant differences, of course: Russia’s claims that Ukraine attacked it first, and its portrayals of the Ukrainian government as fascist, are false; Hamas, on the other hand, is a tyrannical power that attacked Israel and committed atrocities that we cannot yet fully comprehend. But do these differences matter when the case being made is for killing children?

In the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when its troops were occupying the western suburbs of Kyiv, the director of Kyiv’s museum of the Second World War, Yurii Savchuk, was living at the museum and rethinking the core exhibit. One day after the Ukrainian military drove the Russians out of the Kyiv region, he met with the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and got permission to start collecting artifacts. Savchuk and his staff went to Bucha, Irpin, and other towns and cities that had just been “deoccupied,” as Ukrainians have taken to saying, and interviewed people who had not yet told their stories. “This was before the exhumations and the reburials,” Savchuk told me. “We saw the true face of war, with all its emotions. The fear, the terror, was in the atmosphere, and we absorbed it with the air.”

In May, 2022, the museum opened a new exhibit, titled “Ukraine – Crucifixion.” It begins with a display of Russian soldiers’ boots, which Savchuk’s team had collected. It’s an odd reversal: both the Auschwitz museum and the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., have displayed hundreds or thousands of shoes that belonged to victims of the Holocaust. They convey the scale of loss, even as they show only a tiny fraction of it. The display in Kyiv shows the scale of the menace. The boots are arranged on the floor of the museum in the pattern of a five-pointed star, the symbol of the Red Army that has become as sinister in Ukraine as the swastika. In September, Kyiv removed five-pointed stars from a monument to the Second World War in what used to be called Victory Square—it’s been renamed because the very word “Victory” connotes Russia’s celebration in what it still calls the Great Patriotic War. The city also changed the dates on the monument, from “1941-1945”—the years of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany—to “1939-1945.” Correcting memory one monument at a time.

In 1954, an Israeli court heard a libel case involving a Hungarian Jew named Israel Kastner. A decade earlier, when Germany occupied Hungary and belatedly rushed to implement the mass murder of its Jews, Kastner, as a leader of the Jewish community, entered into negotiations with Adolf Eichmann himself. Kastner proposed to buy the lives of Hungary’s Jews with ten thousand trucks. When this failed, he negotiated to save sixteen hundred and eighty-five people by transporting them by chartered train to Switzerland. Hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews were loaded onto trains to death camps. A Hungarian Jewish survivor had publicly accused Kastner of having collaborated with the Germans. Kastner sued for libel and, in effect, found himself on trial. The judge concluded that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil.”

The charge of collaboration against Kastner rested on the allegation that he had failed to tell people that they were going to their deaths. His accusers argued that, had he warned the deportees, they would have rebelled, not gone to the death camps like sheep to slaughter. The trial has been read as the beginning of a discursive standoff in which the Israeli right argues for preëmptive violence and sees the left as willfully defenseless. By the time of the trial, Kastner was a left-wing politician; his accuser was a right-wing activist.

Seven years later, the judge who had presided over the Kastner libel trial was one of the three judges in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here was the devil himself. The prosecution argued that Eichmann represented but one iteration of the eternal threat to the Jews. The trial helped to solidify the narrative that, to prevent annihilation, Jews should be prepared to use force preëmptively. Arendt, reporting on the trial , would have none of this. Her phrase “the banality of evil” elicited perhaps the original accusations, levelled against a Jew, of trivializing the Holocaust. She wasn’t. But she saw that Eichmann was no devil, that perhaps the devil didn’t exist. She had reasoned that there was no such thing as radical evil, that evil was always ordinary even when it was extreme—something “born in the gutter,” as she put it later, something of “utter shallowness.”

Arendt also took issue with the prosecution’s story that Jews were the victims of, as she put it, “a historical principle stretching from Pharaoh to Haman—the victim of a metaphysical principle.” This story, rooted in the Biblical legend of Amalek, a people of the Negev Desert who repeatedly fought the ancient Israelites, holds that every generation of Jews faces its own Amalek. I learned this story as a teen-ager; it was the first Torah lesson I ever received, taught by a rabbi who gathered the kids in a suburb of Rome where Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union lived while waiting for their papers to enter the United States, Canada, or Australia. In this story, as told by the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust is a predetermined event, part of Jewish history—and only Jewish history. The Jews, in this version, always have a well-justified fear of annihilation. Indeed, they can survive only if they act as though annihilation were imminent.

When I first learned the legend of Amalek, it made perfect sense to me. It described my knowledge of the world; it helped me connect my experience of getting teased and beaten up to my great-grandmother’s admonitions that using household Yiddish expressions in public was dangerous, to the unfathomable injustice of my grandfather and great-grandfather and scores of other relatives being killed before I was born. I was fourteen and lonely. I knew myself and my family to be victims, and the legend of Amalek imbued my sense of victimhood with meaning and a sense of community.

Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it—that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood—has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time. Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status, many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Conversely, in the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever.

For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.

The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.

From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away. In 1948, the year the state was created, an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv described the dire conditions—“old people so weak they were on the verge of death”; “a boy with two paralyzed legs”; “another boy whose hands were severed”—in which Palestinians, mostly women and children, departed the village of Tantura after Israeli troops occupied it: “One woman carried her child in one arm and with the other hand she held her elderly mother. The latter couldn’t keep up the pace, she yelled and begged her daughter to slow down, but the daughter did not consent. Finally the old lady collapsed onto the road and couldn’t move. The daughter pulled out her hair … lest she not make it on time. And worse than this was the association to Jewish mothers and grandmothers who lagged this way on the roads under the crop of murderers.” The journalist caught himself. “There is obviously no room for such a comparison,” he wrote. “This fate—they brought upon themselves.”

Jews took up arms in 1948 to claim land that was offered to them by a United Nations decision to partition what had been British-controlled Palestine. The Palestinians, supported by surrounding Arab states, did not accept the partition and Israel’s declaration of independence. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the proto-Israeli state, starting what Israel now calls the War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. Those who did not were driven out of their villages by Israeli forces. Most of them were never able to return. The Palestinians remember 1948 as the Nakba, a word that means “catastrophe” in Arabic, just as Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. That the comparison is unavoidable has compelled many Israelis to assert that, unlike the Jews, Palestinians brought their catastrophe on themselves.

The day I arrived in Kyiv, someone handed me a thick book. It was the first academic study of Stepan Bandera to be published in Ukraine. Bandera is a Ukrainian hero: he fought against the Soviet regime; dozens of monuments to him have appeared since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. He ended up in Germany after the Second World War, led a partisan movement from exile, and died after being poisoned by a K.G.B. agent, in 1959. Bandera was also a committed fascist, an ideologue who wanted to build a totalitarian regime. These facts are detailed in the book, which has sold about twelve hundred copies. (Many bookstores have refused to carry it.) Russia makes gleeful use of Ukraine’s Bandera cult as evidence that Ukraine is a Nazi state. Ukrainians mostly respond by whitewashing Bandera’s legacy. It is ever so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea that someone could have been the enemy of your enemy and yet not a benevolent force. A victim and also a perpetrator. Or vice versa. ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described what Jan Tomasz Gross wrote. It also misstated when Anna’s parents decided to kill themselves and Anna’s age at the time of those events.

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History of the Holocaust by Deborah Lipstadt LAST REVIEWED: 26 May 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199840731-0127

Many historians consider the Holocaust, the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews during 1941–1945, as one of the defining moments, if not a touchstone, of the political, ethical, and religious discourse of the 20th century. It is the only time that a state, as opposed to an insurgent entity or a group of independent actors, determined to murder every member of a particular group, irrespective of their age, gender, education, location, political or religious outlook, or national identity. Any Jew across the European continent and beyond (e.g., Libya, Crete, and Rhodes) whom the Germans could lay their hands on became a potential victim. As a result of this program, which the Germans called the Final Solution, nearly two-thirds of world Jewry was murdered. The Nazis considered killing the Jews such an urgent and necessary act that even when they were losing the war they pursued this goal. From the earliest history of the Nazi Party in the 1920s, the party cast the Jew as an existential threat to the German nation. While the Nazis made the threat posed by the Jews a cornerstone of their ideology and were intent on murdering all Jews they could find, they also targeted other groups. The first to be mass murdered were those inhabitants of the Reich—“Aryans” and Jews—whom the Nazis deemed to be physically or mentally disabled and consequently “unworthy of life.” German authorities also severely persecuted German homosexuals and murdered many eastern European (particularly Slav and Polish) intellectuals and religious leaders. They also killed two to three million Soviet prisoners of war. Millions of slave laborers, particularly from eastern Europe, served in horrendous conditions, and many died as a result. The mass killings of Jews took part in two phases. The first one started in June 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Conducted by special German units called the Einsatzgruppen and Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) with extensive aid of the Wehrmacht (German army) and non-German local militia, police, and civilians, these mass shootings resulted in the murder of over a million Jews. By the end of 1941, German authorities, concerned about the emotional toll the shooting was taking on the shooters, introduced gas buses and then gas chambers.

The vast geographic reach of the Holocaust presents a challenge to historians who want to address its broadest contours. There is an immense body of research on a myriad of aspects of the topic. This makes the need for syntheses all the more crucial. Hilberg 1985 is one of the earliest comprehensive studies of the bureaucratic structure of the Final Solution. It is highly detailed and remains a standard. More-readable volumes include Friedländer 1997 and Friedländer 2007 , which take a broader perspective and focus on the victims as well as the perpetrators. Dwork and van Pelt 2002 and Bergen 2009 were written as textbooks for college use, while Longerich 2010 is more recent and includes new archival information. Berenbaum and Peck 2002 and Friedman 2011 are particularly useful in that they each contain a range of articles by leading scholars in the field. Hayes 2015 is a most useful teaching tool with long selections on most of the topics that would be included in an introductory history of the Holocaust. Hayes and Roth 2010 contains articles by leading scholars who both review a particular aspect of the Holocaust and assess the state of the current research on that aspect.

