This chapter explores the coherence, evolution, and national specificity of antisemitism. It introduces and contrasts the different categories of antisemitism scholars have deployed to provide an explanation for violence (political, racial, eliminatory, redemptive, and so on.)It explores questions of contrast and continuity, and particularly the role of the First World War and its aftermath, and the relevance for understanding Nazi violence against Jews of the unprecedented lethality of the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Civil War.

The Introduction focuses on the experiences of victims of the Holocaust rather than perpetrators. It addresses victims’ perceptions, understandings, reactions, self-help and varied attempts at resistance. It also concerns Roma, mentally and physically challenged individuals, Slavs and Soviet POWs, and homosexuals. Finally, it addresses historiography, as do most of the chapters in this volume.

The twenty-first century is a digital century, and the use of digital media and data-analyzing technology has become widespread and even trendy in the humanities. What does this mean for the legacy of the Holocaust? What are the advantages and challenges of digitalization in the context of Holocaust archives, for example with online access to videos of survivor testimony? Are there new strategies for representing or analyzing the Holocaust that draw on the techniques of digital humanities? This chapter explores the uses (and abuses) of digital technologies for both analyzing the history of the Holocaust and presenting that history to a public audience. It also considers the question of the post-survivor future, for example holograms of survivors, and what this says about “authenticity” and authority.

This chapter 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.

This chapter explores how the Holocaust came into focus in historiography, beginning with efforts to write the Holocaust’s history while it happened, and looking both at the early postwar Jewish historiography and at the first initiatives at writing about the Holocaust in Western historical scholarship. It discusses the impact of the Nuremberg Trials on postwar scholarship, and the challenge this presented to those who wished to capture the victims’ perspective. It concludes in the early 1960s with the publication of Raul Hilberg’s monumental work in the English language, and with new initiatives in Israeli scholarship. A central theme of the essay is the tension between the victim-centered approaches in the early Jewish historiography and the more perpetrator- and policy-related orientation of the Western scholarship in the 1960s.

This chapter explores the evolution of racial ideas before and after the First World War, comparing German-speaking central Europe with the rest of Europe, the USA, or Japan. It analyzes nuances and tensions in German racial discourse between conceptions of Volk and Rasse, both of which might connote “race” in the broader English sense of the term; between Germandom, which privileged the idea of a pure Nordic race native to northern Europe, and Aryanism, which emphasized the racial superiority of multiple “Aryan” nations and peoples; and competing notions of eugenics, including concepts such as “Systemrasse” and “Vitalrasse,” with the former highlighting the differential quality of nations and races and the latter focused on improving the quality of a given population. Finally, it highlights the porous boundaries between conceptions derived from science and eugenics and those emerging from humanist, religio-mythological, and esoteric conceptions of blood and soil. Nazism drew equally on “scientific” eugenic and more “humanist” traditions, which were not unique to Germany but together created the syncretic apotheosis of race-thinking that undergirded the Holocaust.

This chapter recaps historiography on the role of Hitler in the Nazi system in general and in the Holocaust in particular; elucidates meanings of “order/authorization/wish” in the context of decision-making; discusses the predominant depiction of Himmler and Heydrich as “architects” of genocide and the role of leaders who are generally neglected in mainstream historiography (Backe, Rosenberg); reflects on center and periphery as useful concepts for process analysis against the background of empirical/regional studies since the mid 1990s.

This chapter discusses the stances of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Churches towards the increasing persecution of Jews and other targeted groups (such as disabled people or Roma), the splits within some of these hierarchies and between hierarchies (including the Vatican), and grassroots reactions.

This chapter covers coerced sterilization, killings of patients, and forced research in Germany and territories under German occupation. It details the various medical establishments and killing centers as well as the methods by which patients were murdered, as well as complicit medical personnel.

Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that was crafted mainly by Europeans and North Americans, but that never achieved mainstream acceptance in the West. It was, instead, in the Arab states and Iran that Holocaust denial entered into conventional public opinion and politics. The false claim that Jews had “invented” the Holocaust both to extort money from wealthy countries and to justify the founding of Israel became a cornerstone of postwar antisemitism. In this, deniers recapitulate the logic of Nazi ideology in attributing a pervasive, hidden power to “the Jew.” The instrumental appeal of this to geopolitical foes of Israel explains why this conspiracy theory gained broader legitimacy in the Middle East than in Europe or North America.

This chapter first turns to patterns of arrest, imprisonment, and release, then to life inside the camps, including sites of terror, and also to prisoners’ attempts at survival, self-assertion, and resistance. It examines how inmate populations changed over time and how life and death in the camps was tied to gender, age, and class as well as networks. It also compares the experiences of Jewish inmates to non-Jews in these same camps.

Jewish experiences, from life in cramped Judenhäuser always subject to Gestapo violence, to the suffering of individuals and families in a variety of ghettos in eastern Europe, are discussed. This includes the geographies of the Holocaust, house committees and activities within and outside ghetto walls, and also communal organizations, economic activities, self-help, and familial strategies.