The Nazi rise to power and the outbreak of the Second World War created an unprecedented refugee crisis that individual Jews and Jewish communities in Europe, Jewish social welfare organizations, and the Allies endeavored to address. They focused on assisting refugees, while providing relief to Jews in occupied Europe. Despite innumerable challenges, these efforts saved the lives of tens of thousands who would otherwise have been victims of the Nazi regime.

Few historical events have been more often depicted in film than the Holocaust. This started in the 1940s and continues to the present day. Many of the representational challenges and conundrums found in other arts are present in film as well, though if anything in more acute form. Film is arguably the most mimetic of all the arts, which makes the risk of prurience, voyeurism, or sadistic (or masochistic) pleasure in watching artificial depictions of the suffering of others all the graver. This chapter situates the history of Holocaust films between the poles of melodramatic realism embodied in the American television miniseries Holocaust and the epic documentary film Shoah. These represent conventional realism, on the one hand, and a rigorous and austere refusal to represent the past at except through images of the present, on the other. As the chapter shows, a myriad of other films situate themselves either at one pole or the other, or between the two.

German men and their collaborators perpetrated sexual violence during the Holocaust and throughout the war, during pogroms, in ghettos and labor-camps, as well as in concentration and extermination camps. They committed this violence against women, girls, and gender-nonconforming people as well as against minorities, such as Roma. Sexual coercion and abuse also occurred within the societies of those persecuted, for example in ghettos, camps, or partisan groups. In hiding or during liberation, people also experienced sexual violence at the hands of protectors, allies, or liberation soldiers. This chapter focuses on the experiences of women, but importantly also addresses those of male victims. It also addresses how sexual violence was part of Nazis’ and their collaborators’ acts of genocidal violence against Jews.

This chapter explains the basics of Nazi understanding of securing and legitimizing power, dynamics of the “normative/prerogative state” where applicable/useful; clarifies the institutional framework relevant for mass violence in the Reich and occupied regions (military/civil administrations, non-German collaborators/auxiliaries), the development of institutions and their interaction during war, the role of cultural-political perceptions of space (”Heimat,” “the East”) and “normalcy” for participation in violence against civilians

This chapter offers a global and pan-European account of Holocaust trials, which stretch from occupied Germany immediately after the war to Australia in the 1980s, and much in between. It shows that initially crimes against Jews were not in the primary prosecutorial focus of the thousands of trials dealing with Nazi crimes across Europe, but that over the decades Holocaust-related crimes moved to the center of Nazi war crimes and criminal trials related to the Second World War. The chapter trances the evolution of Nazi trials, from an initial period of intensive prosecution in the immediate aftermath of the war, to a period of relative quiet in the 1950s, to a renewed wave of prosecutions beginning in the 1960s.

Against the background of prewar measures and plans, this chapter discusses the basics of and links between different strands of Nazi ethnopolicy based on “othering” (of Jews, “Zigeuner,” …), biosocial engineering (eugenics), and territorial expansionism (Lebensraum); identifies driving forces (the impact of war and expansion; central planning and local initiatives) for child “euthanasia,” “Aktion T4,” and other forms of organized mass murder; and reflects on historiography re the influence of “biologization of the social” for Nazi policy and the Holocaust.

This chapter highlights the importance of military aggression by the Nazis and their allies for radicalization of violence; explains key Axis war aims in East and West and methods used to achieve them (”pacification”); exemplifies the key role of the Wehrmacht for mass killing of civilians in the Balkans and “the East”; recaps historiography on the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht” and its persistence in public perception and German family memory.

This chapter offers an overview of Nazi anti-Roma policies, yet focuses on the reactions of the victims. The voice of the Roma victims remains muted. The collection of witness testimonies began late and is hardly representative. The extended Roma families who fell victim to genocide did not have a recognizable leadership that could speak on their behalf. Romani history is a history of prejudice by definition, since most available sources on their life and death come from the agencies or courts that consistently regarded them as a problem.

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.

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.