Berenbaum, Michael, and Abraham J. Peck, eds. The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

This edited volume contains articles by experts in the field on many of the issues central to the history of the Holocaust, including anti-Semitism within Nazi ideology, the bureaucracy of the Nazi state, the background and motivation of the killers, the concentration camp system, Jewish leadership and resistance, rescuers, onlookers, and the survivor experience.

Bergen, Doris L. War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust . 2d ed. Critical Issues in World and International History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

A concise history of the period that also asks some of the broader and more-theoretical questions. An excellent starting point for those with little background or who want an overview of the history and the underlying theoretical issues.

Dwork, Debórah, and Robert Jan van Pelt. Holocaust: A History . London: John Murray, 2002.

This comprehensive textbook artfully weaves together historical data with memoirs and other firsthand sources. Currently, this is one of the best texts for classroom use or to introduce someone to this vast topic.

Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews . Vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 . New York: HarperCollins, 1997.

This is a sweeping, authoritative, and exceptionally readable account of the initial years of Nazi rule. Friedländer weaves together evidence from the perpetrators as well as the victims.

Friedländer, Saul. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 . 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history, this volume elegantly melds the story of the persecution with the experience of the victims.

Friedman, Jonathan C., ed. The Routledge History of the Holocaust . Routledge Histories. New York: Routledge, 2011.

An exceptionally useful edited volume on an array of aspects of the history of the Holocaust, by leading figures in the field. Many of the authors pay particular attention to the evolution of their historical field. The volume serves, therefore, both as a historical and historiographical tool.

Hayes, Peter, ed. How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Hayes believes the title’s question is answerable. This compendium of highly readable selections from participants, witnesses, and scholars addresses the fundamental issues that ultimately “explain” the Holocaust. It can be a text for a Holocaust history course as well as of interest to those already familiar with the topic.

Hayes, Peter, and John K. Roth, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies . Oxford Handbooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

This profoundly useful book recognizes that study of Holocaust history crosses traditional boundaries of academic disciplines. The forty-seven essays in the book summarize the state of the field at the time of publication and delineate future challenges. Each essay is an excellent starting point for someone interested in exploring a particular topic in depth.

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews . New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985.

Considered one of the most authoritative texts on the destruction process, this book eschews victims’ testimony and relies only on German documents. Though Hilberg addresses the destruction process, not the Jewish response, in a few places he attributes to Jews an ingrained pattern of anticipatory compliance. These observations remain quite controversial.

Longerich, Peter. Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews . New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

In this expanded version of his German-language Politik der Vernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1998), Longerich analyzes the ideological, political, and personal sources of the genocide. Relying on a wide range of documents, including some that were released only after the unification of Germany, Longerich argues that the Nazi policy concerning the Jews was a central, not an ancillary, aspect of their other policies.

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Genocide Studies Program

Between the ascension of the Nazi regime to power in Germany in 1933 and the defeat of the German army in 1945, over six million civilians perished at the hands of German forces, their military allies, and their civilian associates.   The word “Holocaust,” with Greek roots meaning “destruction of life by fire” and a common translation of the Hebrew word “Shoah,” is nearly universally understood to refer to these events.

The murderous effort rested on an ideology of racial superiority and aspirations of racial “purity.”  Jews were by far the largest component of the victims.  Roma and Sinti (both commonly – but sometimes derogatorily – referred to as “Gypsies”) were also targeted, as were the physically disabled, the mentally disabled, and members of several religious minorities.  Political opponents, as well as Slavic and Russian civilians, were also murdered in large quantities, although whether these mass atrocities constituted part of a genocide is less certain.

The Holocaust unfolded over time.  When the Nazi regime came to power, it was already imbued with an ideology of racial ideology – which happened to comport with its own sense of it political enemies.   It began establishing concentration camps shortly after coming to power.  The regime also systematically discriminated against Jews (and other groups it perceived to be racially inferior) in the economic, political, and civic realms.  November 1938 pogroms known as “Kristallnacht” demonstrated that the German police would tolerate (and, indeed, encourage) violence against Jews and their property.  Once World War II broke out the following year, the German government expanded its concentration camp system, and soon converted them into an infrastructure for mass killing.  Meanwhile, an even greater number of Jews and other civilians would be killed outside of the camps, either through the Nazi SS Einsatzgroppen (mobile paramilitary units) or the actions of Nazi supporters on either side of the front lines in Eastern Europe.

The Holocaust is undoubtedly the seminal event for the field of genocide studies.  Even as scholars examine new and different cases from a variety of perspectives, the foundation of the field lies in effort to understand the organization, behavior, and psychology of different actors  – those who killed, those who stood by, those who perished, those who attempted to help, and those who survived – the Holocaust. Many of the field’s most important scholars continue to address these issues today.

A central component of the Genocide Studies Program has been Dr. Dori Laub’s  study of trauma among Holocaust victims, which makes extensive use of Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

Videotestimony Pilot Study of Psychiatrically Hospitalized Holocaust Survivors

Principal Investigator: Dori Laub , MD, Deputy Director (Trauma Studies), Genocide Studies Program. For more details please visit the Traumatic Psychosis: A Videotestimony Research Project website.

The purpose of this research is to systematically assess the effects and potential psychotherapeutic benefits of reconstructing traumatic Holocaust experiences. The reconstruction of the history of personal trauma were conducted through the creation of a videotaped testimony and a multi-disciplinary analysis of the testimony. This study addressed two hypotheses:

• Is massive psychic trauma related to chronic severe mental illness with psychotic decompensation that leads to either chronic hospitalization or multiple psychiatric hospitalizations?
• Does a therapeutic intervention such as video testimony that helps build a narrative for the traumatic experience and gives it a coherent expression help in alleviating its symptoms and changing its course? May these changes be attributed to direct intervention (through the occurrence of the testimonial event itself), or through indirect intervention (through the impact on treatment planning, involvement with family members or the survivor community, or the knowledge that the videotaped testimony will be made available to others)?

A 1993 examination of approximately 5,000 long-term psychiatric inpatients in Israel identified about 900 Holocaust survivors. These patients were not treated as unique: trauma-related illnesses were neglected in diagnosis and decades-long treatment. Evaluation by the Israeli Ministry of Health concluded some 300 of them no longer required inpatient psychiatric hospitalization; specialized hostels (similar to nursing homes) were established on the premises of three psychiatric hospitals. We hypothesize that many of these patients could have avoided lengthy if not life-long psychiatric hospitalizations, had they been able or enabled by their treaters and by society at large to more openly share their severe persecution history. Instead, their traumatic experiences remain encapsulated, causing the survivor to lead a double life: a robot-like semblance to normality with incessant haunting by nightmares and flashbacks. Attention to the particular features of these patients traumatic experiences is of particular importance in the rehabilitation and the re-evaluation of these patients whose initial hospitalization and diagnoses long predate more recent theoretical developments and clinical formulations (e.g., differential diagnosis of PTSD, testimony as therapy).

Phase II of the videotestimony study which is now underway, consists of an in-depth analysis of the videotexts by an interdisciplinary team of experts, in order to define the unique features of the traumatic psychotic disorder these patients most likely suffer from.

The Slave Labor Video Testimony Project

The Foundation for “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” has organized an international project to collect 550 video and audio testimonies from former forced and slave laborers in the German “Third Reich.”  Ex-laborers from 25 different countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, are being interviewed. The project requested the GSP’s Trauma Project to conduct 20 videotestimonies with Jewish Holocaust Survivors in the United States. The names of these survivors were obtained through the Fortunoff Video Archive and through the Connecticut Child Survivor Organization. After proper preparation, the videotestimonies were filmed on the European PAL format and on the American NTSC format, in parallel with professional audiotaping. The testimonies were all given in English and lasted between two and four hours. All subjects also filled out a symptom checklist PCL-9 for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which will be repeated within a year of their testimony to see whether the testimonial event has brought about possible symptom changes and symptomotology.

The twenty videotestimonies, taken in Dr. Laub’s office in New Haven, Connecticut, have all been completed and transcribed and translated into German. The PAL videocassettes were sent to an audio visual lab in Israel to be transferred to an enhanced BETA format.  After that enhancement, they were shipped to Hagen University in Ludenscheid, Germany, which coordinates this international study, along with their translated transcripts and the consent forms, as well as summaries. They were also sent to the Foundation for “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” This project has created a substantial database, useful for future historical, psychological and linguistic studies, for which definite funding is needed.

Dori Laub, Presentations 2005-2011

HIST B323 History of the Holocaust

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Guide created by Scott Libson. Updated in January 2024 by Catherine J. Minter. Feel free to contact Catherine if you need help.

The Holocaust

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Library of Congress Subject Headings:

• Anti-Nazi Movement
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Fiction
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Germany
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Historiography
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Influence
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• Basic Bibliography of the Holocaust (Yad Vashem) Comprehensive and current, this bibliography is subdivided into various Holocaust-related topics and includes about four to twenty-five books on each topic.
• Bibliography of Holocaust Literature by Abraham J. Edelheit; Hershel Edelheit Call Number: Wells Library - Stacks -- Z6374.H6 E33 1986 (a second copy with the same call number is in the Wells Library Reference Reading Room) ISBN: 081337233X Publication Date: 1986-11-09 This is a massive, if dated, bibliography of English-language materials on the Holocaust. It includes an author index, introductory essays, and some annotations. See also the Edelheits' supplement , with 6,500 additional entries, published in 1990.
• The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust by Donald L. Niewyk; Francis R. Nicosia Call Number: E-book, also available in print: Wells Library - Stacks -- D804.3 .N54 2000 ISBN: 9780231505901 Publication Date: 2000 This invaluable resource provides a multidimensional survey of the Holocaust, essentially integrating five separate books into one comprehensive reference tool: a historical overview; a guide to Holocaust controversies; an A-to-Z encyclopedia of people, places, and terms; a chronology; and a comprehensive resource guide. Whether used separately for their individual merits or approached as an integrated whole, the five sections of this informative volume constitute an indispensable contribution to the study of the Holocaust.
• European Jewish Research Archive A free-to-use and comprehensive repository of social research on European Jews since 1990.
• The Oryx Holocaust Sourcebook by William R. Fernekes Call Number: Wells Library - Reference Reading Room -- Z6374.H6 F47 2002 ISBN: 1573562955 Publication Date: 2002-05-30 The Oryx Holocaust Sourcebook provides a comprehensive selection of high quality resources in the field of Holocaust studies. The Sourcebook's 17 chapters cover general reference works; narrative histories; monographs in the social sciences; fiction, drama, and poetry; books for children and young adults; periodicals; primary sources; electronic resources in various formats; audiovisual materials; photographs; music; film and video; educational and teaching materials; and information on organizations, museums, and memorials. In addition, each chapter begins with a concise overview essay.

