Before considering the goal of Augustine’s preaching, this chapter first of all considers Augustine’s understanding of the nature of reality and of human beings as wholly dependent upon God’s grace. In this context, it argues that the question of the goal of preaching is effectively turned on its head: that it is not so much a question of what the human preacher should say or do – of what they should give in order to achieve a particular goal – but rather a question of how they are to receive what is given to them so that their goal can be achieved. It suggests that the answer is found in Augustine’s identification of grace as the love of God, which is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, and demonstrates that love is the source, means, message and end, or goal, of preaching.

This chapter traces the long trajectory of Holocaust testimony from the 1940s to the present. It notes that there are different temporal registers for testimony, from accounts offered during the war to retrospective accounts offered after 1945, sometimes decades later. It notes the ways in which the testimony considered valuable expanded over time to include not just that of survivors of camps or ghettos, but also that of hidden children or Jews living in hiding with false papers. It also evolved in content, as testimony came to not just remember the dead, but also shape the living and the reconstruction of Jewish life. Even material culture has been incorporated into testimony, as artifacts from survivors have become “sacred relics” of a sort.

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 chapter opens with the challenge of connecting fascism to explanations of the Holocaust, given the many distinctive, or purportedly distinctive, elements of National Socialism, not least the radical character of its antisemitism. The chapter argues, however, that thinking about fascism in relation to the Holocaust has three main virtues. First, it prompts us to reconsider the boundaries and distinctiveness of both fascism and Holocaust. Secondly, it suggests that fascist ideology made some critical moves that helped make the Holocaust conceivable and possible. Finally, fascist taboo-breaking helped to create receptive audiences and collaborators across Europe, “catalysing, and radicalising a nexus of local eliminationist agencies.”

Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus, the whole Christ with Christ as Head and the Church as Body, developed within his preaching ministry. The doctrine emerges from Augustine’s prosopological exegesis of the Psalms and grows into a theological reflection on the enduring union of Christ and the Church that leads Augustine to say that Christ and the Church share a voice, an identity, and a life. This transforming union gives Christians a new identity as members of the Body of Christ through the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. The life of the Church reflects the love and unity of Christ in its life and action in the world. Because of its deep roots in his preaching, Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus can be called a preached theology. That is, it is a theology developed within the context of preaching, both in the preparation for preaching and in the preaching itself.

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.

Jews trying to survive in Poland, on the “Aryan” side, were exposed to permanent risk of detection not so much by the Germans, but by their Polish neighbors, passers-by, officers of the “Blue” police and the ever-present szmalcovnicy (blackmailers). The behavior, cultural and religious codes, speech, aand stereotyped physical characteristics of Jews conspired to make Jewish survival so very unlikely.

This chapter discusses the emergence of networks of help and rescue for and by Polish Jews during the Holocaust. It focuses on the activities of individual non-Jews who risked not only harsh measures imposed by the Germans but also social ostracism. The chapter stresses the centrality of Jews’ participation in the rescue initiatives, in particular the role of the Council to Aid Jews “Żegota.”

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.

These sermons were aimed at inspiring believers to imitate the martyrs, who themselves imitated Christ, their archetype. Christ’s voluntary suffering and self-sacrifice defeated the devil and death, expiated our sins, and restored to believers the possibility of eternal happiness, with God’s grace. Augustine modifies the traditional definition of “martyr” as “witness” to make martyrdom contingent on suffering and self-sacrifice: the essence of martyrdom and mandatory for all who would be Christian. He provides examples of this ideal behavior, such as calmly accepting the loss of one’s property. Suffering proves the cause for which martyrs died is true; otherwise they would have failed their ordeals. Augustine draws on Cyprian, recognizing a literal martyrdom in times of persecution, and in times of peace, a spiritual martyrdom fought daily against temptation and sin. These sermons also document the obstacles Augustine faced when preaching: not only correcting the errors of the Donatists, Manichees, and Pelagians, but also accommodating his flock’s limitations. He thus presents an inclusive church, a concord of different levels of expertise ordered hierarchically.

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.