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.

After Kristallnacht, the Nazis introduced forced labor for German Jews. Later, over a million Jewish men and women toiled for private and public enterprises in Europe and North Africa. Changing economic needs and persecution goals during the war determined timing, purpose, inhumane labor conditions, and chances of survival in each territory.

Few events, if any, in the modern era have been more disturbing than the Holocaust. This four-volume Cambridge History, with over 100 contributions from leading scholars in the field, represents the most wide-ranging effort in decades to grapple with the catastrophe. The present moment seems an ideal time to offer such an extensive review. Since the end of the Cold War there has been an explosion of scholarship on every aspect of the Holocaust, from origins and participation to memory and memorialization, from top-level decision-making to everyday responses and experiences across all the regions involved. As part of this wave of new work there has been an integration into English-language scholarship of historiographies too long segregated into separate enclaves, not least the extraordinarily rich Yiddish-language and other Jewish research of the early postwar period (in whose recovery several authors in this collection have played a pivotal role). All this cries out for a synthesis. The Cambridge History of the Holocaust has set itself the task of offering both an authoritative review of what has been achieved and new interpretations based on original research.

A hybrid legal discipline dealing with the relationships between the right to punish and state sovereignty, international criminal law (ICL) overturns classical conceptions of the state, law and justice. Its existence, foundations, scope and effectiveness are determined by the outcome of an attempt – which has proved more or less successful throughout the different phases of its evolution – to reconcile it with the founding principles of the modern state, sovereignty and legality, inherited from the Enlightenment. Adopting a historical perspective helps us its development, on either side of the pivotal moment represented by the creation of the League of Nations: the starting point marked by the 1919 Paris Conference and the immediate aftermath of the First World War; and the turning point marked by the work of the League and international legal doctrine in the interwar era. These two crucial phases saw a string of initiatives which, rather than failures, can be interpreted as a series of necessary transformations for the emergence of a new discipline and, more generally, a profound change in the global legal and judicial order.

This chapter contains four snapshots depicting the state of international legal scholarship at the time of the League of Nations. The first captures the zeitgeist of scholarship during the interwar period and identifies some features that defined this emerging epistemic community. It also considers the extent to which scholars may have had an influence outside academic circles. The second and third snapshots focus on various intertwined debates of the time. In this regard, consideration is given to the debates on the ultimate source of international obligations and the broader discussions about scientific method and the place of ideology in international law. This is done by reference, in particular, to the approaches and/or theories followed by Kelsen, Lauterpacht, (French) legal sociology and jus naturalism. The fourth snapshot elaborates on these debates by focusing on state sovereignty as the vantage point where most doctrinal trends of the time intersect. It identifies liberalism as the ideology underpinning such criticisms and compares them with the views held, first, by controversial German scholar Carl Schmitt and. second, by Soviet legal theorists.