Selective bibliography of academic articles covering all of the fields of Jewish studies as well as the study of Eretz Israel and the State of Israel. RAMBI is based largely on the collections of the National Library of Israel. Includes references to articles in Hebrew, Latin, or Cyrillic letters.

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Bibliographies The bibliographies "list only materials that are in the Museum Library’s collection or available online. They are not meant to be exhaustive. In most cases, annotations are provided to help the user determine each item’s focus, and call numbers for the Museum’s Library are given in parentheses following each citation."
• Children of the Holocaust by Paul R. Bartrop; Eve E. Grimm Call Number: E-book ISBN: 9781440868535 Publication Date: 2020 This important reference work highlights a number of disparate themes relating to the experience of children during the Holocaust, showing their vulnerability and how some heroic people sought to save their lives amid the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime. In addition to more than 125 entries, this book features 10 illuminating primary source documents, ranging from personal accounts to Nazi statements regarding what the fate of Jewish children should be to statements from refugee leaders considering how to help Jewish children after World War II ended.
• The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust by Shmuel Spector (Editor); Geoffrey Wigoder (Editor); Elie Wiesel (Introduction by) Call Number: Wells Library - Reference Reading Room -- DS135.E8 E45 2001 ISBN: 0814793568 Publication Date: 2001-07-01 "Today throughout much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, only fragmentary remnants of once thriving Jewish communities can be found as evidence of more than two thousand years of vibrant Jewish presence among the nations of the world. These communities, many of them ancient, were systematically destroyed by Hitler's forces during the Holocaust. Yet each of their stories-from small village enclaves to large urban centers-is unique in its details and represents one of the countless intertwined threads that comprise the rich tapestry of Jewish history. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust captures these lost images. In three volumes, it chronicles the people, habits and customs of more than 6,500 Jewish communities that thrived during the early part of the twentieth century only to be changed irrevocably by the war."
• Encyclopedia of the Holocaust by Schmuel Spector (Editor); Robert Rozett (Editor) Call Number: Wells Library - Reference Reading Room -- D804.25 .E53 2000 ISBN: 0816043337 Publication Date: 2000 Written in association with Yad Vashem, this encyclopedia features eight essays on the Holocaust on such topics as the history of European Jewry, Jewish achievements and contributions to European culture, and the rise of antisemitism.
• The Holocaust: an Encyclopedia and Document Collection [4 Volumes] by Paul R. Bartrop (Editor); Michael Dickerman (Editor) Call Number: E-book, also available in print: Wells Library - Undergraduate Services - Core Collection -- D804.25 .H655 2017 ISBN: 9781440840845 Publication Date: 2017 This four-volume set provides reference entries, primary documents, and personal accounts from individuals who lived through the Holocaust that allow readers to better understand the cultural, political, and economic motivations that spurred the Final Solution.

An encyclopedia with extra features concerning the Holocaust and the principal figures involved.

The Holocaust Encyclopedia includes items on all aspects of the Holocaust and the central figures involved in the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jewish population of Europe. In addition to the searchable entries of the Encyclopedia itself, the site, sponsored by the National Holocaust Museum, includes historical films, photographs,lists of book titles and scholarly journals, and guides to archival resources, among them a guide to oral histories. There are additional materials, such as a search of identity numbers, with biographies, and resources for the study of genocide in general.

• The Holocaust Encyclopedia by Walter Laqueur (Editor); Judith Tydor Baumel Call Number: E-book, also available in print: Wells Library - Reference Reading Room -- D804.25 .H66 2001 ISBN: 0300084323 Publication Date: 2001 The Holocaust has been the subject of countless books, works of art, and memorials. Fifty-five years after the fact the world still ponders the enormity of this disaster. The Holocaust Encyclopedia is the only comprehensive single-volume work of reference providing both a reflective overview of the subject and abundant detail concerning major events, policy decisions, cities, and individuals.
• Holocaust Survivors by Emily Taitz (Editor) Call Number: Wells Library - Undergraduate Services - Core Collection -- D804.3 .T34 2007 ISBN: 9780313336768 Publication Date: 2007 Although there are more and more Holocaust memoirs on the market, this essential collection is the first to present such a large number of biographical profiles of survivors for a broad readership. Holocaust Survivors: A Biographical Dictionary comprises 278 entries on more than 500 survivors of the World War II genocide. The profiles, averaging 500 words, are mostly of Jews, both individuals and family members, from throughout Europe. Organized alphabetically, the essays cover their background, circumstances and ordeals during the war, aftermath, and life achievements, including family and career. Most are on ordinary people who have extraordinary life stories.
• Perpetrating the Holocaust: Leaders, Enablers, and Collaborators by Paul R. Bartrop; Eve E. Grimm Call Number: E-book, also available in print: ISBN: 9781440858970 Publication Date: 2019 Weaving together a number of disparate themes relating to Holocaust perpetrators, this book shows how Nazi Germany propelled a vast number of Europeans to try to re-engineer the population base of the continent through mass murder.
• The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume I by Geoffrey P. Megargee (Editor) Call Number: E-book, also available in print: Wells Library - Stacks -- D805.A2 U55 2009 ISBN: 9780253353283 Publication Date: 2009 The Nazis and their allies ran more than 44,000 camps, ghettos, and other sites of detention, persecution, forced labor, and murder during the Holocaust. Few people know about the breadth of the Nazi camp system and the conditions in those places—including the broad range of prisoner experiences. The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 , aims to answer basic questions about as many of those sites as possible. As of July 2020, three of the expected seven volumes have been published. Volumes I and II are available for free from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum . The link above goes to the IUCAT record for volume I. Here are the links for volume II and volume III .

Freely Available Websites:

• Guide to Holocaust Websites List created by Professor Mark Roseman. Largely primary sources, but also many secondary sources.
• AHEYM: The Archive of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories The Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM—the acronym means "homeward" in Yiddish) includes approximately 800 hours of Yiddish-language interviews with 350 individuals, most of whom were born between 1900 and 1930. The interviews were conducted in Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, and Slovakia. The interviews include: linguistic and dialectological data; oral histories of Jewish life in Eastern Europe; Holocaust testimonials; musical performances (including Yiddish folk songs, liturgical and Hasidic melodies, and macaronic songs); folklore, including anecdotes, jokes, stories, children's ditties, folk remedies, and Purim plays; reflections on contemporary Jewish life in the region, and; guided tours by local residents of sites of Jewish memory in the region.
• Arolsen Archives The Arolsen Archives are an international center on Nazi persecution with the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of National Socialism. The collection has information on about 17.5 million people and belongs to UNESCO’s Memory of the World. It contains documents on the various victim groups targeted by the Nazi regime and is an important source of knowledge for society today.
• Duane Mezga Holocaust Sites Photograph Collection The Duane Mezga Holocaust Sites photograph collection consists of 682 digitized Kodachrome 64 color slides. Almost all of the photographs were taken in 1992, of concentration camps and other historically significant sites related to the Holocaust. Twenty-one sites in Austria, then-Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland are included. The photographs were taken using the progressive-realization technique, which captures the experience of walking through a site. Memorials present at these sites were a focus of the documentation.
• Holocaust Denial on Trial Documents the trial of David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt.
• Nuremberg Trials Project The Harvard Law School Library's Nuremberg Trials Project is an open-access initiative to create and present digitized images or full-text versions of the Library's Nuremberg documents, descriptions of each document, and general information about the trials.
• Pogrom: November 1938--Testimonies from Kristallnacht (Wiener Library) In the months following November 1938, Alfred Wiener and his colleagues at the Central Jewish Information Office in Amsterdam collected over 350 contemporary testimonies and reports of the November Pogrom in Germany and Austria. These documents are now available here, for the first time in English.
• Simon Wiesenthal Center Digital Archives The Digital Archives images are owned by the Simon Wiesenthal Center Library and Archives. The Archives database and low-resolution images are available here.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Digitized Collections Includes interviews, objects, newspapers, books, and many other types of material. You can also limit results based on events, cities, camps, and ghettos.
• Yad Vashem Documents Archive Includes posters, personal documentation, official documentation, lists, letters, memoirs, testimonies, diaries, and legal documentation. Advanced search allows you to limit results to English-language documents.
• Yizkor Books at the New York Public Library Yizkor (memorial) books document Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Most yizkor books are in Hebrew and/or Yiddish. Most are available for download.
• Conditions & Politics in Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1945 Features full-text documents received in the British Foreign Office from all European states under Nazi occupation during World War II.

The Fortunoff Archive and its affiliates recorded the testimonies of willing individuals with first-hand experience of the Nazi persecutions, including those who were in hiding, survivors, bystanders, resistants, and liberators. Please note: To access users need to create an account and submit a request.  Click more for instructions to create account and submit request, as well as more details about the archive.

