This chapter analyzes difficult to impossible attempts to flee the Nazi juggernaut, starting with early emigration from Germany, to later escapes from occupied lands. It discusses how class, age, and gender influenced Jewish chances for flight and addresses helping organizations and destinations.

This chapter highlights the crucial importance of Operation Barbarossa for the Second World War and the Holocaust; summarizes major stages in the escalation of violence (pre-campaign plans for domination, exploitation, and ethnic restratification; murder of Soviet POWs, Jews, and others by Germans, Romanians, and local helpers), their root causes and key agents (Wehrmacht, SS, police, other occupation authorities); explains Nazi perception of “the East” as the locus for the “Final Solution,” the relevance of German anti-partisan warfare, occupation policy priorities (”pacification,” exploitation, elimination of “useless eaters”) for massive loss of civilian life; and situates violence (mass shootings, gas vans, destruction of villages, deportation of forced laborers) in the Soviet Union in the perspective of other features of the Holocaust and the Second World War.

This chapter exemplifies key areas of regime terror (concentration camps; police and judiciary; forced labor; media control) and their agents (hierarchies in the Reich and occupied territories); explains the scope, transformation and limitations of the terror apparatus after the beginning of the war; discusses the regime’s tendency to combine stoking fear with cooptation/integration; and explains the relevance of postwar legal/political discussions (IMT and beyond) of (German) culpability.

This chapter depicts major events in the evolution of the deportation system (precursor “Nisko,” early isolated deportations from the Reich), the role of the RSHA/Eichmann and local/regional authorities; discusses transportation logistics (roundups, transit camps, railways, police guards, confiscation of property), destination sites, treatment of deportees after arrival and agencies involved; and points to lacunas in scholarship on key features of the deportation process and its place in Holocaust history.

This chapter looks at the complex and contested legacy of the Holocaust within Germany itself. It considers both the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and the way Holocaust memory in the two states interacted. It traces the politics of the past from early Allied efforts at denazification and reeducation, through the amnesty and rehabilitation of former Nazis into the memory wars of the 1980s and 1990s. It concludes with an analysis of the ways in which the Holocaust continues to shape German political culture into the twenty-first century, as with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s controversial decision to support large-scale migration of Syrian refuges in the context of that country’s brutal civil war.

Achieving “living space” for the German people was one of Hitler’s central aims. The concept was developed in the late nineteenth century and popularized in the 1920s after Germany lost territory at the end of the First World War. Hitler saw the concept as essential for the survival of the German people. The object was not just space, but imperial space that could be exploited for resources and whose population would serve German needs. This “greater economic area” was to be self-sufficient (autarkic) as far as possible, creating a German-centered economic bloc to reflect what some German economists assumed was the way the world economy was developing. The war against the Soviet Union was intended to complete this program of imperial expansion and provide room for the surplus German population as well as generous supplies of food and raw materials.

This chapter conveys the origins, course, impact, and consequences of Kristallnacht, locating the events of November 1938 in the longer-term trajectory of Nazi domestic and foreign policy; explores the extent and forms of popular participation in the violence and popular responses to the destruction; pursues the shorter- and longer-term impact of Kristallnacht for the victims (though emigration will be dealt with in Volume III); examines the shifts in Nazi policy in the wake of Kristallnacht, and the shifts of institutional power that accompanied it, and again considers the relationship between antisemitism and foreign policy.

In 1995, Roger Bannister, the first man to break four minutes in the mile, gave new life to an old debate. He argued that Black runners had “certain anatomical advantages” that made them all but unbeatable on the track and the roads. Some condemned his remarks. Bannister had, they said, failed to acknowledge the role of culture. Nature or nurture? commentators asked and asked again. The disagreement between the two sides hid a larger consensus: that the Black athlete constitutes a coherent scientific classification, a classification that, in a society that values the natural above the social sciences (and all sciences above the humanities), enters the collective consciousness in biological form. Chapter 1 tells the longer story of that consensus and how science and science writers used a naturalized male/female binary to naturalize a Black/white racial binary – a rhetorical move that the movement to bar trans athletes from competing in women’s and girls’ divisions has borrowed and reversed.

This chapter establishes and problematizes the category of “survivor” and the ways in which its meaning changed over the postwar decades. The definition of survivors is “unstable,” and includes diverse groups, not just those who lived through the camps or ghettos, but also those in exile or hiding. The chapter discusses how trauma affected not just survivors, but also their children and grandchildren, in complex ways. It analyzes the ways in which the experience of the Holocaust affected family life and the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture, as well as the (re)construction of Jewish communal life.

This chapter reviews the Nazi plunder of art works, Judaica, and other cultural objects during and before the Second World War, showing how it operated as both a top-down and a bottom-up practice. It then traces the diverse efforts around the world to gain restitution or compensation for these plundered goods. Beginning with Allied efforts to locate and return stolen artworks during the closing days of the war (the so-called “Monuments Men”) and continuing through the evasive policies of Germany and Austria after the war, up to the renewed litigation, in Europe and America, starting in the 1990s, the chapter demonstrates the long and difficult road survivors and descendants walked to try to retrieve their stolen property. All too often such efforts failed.

This chapter concerns the situation of Jewish families, focusing on physical and emotional experiences and reflecting on elements of daily life. It emphasizes familial roles, hierarchies, and relations: between spouses, among children, and between children and parents. It tracks the phenomena of family solidarity and family atomization.

This chapter offers an intellectual history of theological responses to the Holocaust, focusing on the way Jewish and Christian religious thinkers sought to make sense of Nazi mass murder. Focusing mainly on the USA, it follows post-Holocaust theologians’ explorations of the problem of evil. It demonstrates that, while theological explorations of the Holocaust saw a high point in the 1970s, since then they have declined in favor of historicization, whereby theological explorations of the Holocaust have given way to the historical study of the religious responses of Jews and Christians to Nazi crimes as they were unfolding.

This chapter treats the daily life experiences of Jews who survived the Second World War in the interior regions of the Soviet Union. Included among this group were Soviet citizens who evacuated eastward ahead of invading German armies as well as refugees from Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.