This chapter addresses gender in the context of male-dominated societal and occupational structures during the Second World War; relevance of group dynamics within and between genders in violence-saturated, highly volatile settings (”the East”); discusses masculinity/femininity and rituals of violence during Holocaust, also in light of insights gained by genocide studies.

This chapter depicts the creation, use, and proliferation of imagery by regime propaganda and individuals (despite censorship and prohibitions); discusses problems of the “Nazi gaze” (vis-à-vis victim-generated imagery) and relevance of perpetrator imagery for scholarly analysis (beyond historiography); elimination of corpses (SK 1005) and sites in their interrelation with Nazi attempts to destroy incriminating evidence, and to control messaging and the spatial/physical dimensions of mass violence.

This chapter argues that dispossession is a central aspect of the Holocaust that remains poorly understood. It is understandable that it was long neglected, since understanding mass murder was the primary goal, and the financial and economic story of expropriation was a complex one. However, early books by Frank Bajohr and Martin Dean helped stake out the field, and international legal actions over Swiss banks and German companies also reinforced its importance. The chapter explores the mixture of law and violence that was used to assault Jewish businesses and property, with the emphasis often on the latter. Jewish businesses were able to hold out longest in Berlin, but the pogrom of November 1938, followed by orgiastic looting, was the beginning of the end. The desire to get Jews out of the country was often in conflict with the aim of expropriating them, but once emigration was no longer viable, expropriation and exclusion accelerated, converging in systematic theft and murder. Even then despoliation remained an autonomous but integral aspect.

This chapter discusses Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust as a distinctive form of literary production practiced by Jewish adults, youth, and children across Europe. Jewisih diaries took on particular significance in the context of the Holocaust. They open a window on the cultural, social, and political history of the Holocaust. By preserving victims’ voices, diaries contribute to the writing of new histories of the Holocaust, in particular because of the attention to gender and social relations among victims.

This chapter discusses the relevance of economic factors for Nazi policy in general and the Holocaust in particular against the background of recent historiography (food and labor demands); addresses the role of “big business” and their expectations vis-à-vis the regime for wartime and postwar planning; and exemplifies the tension between macro- and micro-levels, central planning and local implementation in terms of economic viability, political expediency, and human costs.

The Introduction introduces broader structural aspects: the importance of war, process development and its determinants, the differences and similarities between Axis partners concerning the “Jewish question,” the fluidity of victim groups as defined or perceived by perpetrators; the links and variations among German/Axis mass atrocities (”final solution,” “euthanasia,” “ethnic cleansing,” Soviet POWs, “pacification”). It addresses controversies over the meaning of a “perpetrator” (referring also to the multiplicity of historic manifestations, functions, and usages introduced in the volume) and approaches to “becoming perpetrators”; it introduces correlation with other (partly artificial or otherwise problematic) categories such as “bystander,” “complicity,” and “rescuer” and their constructive engagement by the chapter authors.- outlines the organization of the volume into sections, the sequence of chapters, and raises to attention some of the key points to be considered in the different contributions.

We almost cannot think today about mass atrocities without Holocaust references. Holocaust analogies frame and enflame our ethical debates. Holocaust words dominate our humanitarian lexicon. Yet the deep linkage between the Holocaust and global justice is accompanied by a marked crisis of confidence in international law. Many question whether global legal institutions can ever prevent and properly punish atrocity crimes. The more we invoke the Holocaust, it seems, the less certain we become about the legal world built in its name. This chapter traces this development, from the first discussions of what would come to be called “genocide” in the 1930s, through private litigation geared toward restorative justice. Each legal mode of dealing with the Holocaust has served as a model for how to approach other atrocities, and each has been unavoidably politicized, despite law’s promise to depoliticize the response to political crimes.

Even in the worst conditions, Jews needed to hear music, read books, attend lectures, watch actors perform, and participate in a myriad of cultural activities in order to connect to prewar values and memories. This chapter highlights the extraordinary cultural production of Jews in situations from cramped, dangerous ghettos, to the worst possible extremes, concentration and extermination camps. Jews stressed how much cultural activity helped them retain their psychological integrity and resist Nazi attempts to dehumanize them.

This chapter focuses on Poland and France to discuss examples of the emergence of Jewish armed resistance. It stresses different forms of resistance over time and the shift it took when Jewish activists became aware of mass murder. In the east, the creation of ghettos and the mass shootings and deportations of Jews to extermination camps led the Jewish underground and many individual Jews to engage in armed resistance. In the west, armed resistance emerged in response to mass roundups. Jewish resistance in both eastern and western contexts relied, in part, on longstanding personal networks within Jewish organizations and communities, which transcended linguistic, political, and intra-communal divides.