The Fortunoff Archive currently holds more than 4,400 testimonies, which are comprised of over 12,000 recorded hours of videotape. Testimonies were produced in cooperation with thirty-six affiliated projects across North America, South America, Europe, and Israel. Testimonies were recorded in whatever language the witness preferred, and range in length from 30 minutes to over 40 hours (recorded over several sessions). Create Account & Request Testimony: 1. To create an account select Log In, and then Join Now. Users will then receive a confirmation email. 2. Login and then enter a search term. Click on a testimony in the search results and request access. Please note that records truncate last names of those who gave testimony to protect their privacy. If you are looking for a specific person’s testimony, either shorten their last name to the first initial (“Eva B.”) or contact the archive directly. You only need to request access to one testimony to obtain viewing access for the entire collection. 3. Once the approval email is received, users may view testimonies. A browser refresh may be necessary.

Digital access to 170 German-language titles of books and pamphlets. The collection presents anti-Semitism as an issue in politics, economics, religion, and education.

Most of the writings date from the 1920s and 1930s and many are directly connected with Nazi groups. The works are principally anti-Semitic, but include writings on other groups as well, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jesuits, and the Freemasons. Also included are history, pseudo-history, and fiction.

Human Rights Studies Online is a research and learning database providing comparative documentation, analysis, and interpretation of major human rights violations and atrocity crimes worldwide from 1900 to 2010.

The collection includes primary and secondary materials across multiple media formats and content types for each selected event, including Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Darfur, and more than thirty additional subjects.

Digital archive covering all aspects of 20th-century human migration. includes firsthand accounts from reputable sources around the world, covering such important events as post-World War II Jewish resettlement, South African apartheid, Latin American migrations to the United States and much more.

Contains reports gathered every day between the early 1940s and 1996 by a U.S. government organization that became part of the CIA . These include translated and English-language radio and television broadcasts, newspapers, periodicals and government documents, as well as an analysis of the reports.

An archive of primary source documents, covering the repatriation and emigration of the Displaced Persons and survivors of the Holocaust and World War II.

Files include original reports on orphans and Unaccompanied Children Under UNRRA Care, Voluntary Societies British Zone Monthly Reports, 1949-, Welfare Work Amongst Jewish Prison Inmates, DPs in Assembly Stations, 1950, Displaced persons and prisoners of war to and from Italy, Complaints about Russian refugees and displaced persons (DPs); allegations of mistreatment of Soviet nationals, and Repatriation and disposal of prisoners of war, surrendered personnel, displaced persons etc.

The USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive allows users to search through and view the 51,537 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide currently available in the Archive that were conducted in 61 countries and 39 languages. Initially a repository of Holocaust testimony, the Visual History Archive has expanded to include testimonies from the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China and the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.

Digital access to the archives of the Wiener Library, London, the first archive to collect evidence of the Holocaust and the anti-semitic activities of the German Nazi Party.

Includes documentary evidence collected in several different programmes: the eyewitness accounts which were collected before, during and after the Second World War, from people fleeing the Nazi oppression, a large collection of photographs of pre-war Jewish life, the activities of the Nazis, and the ghettoes and camps, a collection of postcards of synagogues in Germany and eastern Europe, most since destroyed, a unique collection of Nazi propaganda publications including a large collection of 'educational' children's' books, and the card index of biographical details of prominent figures in Nazi Germany, many with portrait photographs. Pamphlets, bulletins and journals published by the Wiener Library to record and disseminate the research of the Institute are also included.

Online access to over 500,000 pages of previously classified government documents.

Declassified Documents Reference Service provides searching and fulltext access to declassified U.S. government documents. Covering major international events from the Cold War to the Vietnam War and beyond, this single source enables users to locate key information underpinning studies in international relations, American studies, United States foreign and domestic policy studies, journalism and more.

Digital access to correspondence, reports and analyses, memos of conversations, and personal interviews exploring such themes as U.S.-Vatican relations, Vatican’s role in World War II, Jewish refugees, Italian anti-Jewish laws during the papacy of Pius XII, and the pope’s personal knowledge of the treatment of European Jews.

Includes materials on political affairs, Jewish people, refugee and relief activities, German-owned property in Rome, property rights, and the Vatican Bank. In addition, there are materials on Axis diplomats, war criminals, protocols and religious statements, and records of the peace efforts of the Vatican.

• Archives of the Holocaust : an international collection of selected documents by Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (general editors) Call Number: Wells Library - Research Coll. - D810.J4 A73 Publication Date: 1989- Contains reproductions of files and documents from a number of relief and charitable organizations dealing with the plight of the Jews during the 1930s and 1940s.

• The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 Call Number: e-books ISBN: 9783110435191 Publication Date: 2019- This landmark collection of primary sources provides unique first-hand insights into the persecution and murder of the Jews of Europe under Nazi rule. The documents, all translated from the language of the original source, range from the police orders and administrative decrees issued by the Nazi apparatus across Germany and occupied Europe to the diaries and letters of Jewish men, women, and children facing discrimination, impoverishment, violent assaults, incarceration, deportation, and death.
• The trial of German major war criminals by the International Military Tribunal sitting at Nuremberg, Germany [e-book] by H.M. Attorney-general by H.M. Stationery Off Call Number: E-book Publication Date: 1946-1951

Scholarly Journals Related to the Holocaust

• Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal Call Number: Electronic resource

Databases Containing Scholarly Articles

Provides full-text coverage of magazine, newspaper, and scholarly journal articles for most academic disciplines.

This multi-disciplinary database provides full-text for more than 4,500 journals, including full text for more than 3,700 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.

Full-text access to a searchable online archive of academic e-journals and e-books in the Humanities and Social Sciences from and about Central and Eastern Europe.

Provides access to all journals and articles, more than 4,370 open access e-books, and over 9,400 open access grey literature items (institutional reports, working papers, government documents, white papers, etc.). Currently, the archive’s content comes from over 1400 publishers. Indiana University Libraries’ subscription does not include full access to all e-books and grey literature, so some paywalls are expected.

Full text database with a focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas.

GenderWatch is a full text database of nearly 400 periodicals and other publications that focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas. Publications include academic and scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, regional publications, books, booklets and pamphlets, conference proceedings, and government, and special reports.

Index to journals, chapters and theses about world history, 1450 to present.

Covers modern world history (excluding the United States and Canada which are covered in the database America: History and Life) from 1450 to the present. It currently indexes about 2,300 journals in 40 languages, with indexing also for some books and dissertations. Most of the article citations include abstracts of 75-100 words.

Provides searchable full-text of historical runs of important scholarly journals in the humanities, arts, sciences, ecology, and business.

JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization established with the assistance of The Mellon Foundation, provides complete runs of hundreds of important journal titles in more than 30 arts, humanities, and social science disciplines. These scholarly journals can be browsed online and searched, and the page images can be printed for those available in full-text. The IUB Libraries subscribe to current content for only some titles available through JSTOR.  All journals in JSTOR start with the first volume. Many include content up to a "moving wall" of 3-5 years ago, although some journals have a fixed ending date for their content in JSTOR. Please check individual journals for exact dates of coverage.  For information about access to this resource for IU alumni, contact the Indiana University Alumni Association .

PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) indexes articles, books, studies, selected official documents and other resources on public policy issues, public administration, law, politics and government.

Includes journal articles, books, government documents, pamphlets and the reports of public and private bodies.  Also indexes publications in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Print source: PAIS bulletin (1915-1990), PAIS Foreign Language Index (1968-1990), PAIS International in Print (1991-)

Access to political science, public policy, and international relations journals. Also includes thousands of recent full-text doctoral dissertations on political science topics, together with working papers, conference proceedings, country reports, policy papers and other sources.

Provides full text access and indexing for e-journals and e-books from a variety of scholarly publishers. Covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.

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The Holocaust: Primary Sources

Primary sources.

Here is a sampling of just some of the digital collections that you can find on the web. Please keep in mind that online collections of primary sources often include commentaries, essays, and other text that is secondary and should be used as such.

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: YouTube Channel Videos created by the museum in Washington, D.C. about their collections and exhibits, as well as topics like genocide.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Collections Search Repository of Holocaust evidence that documents the fate of victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others. The collection contains documents, artifacts, photos, films, books, and testimonies.
• USC Shoah Foundation: Visual History Archive Online An online portal that allows users to search through and view video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide.
• Lost Art Internet Database Data on cultural objects lost as a result of Nazi persecution or the direct consequences of the Second World War.
• Aristides de Sousa Mendes Virtual Museum Virtual exhibits and online resources about the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux during World War II who signed 30,000 visas for people fleeing Nazi persecution.
• European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) Document Blog An international project providing online access to information about dispersed sources relating to the Holocaust.
• Yad Vashem - The World Holocaust Remembrance Center A pioneer of Holocaust museums worldwide, the center places great emphasis on educating the younger generations about the Holocaust. The Holocaust Resource Center includes sources from the Yad Vashem archives and Holocaust survivor testimonies. The Digital Collections include photo and document archives, as well as a database of Holocaust victims.

Testimonies

• USC Shoah Foundation: YouTube Channel Audio-visual interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides.
• Voices of the Holocaust Audio recordings and transcripts of Holocaust survivor testimonies from the British Library.
• National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism Online collection of eyewitness testimonies, as well as vivid photographic material and documents.
• Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust Audio recordings of Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies from the British Library.
• Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies Collects, records and preserves Holocaust witness testimonies, and makes its collection available to researchers, educators, and the general public.
• Gathering the Voices Oral testimonies from Holocaust refugees and survivors who went to Scotland.
• 70 Voices: Victims, Perpetrators and Bystanders Explores the Holocaust through 70 sources – including diaries, letters, testimonies and poems – created by victims, survivors, perpetrators and other witnesses. A digital Holocaust Educational Trust project marking 70 years since the end of the Holocaust in 2015.
• Voices of the Holocaust A portal for the exploration of digitized, restored, transcribed, and translated interviews with Holocaust survivors conducted by Dr. David P. Boder in 1946. Hosted by the Galvin Library at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
• The Avalon Project: The International Military Tribunal for Germany Contents of The Nuremberg Trials Collection at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.
• The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy All twentieth century documents held by the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, including many that related to the events leading up to and after World War II.
• Nuremberg Trials Project Examine trial transcripts, briefs, document books, evidence files, and other papers from the trials of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany. Hosted by the Harvard Law School Library
• Indictments from Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings held by United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals Indictments from the 12 trials held after the Nuremberg Trials by the the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Preserved through the Library of Congress.
• Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings held by United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals This 15-volume series, also known as “The Green Series,” focuses on the 12 trials of almost 200 defendants between 1946-1949. Digitized by the Library of Congress.
• The Nizkor Project Along with many other primary sources, the digitized, complete transcripts of the Eichmann trial can be found at this website.

