Whereas other chapters in this volume integrate gender perspectives, this chapter argues that gender is a key lens for understanding Jewish experiences in the Holocaust. Across Europe, in Jewish communities vastly different in terms of size and religious mores, gender roles and gender ideals affected access to information, escape trajectories, and survival strategies.

This chapter summarizes the status of the “Final Solution” after the end of Aktion Reinhard and German efforts to expand the process by deporting Jews in countries allied with the Third Reich; depicts the life of the “surviving remnant” in eastern Europe and Jewish communities elsewhere in the Axis orbit until liberation; discusses the degrees and limits of Nazi determination to exert pressure on their reluctant allies; and outlines German anti-Jewish measures after taking direct control in Italy and Slovakia.

The idea of an “integrated history” of the Holocaust is primarily associated with Saul Friedländer. For Friedländer, integration means bringing the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust into the history of the Nazi epoch. This is to be achieved by ensuring that the historian’s focus is not only on the Germans but also on institutions of all sorts across Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as on Jewish responses both under Nazi occupation and outside it. This “simultaneous representation of the events – at all levels and in all different places – enhances the perception of the magnitude, the complexity, and the interrelatedness of the multiple components of this history,” as he writes. This chapter considers the extent to which Friedländer realized his goal, and asks what other kinds of integration – such as placing the genocide of the Jews in a single analytical framework alongside the Nazis’ “other victims”; or placing the Holocaust in the context of genocide studies – might help us to understand about the Holocaust as a historical event or about its significance for the contemporary world. While most historians are in favor of integration, what that means in practice remains contested.

This chapter traces the basic evolution of narratives/rumors about the Holocaust within relevant countries and organizations (the Red Cross, Jewish organizations); elaborates on the “Jewish question” as a tool in Nazi propaganda and diplomacy; discusses the integrative function of knowledge within German society for the Nazi regime; lists impediments against perception of the genocidal reality inside and outside the Reich; discusses the role of postwar trials for shaping public and scholarly discourse; and considers the effects of media-driven representation of the Holocaust for current understanding of perpetration.

This semi-autobiographical essay offers the perspective from the 1970s to the present of a leading historian of Nazi Germany. It shows how a series of paradigms in one way or another obscured the Holocaust, while at the same time underling the importance of the scholarship on the Final Solution that took off in the 1960s. A particular focus of the essay is the debates around fascism and the difficulty of acknowledging the centrality of racism within the fascist model.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prohibited marriage between people “of German blood” and Jews (including, in practice, “half-Jews”). So-called mixed marriages already in existence were subjected to persecutory measures. This chapter examines the fates of couples in mixed marriages and their “mixed-blood” children, both inside Germany and in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Holocaust literature started even before the mass killings themselves, with Jewish poets, novelists, and essayists reacting to the rise of Nazism and the war, and it continues to the present day. At first, many representative authors were survivors, but, with the passage of time, new generations of writers came to engage with the reality of the Holocaust, either as descendants of survivors themselves, or simply as human beings wrestling with one of humanity’s greatest calamities. Traversing poetry, diaries, memoirs, and novels, this chapter tracks the evolution of Holocaust literature, its expansion into a global vernacular, and the ways in which diverse authors have sought to deploy language to process mass slaughter.

The core idea in this chapter is that there was a substantial, transnational, effort to rethink medical ethics – how it was framed by, taught to, and practiced by health professionals such as physicians – after the Holocaust. Because of the intense involvement of medical professionals in the Holocaust, both in the extermination process and through medical experimentation, there was a widespread sense after 1945 that the medical profession needed to rethink its ethical foundations. The chapter in particular highlights postwar currents in east-central European ethical thought, which engaged its own indigenous tradition of medical ethics (“deontology” as it was called) in ways that sometimes went beyond the parallel but more familiar debates in western Europe and the USA. The Holocaust informed – but did not determine – the evolution of biomedical ethics throughout the postwar period. Such thinking was also, necessarily, shaped by other currents – economic, political, and scientific – such that it is hard to say that medicine has “learned the lessons of the Holocaust,” at least not completely.

Museums, including Holocaust museums, display artifacts and other aspects of material culture in order to convey historical events in a manner that allows the visitor to experience them at various levels. The combination of didactic and narrative exhibits generates a sense of identification and empathy with the victims and offers visitors an emotional and even spiritual experience. Thus, Holocaust museums are located in an intermediate zone between the academic establishment and the popular media. Holocaust museums form an integral institution for forming and conveying Holocaust memory. Unavoidably, they are also shaped by the political cultures of their home countries. This chapter examines how different Holocaust museums have been constructed in different times and places to serve both a didactic function for Holocaust education and a political function in shaping contemporary culture.

This chapter transcends their traditional depiction as the Holocaust’s “last chapter” by elaborating on death marches as a phenomenon sui generis in terms of driving forces, perpetrators, and victims; and discusses possible explanations for the German (and non-German) propensity for violence in the face of imminent defeat.

Virtually all countries affected by the Holocaust, and many of those only indirectly implicated, have made efforts to commemorate and memorialize the murder of European Jewry. This encompasses not only physical monuments, but also alternate approaches such as Memorial Books, rituals, liturgy, and memorial days. Many of these started as grassroots initiatives, only to be turned into state-sponsored events. Looking across the postwar decades and comparing memorials from Germany and the USA, this chapter analyzes the complex interplay between artistic choices, educational missions, and political agendas that shaped memorials and their representational strategies and spaces.

This chapter investigates what Primo Levi called the space “which separates the victims from the persecutors.” It uses historical examination, an anthropological approach to morality, and a historiographical review of writing to assess such “gray zones.” These can include stealing food, the role of Jewish physicians, the Sonderkommandos, or decisions made by prisoner functionaries.

In the 1990s, the challenges of representing the (perhaps, arguably) unrepresentable horror of the Holocaust were hotly debated. The issue still poses crucial theoretical questions that have animated a wide array of both scholarly and aesthetic responses. One might think, for instance, of the very different representational strategies adopted by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah and Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List as marking two ends of the spectrum on how to represent the Holocaust. This chapter articulates the theoretical terrain upon which Holocaust representation unfolds and, in this respect, serves as a theoretical companion to the topic-specific culture chapters that follow.

This chapter describes the “choiceless choices” of the leaders as circumstances changed over time and as a result of Nazi strategies of annihilation. Similarly, the chapter addresses the motivations and strategies of the Jewish police and its role at different stages of the “Final Solution” and how these decisions affected Jews according to gender, age, country of origin, and class.