The introduction highlights the enduring impact of the Holocaust, the global reach of its legacy, and the ways it has shaped all domains of social and cultural life. Briefly tracing the changing shape of Holocaust memory and post-Holocaust politics, it is argued that the Holocaust has become a global touchstone for thinking about mass atrocity. The Holocaust has become a master metaphor for evil, which has led to it being appropriated and misappropriated for diverse contemporary political uses in ways that are often detached from the historical event itself. The introduction suggests that the various chapters in the volume trace these developments across a range of geographical spaces and cultural practices.

In past decades, the relationship between fascism and communism was of major interest. The theory of totalitarianism viewed them as different versions of the same phenomenon. Communists saw fascism as a function of capitalism, and communism as its only legitimate opponent. Both views marginalized the Holocaust. As the Holocaust came to the fore in Western scholarship, entanglements with communism slipped out of view. This chapter argues that they deserve closer attention. Though its roots were older, after 1917 anticommunism gave the right a new focus, giving radical fringe groups respectability. Communism exerted a “negative fascination” on the right, encouraging mutually escalating extremes. Anti-Marxism legitimated Nazi violence after 1933, drawing support even from the Churches. For their part, even after the adoption of the popular front strategy in 1935, the KPD continued to believe that the SPD was the main enemy, and long remained silent on the persecution of Jews. Since the end of the Cold War, the question of the relationship between communism, Nazism, and the Holocaust has been expressed above all in the culture of remembrance.

This chapter discusses a key concept of National Socialist policy: the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). Although significant social differences remained, the Volksgemeinschaft served as a social vision. An indispensable core element was antisemitism, because the National Socialist people’s community was constituted through the exclusion of Jews and other racially defined groups. Numerous associations, cities, churches, and cultural institutions supported the antisemitic policy and excluded Jews. By boycotting Jewish businesses, especially in the provinces, local Nazi groups succeeded in isolating Jews and mobilizing the non-Jewish population in an antisemitic way. Public parades in which the SA forcibly drove Jewish people through the streets because of “racial defilement” (i.e., they had allegedly had sexual relations with non-Jewish people) attracted crowds bolstering the violence. The extent to which German society becsme antisemitic and racist was demonstrated by the November pogrom of 1938, in which the destruction of stores was deplored but the violence against Jews was accepted with indifference.

This chapter introduces the extraordinary range of archival materials and archives used by Holocaust scholars. It chronicles the efforts of prewar organizations to preserve Jewish papers and artifacts, and the clandestine efforts in ghettos and even in camps to document the unfolding genocide. This is followed by accounts of postwar retrieval efforts, often delayed for decades, and documentation efforts with multiple legal, historical, memorial, and welfare goals in mind. Some lacked a fixed home and dissolved, others followed their organizers to new homes. A fierce battle developed over German government, military, and industrial records and over postwar civilian search records. Since the 1980s, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined Yad Vashem as a central collection point for Holocaust material. Finally, the chapter turns to what constitutes a valuable artifact and to the impact of digitization on the Holocaust archive.

This chapter explains the importance of German/Italian occupation for evolution of violence against the historical background (pre-occupation setting in the Balkans, German/Austrian First World War experiences, differences between Axis partners); and showcases interactions between occupiers and occupied, including autonomous measures against specific groups in terms of policies, camps, partisan warfare, and postwar ramifications.

This chapter examines the experiences of children in the Holocaust in various geographic contexts. It raises questions about the avenues for rescue and survival of children and the limits of children’s agency. How did gender, age, and family background play a role? And how did children adjust to or resist their new – and supposedly temporary – separation from their families?

The question concerning the adequacy of mimetic representation raised by the Holocaust, of how to best convey the vast suffering, the enormity of extermination, the tragedy of loss, has profoundly shaped the history of the visual arts since 1945. Focusing mainly on painting and sculpture, this chapter argues that Holocaust art largely rejected the turn to abstraction otherwise so characteristic of postwar modernism, in favor of an ongoing engagement with figurative representation. For many artists, this was a way to retain the human dimension of the Holocaust. The shared an underlying ethical and aesthetic commitment to the human figure with its myriad complexities and configurations. At the same time, they sought to avoid falling into the trap of kitsch and sentimentality. This created ineluctable aesthetic dilemmas – to combine beauty and terror – that led to a series of heterogeneous responses, not a “school of art,” but a struggle with aesthetics in the face of catastrophe.