German History

• DigiBaeck: German-Jewish History Online A growing treasury of artifacts that document the rich heritage of German-speaking Jewry in the modern era. Created by the Leo Baeck Institute (New York and Berlin).
• German History in Documents and Images Original historical materials documenting German history from the beginning of the early modern period to the present held by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.

Nazi Propaganda

• Nazi and East German Propaganda Site maintained by Randall Bytwerk, a professor emeritus at Calvin University.
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Holocaust-Era Assets

Records and Research

Researching Holocaust-Era assets at NARA can be a daunting task, in part because of the vast quantity of records, some 20 million pages of textual records (as well as nontextual records) directly or indirectly relating to Holocaust-Era assets. These records were created or compiled by over 30 federal agencies. Researchers using these records, first and foremost, must remember that the records follow or reflect functions and activities and are not, at the macro level, arranged according to subject; they are arranged by the entity that created or received the records. So researchers need to know which government agency or agencies were responsible for certain functions and activities. This information can be gained by various means, including, and especially, by looking at published and unpublished National Archives finding aids , by communicating with others involved in similar research, and using the research tools on NARA's website. Additionally, researchers should consult secondary literature. Besides providing information about subjects of interest, books, articles, and reports often provide specific citations to NARA's holdings. Researchers should also take the time to study the contents of these web pages as it will save them time later as they navigate NARA's holdings of records relating to Holocaust-Era assets.

Papers and speeches about doing research in the National Archives relating to Holocaust-Era Assets

Articles in the record.

• Searching for Records Relating to Nazi Gold, Part I.   The Record , May 1997, by Greg Bradsher.
• Searching for Records Relating to Nazi Gold, Part II.   The Record , May 1998, by Greg Bradsher.
• Documenting Nazi Plunder of European Art:   Records in the National Archives Provide Research Base for Tracking Works Seized During War.  The Record , November 1997, by Greg Bradsher.
• Searching for Documents on Nazi Gold .  The Record , May 1997, by Greg Bradsher.

Articles in Prologue

• Monuments Men and Nazi Treasures: U.S. Occupation Forces Faced a Myriad of Problems In Sorting Out Riches Hidden by the Third Reich (Summer 2013) Tells the true tale of the men and women of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFA&A) Section of the U.S. Army, also known as "Monuments Men."
• Archives Receives Original Nazi Documents That "Legalized" Persecution of Jews (Winter 2002) Describes how the records of the U.S. Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality came into the possession of the National Archives.
• A Time to Act: The Beginning of the Fritz Kolbe Story, 1900–1943 (Spring 2002) Recounts how Kolbe, a mid-level official in the German Foreign Office, supplied the Allies with some of their most important intelligence of World War II.
• Spoils of War Returned: U.S. Restitution of Nazi-Looted Cultural Treasures to the USSR, 1945–1959 (Spring 2002) The story of how the United States undertook an unprecedented program of cultural restitution in an effort to restore displaced treasures to the countries from which the Nazis had confiscated them.
• Nazi Looted Art: The Holocaust Records Preservation Project (Summer 2002) The Holocaust Records Project is providing greater access to the records that tell the story of artworks and artifacts damaged and looted during World War II.
• Nazi Gold: The Merkers Mine Treasure (Spring 1999) American troops discover gold and art in a German mine at the end of World War II.

Papers and Other Information:

• Berenbaum, Michael. Testimony before the Nazi War Criminals Interagency Working Group , June 24, 1999.
• Bradsher, Greg, German Administration of American Companies , May 9, 2000. (Revised June 6, 2001)
• Bradsher, Greg. Archivists, Archival Records, and Looted Cultural Property Research . Paper presented at the Vilnius International Forum on Holocaust-Era Looted Cultural Assets, Lithuania, October 3, 2000.
• Bradsher, Greg. Art Looting Records and Research at the National Archives . Presented to the National Archives Assembly on April 17, 2001.
• Doing Looted Art Research at the National Archives . Talk given at the Provenance and Due: A Workshop/Conference, New York University, April 29, 2000. Sponsored by the International Foundation for Art Research and New York University.
• Bradsher, Greg. Holocaust-Era Assets Records and Research at the National Archives . Speech given by Greg Bradsher at the Conference on "New Records-New Perspectives: World War II, the Holocaust, and the Rise of the State of Israel" (December 13-16) Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, December 14, 1998.
• Bradsher, Greg. Investigative Reporters, the National Archives, and the Search for 'Nazi Gold' and Other Treasures . Speech given at the annual meeting of the Investigative Reporters and Editors, Kansas City, Missouri, June 5, 1999.
• Bradsher, Greg. Nazi Gold: The Merkers Mine Treasure . Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration , Spring 1999, vol. 31, no. 1.
• Bradsher, Greg. Research, Restitution, and Remembrance: The Federal Government and Holocaust-Era Assets 1996-2001 . Speech given to the B-nai Israel Synagogue, April 20, 2001, Wilmington, North Carolina.
• Bradsher, Greg. Researching Holocaust-Era Assets Records 1996-1998 . Presentation Given at the Society of American Archivists' Government Records Section Meeting, September 4, 1998, Orlando, Florida.
• Bradsher, Greg. Speech given at the annual meeting of the Society for History Government, Archives II, College Park, Maryland, March 19, 1999.
• Bradsher, Greg. Turning history into justice: Holocaust-Era Assets Records, Research, and Restitution . A "War and Civilization Lecture" given at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, North Carolina, April 19, 2001.
• Bradsher, Greg. Turning history into justice: the search for records relating to Holocaust-Era Assets at the National Archives . Paper given at the Society of American Archivists, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 27, 1999.
• Kleiman, Miriam. My Search for "GOLD" at the National Archives . Paper given at the Society of American Archivists, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 27, 1999.
• Marchesano, Louis. Classified Records, Nazi Collecting, and Looted Art: An Art Historian's Perspective . Paper delivered to the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles, June 24, 1999.
• Rickman, Gregg. The Truth Shall Set You Free: The Archives and the Swiss Bank . Paper delivered at the Society of American Archivists, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 27, 1999. Rickman later discussed his new book, Swiss Banks and Jewish Souls, at the National Archives' Author Lecture and Booksigning event on September 9, 1999.
• Sullivan, Steve. Marta's List: The Pursuit of Holocaust Survivors' Lost Insurance Claims .
• Truman Library opens papers on Post-World War II Jewish history . The Harry S. Truman Library has opened three manuscript collections that relate to different aspects of the history of the Jewish people in the years following World War II.

Related Posts on The Text Message Blog

The Text Message , which features posts related to NARA's holdings, includes many entries related to the subject of Holocaust-Era Assets research .

The Record, a newsletter put out by the National Archives and Records Administration, suspended publication with the September 1998 issue. 1998 issues are available online .

Holocaust-Era Assets: Conference & Symposium Papers & Proceedings

Papers and Proceedings relating to the National Archives and Records Administration's Holocaust-Era Assets Symposium and Conference held in December 1998.

Conference Proceedings

• Available in hardcopy

Symposium Proceedings. Available on videotape

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Symposium Papers: December 1998

• Dugot, Monica. Holocaust-Era Looted Art: Sources, Resources, and Documentary Evidence .
• Feldman, Gerald D. Insurance in the National Socialist Period: Sources and Research Problems .
• Friedman, Max P. Holocaust-Era Assets, the Archives and Non-Archival Resources .
• Latham, Ernest "Tyger."  Conducting Research at the National Archives into Art Looting, Recovery, and Restitution .
• Lillie, Catherine A. Researching Unpaid and Unclaimed Holocaust-Era Insurance Policies: Documentary Evidence for Claims .
• Murphy, Greg. Insurance Research at the National Archives .
• Trooboff, Hannah E. Researching Swiss Refugee Policy .
• Wythe, Deborah. Record keeping in Museums .

The Holocaust: an Overview of History’s Darkest Chapter

This essay about the Holocaust provides a concise overview of the systematic genocide orchestrated by the Nazi regime from 1941 to 1945, which resulted in the deaths of six million Jews along with millions of others deemed undesirable by Nazi ideology. It traces the origins of the Holocaust to the post-World War I era in Germany, emphasizing how economic hardship and anti-Semitic propaganda facilitated Hitler’s rise to power. The escalation of anti-Jewish measures from the Nuremberg Laws to Kristallnacht and the eventual implementation of extermination through labor and death camps like Auschwitz is discussed. The essay also explores the aftermath of the Holocaust, its impact on international law and human rights, and the ongoing importance of remembering this atrocity to prevent future genocides. The narrative underscores the role of the Holocaust in teaching the dangers of hatred and totalitarianism, while honoring the resilience of survivors and the solemnity of memory.

