Focusing particularly on Poland and Ukraine, with less detailed considerations of other parts of eastern Europe, this chapter examines the politicization of Holocaust memory in the post-Cold War period. An attempt to forge a new, postcommunist identity in eastern Europe also entailed an evasion of wartime reality. The all too real suffering of Poles or Ukrainians during the Second World War was conflated with, or even substituted for, the extermination of east European Jews. The tragic reality that collaboration was commonplace among non-Jewish Poles or Ukrainians was denied. Even more strikingly, Poland and Ukraine tried to use the power of the state to craft a new, revisionist mythology about the past in which Poles and Ukrainians were rescuers, Jews were largely absent (or even blamed for their own murder), and only Germans did anything bad. This revisionism was part of a revived nationalism that sought to ground new, postcommunist, often authoritarian regimes in a comforting mythic history.

This chapter explores the relationship between Holocaust and genocide, beginning with the the emergence of the concept of genocide and its relationship to prior law on war crimes. The chapter offers a close examination of Lemkin’s evolving thinking, and that of other contemporaries on the relationship between the Jewish experience under Nazism and other mass atrocities. It argues that Lemkin’s genocide concept blurred some critical distinctions, notably whether genocide necessarily implied biological extermination. This ambiguity was, however, critical to its political utility in the early postwar context, but the resulting law and terminology has become a political weapon, often obscuring the reality of the violence it purports to describe.

This chapter shows how foreign observers sometimes condemned and sometimes endorsed the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish policies in the years before the Second World War, and in turn how the Third Reich responded to global opinion. The Nazis encountered international outrage in the face of their anti-Jewish policies. But they also found imitators and supporters around the world, including in the USA, who applauded Hitler’s efforts to solve the “Jewish question.” As the 1930s proceeded, global condemnation of Hitler’s antisemitism grew, but the Nazi regime rightly came to see expressions of outrage as largely toothless, as the international community appeared either unwilling or incapable of organizing collective action to save Europe’s Jews.

This chapter examines the political culture of the fragile Weimar Republic, focusing in particular on its tumultuous beginning and its calamitous end. Rather than narrating a story of unavoidable doom or one that focuses exclusively on Weimar’s cultural achievements, it stresses the complexity and the multifaceted crises that marked this era of German history. This essay considers the particularly German elements of the Weimar period but also the ways in which Germany’s post-First World War experience can be situated within a broader regional context.

Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, this chapter explores the often hidden history of the lasting impact of Nazi racial violence on non-Jewish victims. It analyzes the forces and structures that continued to discriminate against homosexuals, survivors of sterilization, Roma, “asocials,” and others. Many of these groups were initially excluded from reparations programs for survivors and, in some cases, were subjected to ongoing legal discrimination. Over time, this began to shift, largely in response to pressure from survivor activists from among these groups, who fought hard to establish their status as recognized victims of the Nazi regime.

This chapter engages the interrelation between German agency and non-German interest in the pursuit of the “Final Solution” and other projects of ethnic, economic, or political restratification; and discusses the European dimensions (including imperial/colonial aspirations) in the history of these projects and the specifics of the “Final Solution” in the attempt to locate the Holocaust on the historical map of genocides.

This chapter discusses similarities and differences in the emergence (including planning and construction), functions (mass murder, forced labor, utilization of looted property), and operations (killing techniques, connections to the “outer world”) of German mass extermination sites, the importance of “knowledge transfer” (from “euthanasia” killings to “Aktion Reinhard,” from prewar concentration camps to Auschwitz); addresses forms and levels of involvement of these sites and their staff in the “Final Solution” and the murder of other groups (also vis-à-vis non-German killing sites and German mass shooting sites) within the broader context of the Nazi project and its systemic dynamics.

This chapter critically reflects on the centrality of Auschwitz in public Holocaust discourse and addresses the site’s transformation after 1942 as the main killing site for Hungarian Jews; engages the specificities of Auschwitz compared with other German concentration and extermination camps; and discusses the role and interests of German and Hungarian authorities in driving these late deportations against the background of Hungarian pre-occupation anti-Jewish policy.

The introduction to Volume I considers the shift in Holocaust historiography since the end of the Cold War to focus on eastern Europe and, increasingly, on neglected areas such as south-eastern Europe. Noteworthy too is the increasing diversity in methodologies, including digital humanities, gender history, family history, microhistory, transnational history, and spatial, geographical, and material approaches. Each of these strands approaches sources differently, meaning that what historians consider to be a usable source has also changed a great deal. This diversity reflects also the changing face of the historical profession itself and the world in which it operates. Our awareness has grown that the Holocaust was a continent-wide crime committed by willing participants everywhere. The historiography is moving in two opposite directions: towards more microhistories, but also towards greater understanding of the continent-wide scale of the Holocaust, with a particular focus on the hitherto unacknowledged extent of participation in the killings by non-Germans all across Europe. How to reconcile them and bring all of this research together is the challenge of our hyper-productive times.

