Parallel to the anti-Jewish policy of the National Socialists that culminated in mass murder, so-called “Judenforschung” was established in the Third Reich as an independent field of study, outside traditional disciplines, through a number of institutions, publications, and public events. In Nazi “Judenforschung,” antisemitism was the leading principle, and the antisemitically constructed “Jewish Question” was the focus of research activity. Thereby, contrary to the tradition of German academia, themes of Jewish history became in themselves respectable subjects of research. The chapter gives an overview of the different institutions for “Judenforschung” in the Third Reich and the dynamics of the field from the mid 1930s until the end of the Second World War; presents different responses to and perceptions of Nazi “Judenforschung” during and after the Second World War; analyzes the relationship between scholarship and antisemitism in Nazi “Judenforschung” that is crucial for the whole research field and its practice in the Third Reich; discusses the role of scholarship in the Holocaust; and finally explores the role of scholars in perpetrating Nazi crimes.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Antisemitism was a determining feature of Nazi ideology. The racial state was to be established through the so-called “Judenpolitik,” which aimed to “reduce Jewish influence,” make life for Jews in Germany difficult or impossible, and eventually drive Jews out of Germany. Although this policy was directly inspired by Hitler’s own thinking and by Nazi ideology, the resulting discrimination and persecution, culminating in genocide, was not a linear top-down process but rather the result of a dynamic interaction between central Nazi Party and state institutions, often triggered by bottom-up initiatives by local party activists at municipal level. Terror against Jews was used to drive this policy. It encompassed coercion and violence against Jews or people considered to be Jewish accompanied by legal measures to oust Jews from public life in Germany, reflecting what émigré lawyer Ernst Fraenkel described as a “dual state”: a “state of measure or action,” which used terror to quench opposition and fight “racial opponents,” and the “state of norms,” which employed legislation to achieve its aims while preserving legal certainty in order to avoid antagonizing majority society.

This chapter argues that dispossession is a central aspect of the Holocaust that remains poorly understood. It is understandable that it was long neglected, since understanding mass murder was the primary goal, and the financial and economic story of expropriation was a complex one. However, early books by Frank Bajohr and Martin Dean helped stake out the field, and international legal actions over Swiss banks and German companies also reinforced its importance. The chapter explores the mixture of law and violence that was used to assault Jewish businesses and property, with the emphasis often on the latter. Jewish businesses were able to hold out longest in Berlin, but the pogrom of November 1938, followed by orgiastic looting, was the beginning of the end. The desire to get Jews out of the country was often in conflict with the aim of expropriating them, but once emigration was no longer viable, expropriation and exclusion accelerated, converging in systematic theft and murder. Even then despoliation remained an autonomous but integral aspect.

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 analyses garments in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, where clothing was a vital matter. Lice-ridden garments spread typhus, claiming hundreds of lives after the camp passed from SS to British control. Medical students and humanitarian workers, from the Red Cross, Friends Relief Service and UNRRA, worked alongside military personnel and impressed German civilians and Hungarian guards to check disease and bring Holocaust survivors ‘back to life’. Clothing was crucial to the restoration of dignity. Many survivors were naked or partially clad; those with garments often had nothing to wear but camp uniforms or plundered SS apparel. Where would sufficient garments be found to stock ‘Harrods’, as Britons nicknamed Belsen’s clothing store? Initially, clothing, shoes and bedding were levied from the German population near Belsen in a British military effort to enact retributive justice that encountered considerable resistance. The chapter also explores relationships between survivors, medical students and relief workers, as clothing and makeup ‘refeminized’ women survivors, and as Britons wrestled with ambivalence towards Jews and Jewishness.

From the Enlightenment, liberal political economic thought, and the history of science, to the nation-building, ideas of citizenship, and border-setting that have defined European political and geographical space, and to racial capitalism and imperialism’s foundational role in shaping modern European economies, politics, law, and modernity, race has been central to modern Europe’s history, including its most painful episodes, and to the “global turn” in writing European history. Antiracism associated with internationalism, anticolonialism, and decolonization has also profoundly shaped European history and its writing – especially the “global turn.” Yet, considerations of economic, intellectual, political, religious, and other aspects of European history continue to neglect race and racial thought. This chapter examines the literature produced by the global turn on the role of race and racism in European history and reflects on its persistent marginalization in narratives of European history.

This chapter explores the American discourse surrounding three scientists/inventors: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Albert Einstein. All three are regarded as “great” in the areas of science and quantitative intelligence. Due to that, each is also elevated more broadly into wisdom curators, individuals who ought to possess great answers to questions beyond their expertise. These instances betoken Americans’ belief that greatness in one field ought to translate into some near-mystical sort of intuition in all others. In all three cases, greatness was remarkably compromised. America’s reaction and reassessment suggest something very important about the contours of great men in the United States.

The chapter argues that prior to Hitler’s accession, Germany’s corporate elite was fatefully ambivalent toward Jews: sympathetic to those who were part of it, suspicious of those who were critical of it or newly arrived in the country. This ambivalence meant that corporate executives were generally neither antisemites nor anti-antisemites or that they were simultaneously both.

Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.