How it works

The Holocaust, an indelible scar upon the annals of human history, delineates the orchestrated, bureaucratic, state-endorsed persecution and annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its cohorts. Spanning the years 1941 to 1945, spearheaded by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi Party), this genocide harbored the sinister ambition of eradicating the entirety of the Jewish populace, alongside other marginalized groups such as Romani people, individuals with disabilities, Polish and Soviet civilians, Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

The genesis of the Holocaust traces back to Germany’s ignominious defeat in World War I and the ensuing economic vicissitudes, including the cataclysm of the Great Depression. Amidst these crucibles, anti-Semitic sentiments burgeoned, with Jews being vilified as scapegoats for the nation’s socioeconomic tribulations. The ascent of Adolf Hitler in 1933 marked a seismic juncture, as he espoused the doctrine of an unblemished Aryan race and the ostensible menace Jews posed to its sanctity. These convictions were enshrined in legislation that marginalized Jews from German societal and economic strata, most notably the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of German citizenship and proscribed matrimonial or carnal affiliations between Jews and Germans.

The crescendo of brutality against Jewish denizens reached a nadir on November 9-10, 1938, during Kristallnacht or the “Night of Broken Glass”. This pogrom precipitated the widescale desecration of Jewish enterprises, residences, and synagogues, alongside the apprehension of myriad Jewish men. The episode heralded a metamorphosis from economic and social oppression to corporeal aggression, heralding the onset of the mass deportations and executions that ensued.

The onset of World War II and the incursion into Poland in 1939 galvanized the Nazi agenda to exterminate the Jewish populace. Initially, the Nazi modus operandi centered on emigration as a panacea to the “Jewish conundrum”; however, this swiftly devolved into systematic genocide. With the foray into the Soviet Union in 1941, specialized mobile extermination units, christened Einsatzgruppen, were entrusted with the task of liquidating Jews, communists, and other “undesirable” factions. These brigades perpetrated the execution of hundreds of thousands through mass shootings.

The most nefarious facet of the Holocaust was the institution of extermination camps. Facilities such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor were engineered for streamlined mass slaughter, primarily through the utilization of gas chambers. Within these charnel houses, victims were beguiled into believing they were destined for a shower before being corralled into gas chambers cloaked as bathing quarters. Zyklon B, a cyanide-infused pesticide, was then deployed en masse to effectuate their demise.

Survivors of these installations, if not summarily dispatched, confronted harrowing tribulations, encompassing coerced labor, malnutrition, maladies, and medical atrocities. The Nazis further ransacked the possessions of slain Jews, expropriating everything from the lucre in their pockets to the aurum in their dentition.

The Holocaust culminated with the vanquishment of the Nazis by Allied forces in 1945, yet its reverberations persistently resonate within the global consciousness. It has galvanized international statutes and human rights benchmarks, engendered myriad educational initiatives, and precipitated discourses surrounding morality, remembrance, and the machinations of genocide deterrence.

Comprehending the Holocaust is imperative, not solely as a historical record but also as a poignant admonition regarding the perils posited by antipathy, intolerance, and despotic doctrines. It serves as a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit in the face of unfathomable adversity and underscores the duty to safeguard the persecuted. This somber epoch mandates commemoration and introspection to forestall the recurrence of such abominations.

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The International Institute for Holocaust Research

About the International Institute for Holocaust Research

Research and publications on the Shoah have always been high priorities of Yad Vashem since its official founding by the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) in 1953. Due to the increase of international interest in the Shoah, the desire to encourage and support worldwide scholarly research on the Shoah and related topics, Yad Vashem established the International Institute for Holocaust Research in 1993.  More...

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Research Projects

Untold Stories - Murder Sites of Jews in Occupied Territories of the USSR

The online project of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Untold Stories - Murder Sites of Jews in Occupied Territories of the USSR , has recently been posted at Yad Vashem’s website.This project tells the story of the murder of Jews in the occupied areas of the former Soviet Union that began with the German invasion of the former USSR on 22 June 1941.

The Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research

The recipients for the 2023 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research in Memory of Benny and Tilly Joffe z”l are:

Dr. Laurien Vastenhout for her book Between Community and Collaboration: Jewish Councils in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation . 

Prof. Edward Westermann for his book Drunk on Genocide:  Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany .

Learn more about the Yad Vashem International Book Prize...

Events of the Research Institute

The International Institute for Holocaust Research is active in organizing symposia, workshops and international conferences sometimes in collaboration with universities and other research institutions in Israel and abroad. More...

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Call for Papers: International Conference on the Role of Auschwitz in Holocaust Narratives

The USC Shoah Foundation is proud to support the efforts of our longtime partners, The Azrieli Foundation, and to offer this opportunity to participate in the May 2025 conference. Submissions due by September 15, 2024 .

Toronto, ON, Canada - Conference Date: May 5, 2025 (mid-town Toronto)

The Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program invites proposals that interpret the place of Auschwitz in shaping Holocaust survivor narratives and contribute to the interdisciplinary discussion on the role of Auschwitz in influencing collective memory of the Holocaust.

The conference marks the 80th year since the liberation of Auschwitz and coincides with the Toronto run of the travelling exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). A private pre-program event focusing on the exhibit will be held on Sunday, May 4, 2025, featuring Dr. Naomi Azrieli, CEO and Publisher, and Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt, curator of the exhibition and keynote speaker.

Conference Overview:

Inspired by the memoirs program’s nearly two decades of dedicated work on survivor memoirs, this conference aims to critically examine the impact of Auschwitz on the narratives of Holocaust survivor experiences. This international conference, serving as both a commemoration and reflection, will provide a platform for interdisciplinary discussions that plumb the complexities surrounding Auschwitz as a place of atrocities, its symbolism and the narratives surrounding it.

Conference Themes:

Auschwitz occupies a unique place in history as the most infamous concentration camp and death camp within the Nazi camp system. The conference aims to explore and grapple with aspects of Auschwitz that have influenced survivor memoirs, short stories and poetry.

These aspects include but are not limited to:

• the role of Auschwitz as the most authentic representation of Holocaust experiences in the Nazi camp system
• survivor memoirs and storytelling; what is recounted or omitted, and how we reconcile memories that may conflict with the historical record
• memoir descriptions of ritual and Jewish agency; that is, how Jews responded to the conditions and treatment they endured
• collective memory, vocabulary, language and imagery surrounding Auschwitz
• the narrative significance of Auschwitz as the symbol of the Holocaust and its impact on shaping collective memory
• the voices of women, sexuality studies and the gendered lens
• the representation of a diverse range of experiences including those of non-Jews, Polish political prisoners, Roma, Catholic clergy and others
• representation of Auschwitz and survivors in works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and/or cultural productions
• the role of survivors of Auschwitz in remembering the atrocities in contrast to other camps and experiences

Submission Guidelines:

We invite submissions that contribute to the interdisciplinary discourse on the role of Auschwitz in Holocaust narratives. This conference is primarily aimed at literary, Jewish studies, humanities, cultural, and gender studies scholars as well as historians. Early career researchers/academics and PhD candidates are also encouraged to apply.

Submissions must demonstrate that at least one of the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs will be integrated into their final presentation. For a complete listing of memoirs please see https://memoirs.azrielifoundation.org/the-auschwitz-collection

Abstracts (max. 500 words) and a short CV must be submitted by September 15, 2024 . Please submit as one combined PDF file including the presenter’s familial name in the following format: LASTNAME.AzrieliSem2025. All applicants will be notified by December 18, 2024. For inquiries and submissions, contact Carson Phillips, [email protected]

Conference Details:

The conference will convene in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 5, 2025, with a pre-conference event on the evening of May 4, 2025. The program will include a keynote address and approximately twelve, 20-minute presentations. Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered for successful applicants. Should a proposal be submitted jointly for co-authors to present, funding will be offered for one presenter only.

Proposal Review Committee:

Debórah Dwork, The Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, The Graduate Center - CUNY

Sara Horowitz, Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, York University

Carson Phillips, Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program, The Azrieli Foundation

Join us in Toronto for a thought-provoking exploration of the significance of Auschwitz in Holocaust narratives. Together, let us unravel the complexities of this landmark and contribute to a deeper understanding of its importance as part of the collective narrative of the Holocaust.

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Holocaust Death Toll on English Channel Island Is Raised by Hundreds

A panel of academics said it found more conclusive evidence of how many people were killed during the Nazi occupation of Alderney, one of the Channel Islands in British territory.

By Claire Moses

Reporting from the Imperial War Museum in London

A long-running debate about a small part of Britain’s Holocaust history has been settled.

A panel of historians tasked with investigating the death toll in Alderney, a British Crown Dependency and one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, has adjusted the island’s historical record, adding several hundred people to an official count from the 1940s.

English Channel

Lord Eric Pickles, Britain’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, announced last July that a panel of experts would try to settle the — at times heated — debate. On Wednesday, he presented the findings with members of the panel in a packed room at the Imperial War Museum in London.

The panel did not come to an exact number. It concluded that the likely range of deaths was between 641 and 1,027, with a maximum number of 1,134 people. A previous estimate had put the number of deaths below 400.

The panel also answered the question of how many forced laborers and prisoners — a vast majority of whom were men — were on the island during the occupation between 1940 and 1945, concluding that there were between 7,608 and 7,812 people. Most of them were forced laborers from the Soviet Union. That number also included 594 Jewish prisoners from France.

“We are absolutely confident about these numbers,” Mr. Pickles said. “The truth can never harm us.”

Although the panel’s original remit had been to focus solely on the numbers, that turned out not to be enough, Mr. Pickles said. Over the last nine months, the panel widened its scope and investigated the question of why Britain never held any of the Nazi perpetrators responsible for mistreatment that included beatings, shootings, malnutrition and horrific working conditions.

The lack of prosecution of any of the people who committed violence and crimes in Alderney, Mr. Pickles said, was a “stain on the reputation of the United Kingdom.”

Anthony Glees, a historian at the University of Buckingham, said that the failure to bring those responsible to justice was a “cover-up” by the government, although he emphasized that his research showed the government had not intended to let the perpetrators walk free.

After the war, Britain handed over the Alderney cases to the Soviet Union in 1945, Mr. Glees said, because most of the victims had been Russian. The Soviet Union did not put any of the perpetrators on trial, a fact that the British government did not make public. Furthermore, the Soviet Union had not requested the information, according to the 93-page report from the panel.