There are very few Holocaust survivors or perpetrators left in the world, and, quite soon, there will be none. What role will the Holocaust play in global culture and politics in a world where no one alive had any direct experience of the event? It seems unlikely that the Holocaust will ever disappear entirely from public consciousness, but what does the legacy and meaning of Nazi genocide look like going forward? In a fragmenting media, cultural, and political landscape, will there simply be a plethora of “Holocausts,” each dragooned into the service of some contemporary agenda? Will it be possible to craft and hold onto some kind of understanding of the Holocaust with broader reach, one that can perhaps help underpin ongoing efforts to mitigate mass violence?

The chapter introduces Agnew’s three-fold definition of place – as location, locale, and sense of place – to structure its reflections. Over the last thirty years, a digital revolution has transformed what it is possible to map since Martin Gilbert first produced his Atlas of the Holocaust. The rich array of printed and digital maps now available serve both historiographical and memorial purposes. In terms of location, the terrain depicted has shifted eastwards in the wake of the end of the Cold War, and often homed in on meso- and micro-regions, representing spaces long neglected in older surveys. Moving on to locale, the chapter introduces recent work on the Nazi understanding of “Raum” and on the place of the Holocaust in the colonial imagination. Other studies have explored the spatial patterns of arrests and deportations, the multiple border changes of ghettos, or the creation and destruction of new kinds of spaces for concentrating and murdering human beings. Finally, historians of victim experience have used a variety of means to convey victims’ sense of place and space both at the time and as conveyed through testimony.

This chapter examines the way in which the Holocaust has been brought into conversation with understandings of the modern world, with a strong focus on historical and sociological accounts (though recognizing the place of the Holocaust in postmodern literary and critical theory.) It shows the multiple ways in which concepts of modernization, modernity, and the modern have been deployed, be it to establish the Holocaust’s paradigmatic or normative character, or the reverse. It illustrates the paradoxical character of efforts to highlight the Holocaust’s distinctiveness while harnessing it to a pervasive and generic “modernity.”

During the 1920s Jewish organizations in the USA developed a strategy for guarding the global security of Jews. The strategy was based on economic assistance, international diplomatic pressure, and emigration. The Nazi accession to power fundamentally upset that strategy.

This chapter explores Nazi violence against non-Jewish eastern Europeans during the Holocaust. It covers German anti-Slavic thought, the experience of Slavic peoples and POWs during the Nazi genocidal project, and issues of collaboration and complicity.

This chapter offers a nuanced account of liberation, displacement, and homecoming after the Second World War. It emphasizes the ambiguity of a liberation that was not always freeing, displacement that continued wartime suffering, and a homecoming that was often bittersweet, when it was even possible. It traces the ways in which the savage history of postwar Europe led to massive population transfers, including of Jewish Holocaust survivors. It looks at “homecoming” both in western and in eastern Europe, as well as post-liberation migration out of Europe. After all, most east European Jews quickly realized they had little future in Europe, their sense of belonging shattered. The surrounding societies were often unwelcoming for returnees, reluctant to return appropriated property, and retained substantial antisemitism. If, in western Europe, Jewish survivors could, to a degree, “go home again,” this proved impossible for the most part in eastern Europe. Thus, Jewish survivors often abandoned Europe altogether, seeking new lives in Israel, the USA, and elsewhere. The political and social history of displaced persons after the war is thus both pan-European and global.

This chapter focuses on policies of the Allies from 1941 until 1945. Responding to the news about the mass extermination of the Jews, individuals and Jewish organizations lobbied for making declarations denouncing Nazi atrocities and taking diplomatic and political measures. This chapter shows the complexity of Allied attitudes, logistical and political considerations, actions, and inactions with regard to the fate of the Jews in Europe. In particular, it concerns the response to the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, the rescue initiatives and role of Roul Wallenberg, and the refusal to bomb Auschwitz.

This chapter examines Jewish responses to “Operation Reinhardt” from the spring of 1942 until the fall of 1943. Examining the attitudes of the rank-and-file members of the Jewish Councils and the underground, as well as individual Jews in the ghettos in the Generalgouvernement, it pays close attention to the dilemmas Jews who remained in the ghetto faced, as more people tried to escape to the “Aryan” side and planned armed resistance.

This chapter critically reflects on the “bystander” category, and the fluidity and diversity of “collaboration” depending on perspective (also postwar); points out differences in occupation regimes East/West, North/South, and early/late and their impact on level of violence; and outlines pre-occupation interests that impact local (group/societal) behavior after the arrival of the Germans and outlive their retreat.