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.

Nazi Germany’s policies profoundly altered both private and public lives of religious Jews in Germany and then across Europe. Despite targeting Jews as a “race,” anti-Jewish measures forced the Jewish religious leadership to seek new ways to assist their communities. Maintaining Jewish religious practices during the Holocaust became increasingly challenging and eventually impossible for most Jews.

What made National Socialist Germany such a violent society? Focusing on the interrelationship between Hitler, the Nazi Party, state, and society, this chapter sketches the historiographical tradition of thinking about this question. Beginning with early analyses of the Nazi regime, as in Ernst Fraenkel’s Dual State (1941) and Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1941), it follows the tradition through the debates between intentionalists and structuralists, as well as newer approaches that focus on the war years, even seeing these years as representing a “second stage of the National Socialist Revolution” (Hans-Ulrich Thamer). Early work on the destructive dynamic of Nazi society focused on the first six years of the Third Reich, with scholars differing over the degree to which Hitler was a strong or weak dictator, with the best analyses emphasizing not just the “above” of dictatorship or the “below” of popular mobilization, but the interaction between Hitler, state, and society. The outbreak of the Second World War changed the dynamic significantly; it saw a dramatic expansion of the state in the form of occupation administrations and concentration and extermination camps.

This chapter examines the legacy of the Holocaust in all dimensions of Israeli life. It considers the evolving policy landscape, including decisions regarding commemoration, education, and the prosecution of collaborators. It also traces the evolution of the cultural and political status of “survivors.” Initially, resistance fighters were treated as heroes, while ordinary survivors were viewed as passive weaklings unable to defend themselves. Both stances were part of a Zionist understanding of Israeli identity. Over time, especially in the 1960s with the Eichmann Trial and in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, a more nuanced, mournful view took hold that acknowledged the importance of survival itself as essential for Jewish identity in a precarious world.

This chapter explores Hitler’s role in the Nazi Party, with a particular focus on Hitler’s relationship to antisemitism. It carefully examines the evidence concerning Hitler’s views towards Jews, and argues forcefully for the emergence in the 1920s of a vision that was already at least implicitly genocidal and certainly murderous. It thus makes a forceful case both for continuity in Hitler’s ideas leading to the Holocaust, and for the primacy of his vision in determining the later policy towards Jews adopted by the Nazi regime.

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.