Then, a couple of years after the war, the public appetite for prosecuting big war crimes waned in Britain, Mr. Glees said.

“It wasn’t a blind eye to murder,” Mr. Glees said, “but a lack of resolve.”

The Channel Islands were the only British territory occupied by the Germans during World War II. In June 1940, the British government evacuated Alderney.

The Nazis built four camps in Alderney. Two of the camps, Helgoland and Borkum, were labor camps run by the civil and military engineering arm of the Nazis. The SS, the organization that was largely in charge of the Nazis’ barbaric extermination campaign, took control of two other camps, named Norderney and Sylt, in 1943.

The panel arrived at its conclusions by looking at archival materials and comparing each member’s work. Before that, the closest thing to an official count came from a British military intelligence interrogator, Theodore Pantcheff, shortly after the end of the war. He had found that at least 389 people died in Alderney.

The debate about the numbers has brought a lot of attention to the island over the years, sometimes to the dismay of its residents, who yearn for a quiet and remote lifestyle.

“I have encountered many arguments over numbers,” Mr. Pickles said. “Nothing compares to the virulence or personal nature of arguments over numbers in Alderney.”

Upon learning the panel’s conclusions, William Tate, the island’s president, said he felt a mixture of relief and sadness: Relief that the number wasn’t higher, and sadness for hundreds of victims who had effectively remained unidentified for more than seven decades.

“It’s a very important moment in the history of our island,” he said.

Mr. Tate said that the island was responsible for keeping the memories of those victims alive and for providing residents and visitors with more information in the form of signs.

The academics on the panel were pleased with the outcome of the much-awaited report. “We cracked it; we exceeded our expectations,” said Dr. Gilly Carr, a historian who has published books about the islands’ Nazi occupation. Other members of the panel also voiced confidence in their findings.

While new information could surface, bringing future insights, these results would hold up, Robert Jan van Pelt, a historian at the University of Waterloo and a member of the panel, said.

Alderney plays a relatively small but extraordinary role in Britain’s World War II history, placing Nazi violence and atrocities squarely on British soil.

The tiny island, which today has just over 2,000 residents and sits about 10 miles off the French coast, did not have gas chambers. But, the researchers said, the laborers’ and prisoners’ conditions on the island were brutal.

“In the eyes of the Nazi regime, Jewish forced laborers only had the right to live as long as their labor could be exploited,” the report concluded. “The Holocaust therefore is part of Alderney’s history.”

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to two Nazi labor camps. The camps, on Alderney, were named Norderney and Sylt; they were not built on the German islands of the same names.

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Claire Moses is a Times reporter in London, focused on coverage of breaking and trending news. More about Claire Moses

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The films changing how we understand the Holocaust

The genocide has been endlessly churned through the Hollywood machine, resulting in melodrama, insensitivity and triteness. Three new films attempt to correct that.

By Miriam Balanescu

In a 2005 episode of Extras , Kate Winslet, cameoing as a caricature of herself, infamously joked that “if you do a film about the Holocaust, you’re guaranteed an Oscar”. Just a few years later, she was duly nominated for her role in The Reader , an uneasy romance between a former concentration camp guard (Winslet) and a 15-year-old German boy (David Kross). Years after their relationship, the young man, now a trainee lawyer, is called to observe her trial for war crimes, watching her wistfully and feeling increasingly sorry for her. The film, with its sympathy for a perpetrator of the Holocaust, was subject to accusations of revisionism and Nazi apologia. But amid this controversy, Winslet won the award – with Extras writer Ricky Gervais quipping at that year’s Golden Globes that he told her to do a Holocaust movie.

It’s not the first controversy in a sprawling – and often fraught – history of films about the Holocaust. Criticisms have been levelled at many of them. The infamous Seventies film The Day the Clown Cried , about a circus entertainer imprisoned in a concentration camp who lures children to the gas chambers, had a premise so offensive it was never released. The definitive Holocaust film of the Nineties, Steven Spielberg’s garlanded Schindler’s List , has had as many vilifiers as admirers: Tablet magazine critic Liel Leibovitz called it “astoundingly stupid”, “a moral and an aesthetic disaster” for its easy dichotomies of good and evil. The infantilising 2008 film The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas , adapted from the saccharinely sentimental John Boyne novel, was criticised by the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial museum, which said the film “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches the history of the Holocaust”. In Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit (2019), the director stars as a Nazi youth’s zany imaginary friend – a hallucinated apparition of Hitler himself. The film’s slapstick version of Nazi Germany fails to engage with its true horrors: the Telegraph critic Robbie Collin claimed the film “sentimentalises and trivialises the Holocaust”. The genocide has been folded into existing genres: such as Holocaust thrillers, from Black Book to Inglourious Basterds . There’s even a micro-genre of “Nazi zombie” films.

Winslet’s glib Extras gag makes a serious point: the Shoah has loomed large in the global cultural imagination. The sheer volume of films made about the subject is almost unprecedented – meaning an inconceivable tragedy has been endlessly churned through the Hollywood machine, often veering into melodrama, insensitivity and triteness. Few grasp the full complexity of the genocide: including how and why it happened. Many of these films begin in medias res , and lack any historical depth. The result limits our understanding of the Holocaust, reducing it to a series of satisfying story arcs and tropes.

In his 1979 essay on the TV series Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss , the author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi writes, “It was predictable and obvious that the blood, the slaughter, the intrinsic horror of what happened in Europe in those years would attract myriad second-rate writers looking for easy subjects, and that that vast tragedy would be tampered with, chopped into pieces, arbitrarily sorted through in order to obtain fragments suitable for satisfying the turbid thirst for the macabre and the obscene that is supposed to dwell in the depths of every reader and consumer.” The roots of Nazism and anti-Semitism, Levi writes, are “remote and complex”, and “cannot be understood without knowing anything of the wound inflicted on German pride by the 1918 defeat, of the successive revolutionary efforts, of the catastrophic inflation of 1923, of the violence of the ‘Free Corps’, of the dizzying political instability of the Weimar Republic”. Without such context, the viewer is left with “the impression that Nazism sprang out of nowhere, the diabolical work of cold-blooded fanatics like [Reinhard] Heydrich or sinister cutthroats with a swastika on their sleeve, or that it was the product of some intrinsic and unexplained German wickedness”.

Three new films released this year take a radically different approach. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, not for its subject matter but for its treatment of it. It captures in sun-bleached hues the bucolic life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’s family, living on the other side of the camp’s wall. Eschewing the narrative of the Martin Amis novel on which it is based, there is little traditional plot here. We do not see, but hear what is happening over the barbed-wire wall. The atrocities happening inside the camp leak out in other ways, too: such as the furnace ash the house servants are forced to scrub from the bathtub.

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Ordinariness, even beauty, is tainted by moral ugliness. Glazer’s film documents the family’s humdrum routines: it was filmed mostly using hidden cameras like his previous feature Under the Skin . Those familiar with Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil” will immediately recognise many of the hallmarks here: the dutiful, deadly decision-making; the euphemistic, bureaucratic uses of language; the unthinking bowing to authority. Sixty years on from Arendt’s report Eichmann in Jerusalem , the ideas in Glazer’s cold and unflinching film are not new. But the rapt critical response to a work that is so different to other Oscar-winning films suggests otherwise, as if viewers have been jolted awake.

Glazer’s Nazis are depicted as ordinary people committing extraordinary atrocities. It’s a sharp contrast to most cinematic conceptions of the Holocaust’s perpetrators. In Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 masterpiece Rome, Open City , Nazi occupiers are slimily subhuman. (Ralph Fiennes’ cartoonishly evil Amon Göth in Schindler’s List ranks 15th in the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest villains of all time.) But such cartoonish villains enable audiences to overlook the real, disturbingly normal, motivations of power-wielders and absolve ourselves of complicity.

Holocaust films have also often been plagued by non-Jewish saviour narratives. Schindler’s List , Jojo Rabbit , The Book Thief (2013) and the recent Anthony Hopkins-starring One Life celebrate heroic individuals who demonstrate unwavering courage and kindness amid widespread inhumanity. It’s telling that the emphasis always falls on these feel-good stories of resistance, rather than the far more frequent stories of those who witnessed the persecution of the Jewish people and failed to act. No dramatisation has been attempted of the disastrous 1938 Évian Conference, in which 32 nations – including Britain – unanimously decided they couldn’t take Jewish refugees. Or the 1943 Bermuda Conference, where the same decision was reached, a member of the Jewish advisory body to the Polish government-in-exile Szmul Zygielbojm taking their own life in protest of its outcome. But this is where the real story of the Holocaust can be found. Today’s anti-refugee policies in Britain are a chilling echo of these events.

There are no such saviours in The Zone of Interest or Ava DuVernay’s Origin , also released this year, which takes the shooting of 17-year-old African American Trayvon Martin as its starting point before venturing into the past of Nazi Germany and to India’s treatment of “untouchables”. Adapted from Isabel Wilkerson’s non-fiction book Caste , the film finds the connective tissue between different systems that rely on scapegoating a particular group, regardless of race. As Isabel travels from the US to Germany, she investigates the mechanisms that enable systems of oppression. Moving between Isabel’s present-day examination of archives and documents to flashbacks showing this history, she unearths historical ties between the American legislation behind slavery and segregation, and German laws that initially segregated Jews but culminated in their extermination. When she travels to India, meeting Dalit professor Suraj Yengde (played by himself), he draws direct parallels between segregation, India’s untouchables, the Holocaust and the plight of Palestinians. Though Origin is flawed – the film’s structure also follows Isabel through two personal tragedies, leaving little space for in-depth probing of Wilkerson’s thesis – it tussles with the reasons why, which so many Holocaust films gloss over in the interest of easy storytelling.

Holocaust films can often flatten the Jewish lives at their centre, especially those not told from Jewish characters’ perspectives: uninterested in their lives before genocide, such films allow Jewish characters to exist on screen only to be persecuted, tortured and slaughtered. One Life recently came under fire for omitting in its marketing materials the fact that most of the Czech children rescued by Nicholas Winton were Jewish, calling them “central European” instead. In films like Where Hands Touch (2018) or The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler (2009), Jewish characters are defined by their suffering, and only seen as victims. Though resistance and uprisings were widespread and well-documented, it’s rare to see Jewish people fight back on screen.

Michael Winterbottom’s biopic Shoshana , also released this year, is a much-needed counter to this. From its outset, the title character Shoshana Borochov (played by Irina Vladimirovna Starshenbaum) is engaged in resistance, navigating quagmire-like politics in 1930s Palestine. She is the daughter of the socialist Zionist Ber Borochov, and a fierce opponent of her father’s politics: the film charts her relationship with the British police officer Thomas James Wilkin, an adversary of Zionist paramilitary groups, further complicating her relationship with fellow Jewish migrants. Shoshana examines Britain’s role in the Holocaust as the occupiers of Mandatory Palestine. Heavy-handed police stoke existing tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, while desperation escalates around Britain’s refusal to allow those fleeing the Holocaust into the country. In the end, the main objective of both Palestinians and Israelis becomes to rid themselves of the British colonial forces. This, the film suggests in its disturbing closing shot of guns trained on Palestinians, fuelled the ever-more urgent situation in the region today.

Primo Levi acknowledges that even the most historically curious and informative works on Nazism may fail to understand our fundamental questions about how it happened. In his essay on the Holocaust programme, he writes: “This explains the reason for the innumerable phone calls that flooded the TV stations in the countries where the serial has been shown so far. Most of the callers were asking ‘why’, and this ‘why’ is gigantic and as old as humankind. It’s the ‘why’ of evil in the world.”

Not all of our “why”s can be answered sufficiently – but the question itself is crucial. Where other films have been more concerned with turning the Holocaust into a universal template of the human struggle, creating new myths and misconceptions about the genocide as a result, these new films explore the events that gave way to unconscionable mass violence. As the Holocaust moves out of living memory and into history, an awareness grows of genocides that have been forgotten and ignored and further unfathomable horrors unfolding in the present day. These films, which dare to ask why, have never felt more urgent.

[See also: The myth of progressive Catholicism ]

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Arts | Museums for summer 2024: After-hours parties at…

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Arts | museums for summer 2024: after-hours parties at the shedd and a holocaust museum debut.

Not all the exhibitions below are free, but enough are to prove, yet again, that Chicago is the very best major American city to spend a summer. (Then again, we’re biased, aren’t we?)

Chicago’s hottest club is … the Shedd Aquarium? Heck, it might be, with a full slate of after-hours events plotted for the summer. Lindy-hop with a rockhopper and get down with the gobies. All at the Shedd Aquarium, 1200 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive, and $20-$40 for non-members: Pride Night 6 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. June 1; Jazzin’ at the Shedd every Wednesday, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. from June 5 to Aug. 28.; Shedd House Party , 6 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. June 8, June 14, July 13 and July 19; and Ritmo del Mar , 6 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. July 27.

If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em: Thomas Jefferson was president and ground had been barely broken on Fort Dearborn the last time two cicada broods emerged simultaneously in northern Illinois, in 1803. Another convergence is taking place for this summer. On the off-chance a ’round-the-clock chorus of 100,000 miniature air raid sirens makes you say, “More, please!”, the Field Museum has a slate of events related to nature’s favorite alarm clocks. For example: in the spirit of those who have resorted to cooking up cicadas in other flush years, an offsite collaboration with Big Star puts grasshopper tacos and ant mole on the menu. Before you sup, pay your respects to another esteemed insect-eater before it’s retired for the summer: the Field’s recently acquired Chicago Archaeopteryx goes off display June 9.

• Cicada Pinning Workshop , 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. May 29 at the Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; tickets $30.
• Bug Bites , 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. June 11 at Big Star West Town, 551 N. Ogden Ave.; first come, first serve, or reserve a spot at OpenTable.com .
• PlayLab PlayDate: Cicadas Take Flight Storytime & Craft , 11 a.m. to noon June 26 at the Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; free with museum admission; recommended for children ages 2-6.

A newspaper man gets an exhibit: On April 30, 1997, Mike Royko’s weekday Tribune column ran in its usual spot. But instead of his arrowhead prose — short, straight and piercing — it ran letters from readers grieving his death three days before. This exhibition draws from Royko’s papers at the Newberry Library, including clippings from his stints at all three major then-Chicago dailies and other ephemera. “Chicago Style: Mike Royko and Windy City Journalism,” June 20 to Sept. 28, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tues.-Thurs., and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St.; free, newberry.org .

Brookfield’s birthday bash: Now rebranded Brookfield Zoo Chicago and undertaking an ambitious redevelopment project, the suburban institution is ringing in its 90th year in a big way with three major musical acts, over three concerts. The Barenaked Ladies have already sold out, but tickets are still available for The Fray and Gin Blossoms. “Roaring Nights,” featuring The Fray June 22 and Gin Blossoms July 27, both 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.; tickets $45-$55, one child 12 and under gets in free.

This planet is not like the others: Through models, dioramas, and touchable meteorites, a new permanent exhibition slated to open later this summer at Adler Planetarium uses groundbreaking research on exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — to inform our understanding of Earth. “Other Worlds,” opening mid-July at the Adler Planetarium, 1300 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; basic entry $8-$19.

A picture is worth … Two photography exhibitions take over the Cultural Center this summer. A citywide exhibition anchored at the Cultural Center, “Opening Passages” captures the twin urban landscapes of Chicago and Paris (sister cities, by the way). After that, block off an entire afternoon for “Images on which to build,” which occupies the entire first-floor east exhibition wing. This commanding exhibition features a different photographer or organization in each room, telling queer history through a chorus of voices. A special highlight: an overdue local retrospective of Mexican-American photographer and activist Diana Solís, once a photojournalist for the Tribune. Both at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, free admission: “Images on which to build,” through Aug. 4, and “Opening Passages,” through Aug. 25, with additional installations at 6018|North (6018 N. Kenmore Ave.), BUILD Chicago (5100 W. Harrison St.), and Experimental Station (6100 S. Blackstone Ave.).

Saving children from war: The Illinois Holocaust Museum hosts what is somehow the first major American exhibition about the Kindertransport, a coordinated effort to evacuate nearly 10,000 children from Europe to the United Kingdom. There could be some sheepishness involved: a bill that would have allowed for a similar program in the U.S. stalled before even reaching a congressional vote. “Kindertransport: Rescuing Children on the Brink of War,” Weds.-Mon. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Nov. 17 at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, 9603 Woods Drive, Skokie; free to $18.

Urban paradigms: The Chicago Architecture Center’s latest exhibition uses the Loop as a lens to examine American downtowns, facing an identity crisis after getting rocked by COVID. The exhibition includes interviews with downtown residents and a “ballot box” for sounding off on whatever urban-planning gripes are on your mind. “Loop as Lab: Reshaping Downtowns,” daily 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Jan. 5, 2025 at the Chicago Architecture Center, 111 E. Wacker Drive; free to $14.

Illustrating a movement: With the DNC on the tip of everyone’s tongue, and the aftertaste of 1968 still lingering on it, the Chicago History Museum’s new gallery of protest art of the 1960s and 1970s feels apropos, to say the least. “Designing for Change: Chicago Protest Art of the 1960s-70s,” 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tues.–Sat and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays through May 4, 2025 at the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark St.; admission free to $19.

The other kind of bard: If you’ve ever unwound with a video game or weekly Dungeons & Dragons campaign, thank a writer. The American Writers Museum champions an undersung pocket of the literary community with a spotlight on game writers. The museum will stock up on board games and card decks for visitors to play onsite, and is welcoming reservations from RPG campaigns in conjunction with the yearlong exhibition. “Level Up: Writers & Gamers,” Thurs.-Mon. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through May 5, 2025 at the American Writers Museum, 180 N. Michigan Ave., 2nd floor; admission free to $16.

“Flight of Butterflies" is an outdoor public art exhibit this summer commissioned by the Notebaert Nature Museum, including sculptures on Michigan Avenue. (Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum)

American Writers Museum

Artifacts related to Dungeons & Dragons and other games are displayed at the American Writers Museum in Chicago in the new exhibition “Level Up: Writers & Gamers." (American Writers Museum)

“Notes to Neurons” is a new exhibit devoted to music at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. (Griffin MSI photo)

Chicago journalist Mike Royko's hat, cigarette butts and other items go on temporary display as they arrive at the Newberry Library on Sept. 8, 2005. Royko's widow donated 26 boxes of items for the library's collection. (Bonnie Trafelet/Chicago Tribune)

This summer's Jazzin’ at the Shedd gatherings every Wednesday are joined by Pride Night, Shedd House Party and Ritmo del Mar, all after hours at the Shedd Aquarium on Chicago's Museum Campus. Shedd Aquarium/Brenna Hernandez

A marvelous migration: Larger-than-life butterfly statues will wing to public parks all over the city in July, thanks to an art commissioning project by the Nature Museum. Before they scatter, check out the whole array onsite at the museum, or on Mag Mile, where a few were installed earlier this month. “Flight of Butterflies,” daily 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Sept. 2025 at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon Drive; admission free to $17.

Song science: Why do we find music so irresistible, anyway? A new timed-entry experience at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry — which just joined the ranks of scores of cultural entities renamed for billionaire donor Kenneth C. Griffin — answers, using immersive visuals to show the neuroscience behind our love of rhythm. “Notes to Neurons,” daily 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; general admission $26 for adults, $15 for children, but requires a free onsite RSVP.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.

More in Arts

Movies | Jacqueline Stewart leaving Academy Museum for return to University of Chicago

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Immigration | Notes of home: A Civic Orchestra of Chicago Venezuelan fellow brings music to migrants

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