New Books in Genocide Studies

Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist (Ibidem Verlag, 2014) is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentiet...

Everyday items found at the sites of atrocities possess a striking emotional force. Victims’ garments, broken glasses, wallets, shoes, and other such personal property that are recovered from places of death including concentration camps, mass graves, and prisons have become staples of memorial museums, exhibited to the public as material testimony in order to evoke sympathy and promote human righ...

Guangxi, a region on China's southern border with Vietnam, has a large population of ethnic minorities and a history of rebellion and intergroup conflict. In the summer of 1968, during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, it became notorious as the site of the most severe and extensive violence observed anywhere in China during that period of upheaval. Several cities saw urban combat resembli...

Mass violence comes not only from states, but also from people. By analyzing mass violence as social interaction through survivor accounts and other sources, Conditions of Violence (de Gruyter, 2024) presents understudied agents, aims and practices of direct violence and ways of action of those under persecution. Sound history – examining the noises of mass violence and persecution – is particular...

On 23rd August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Allies. Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania explores the hopes, struggles and disappointments of Jewish communities in Romania seeking to rebuild their lives after the Holocaust. Focusing on the efforts of survivors to recuperate rights and pr...

A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinist terror in Hung...

Jewish Pogroms in Kiev During the Russian Civil War discusses how anti-Jewish violence began during the revolution and civil war 1917-1920 raising questions of responsibility of civil and military authorities and the antisemitic propaganda spread by official mass media as well as deliberate exploitation of antisemitism for political purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/ad...

The main objective of Re-Constructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus (de Gruyter, 2020) is to locate the grass roots initiatives of remembering the Holocaust victims in a particular region of Russia which has a very diverse ethnic structure and little presence of Jews at the same time. It aims to find out how such individual initiatives correspond to the official Russi...

Hitler’s Hunting Squad in Southern Europe: The Bloody Path of Fritz Schubert through Occupied Crete and Macedonia (Pen and Sword, 2024) traces the violent path of Fritz Schubert and his Greek 'hunting squad' across occupied Crete and Macedonia, offering a complete translation (by Stratis A. Porfyratos) of Thanasis Fotiou's comprehensive study on the German Lieutenant during World War II. The autho...

The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War (Purdue UP, 2025) starts when the travesty ends, telling the story of the ravine’s memory and forgett...

Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania is the first scholarly English-language study of Lithuania during World War II which utilizes previously inaccessible archives as well as academic works published in that country in the post-Soviet era. In the first chapters, the book examines the multifaceted relations of Lithuania's national communities before World War II and the international and dom...

Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not always seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the concept of atrocity even exist before people could accuse their own country of mass violence committed against the inhabitants of another country?  In Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford UP, 2025), Bruce Robbins details how, when and where the concep...

We Remember Lest the World Forget: Memories of the Minsk Ghetto (JewishGen, 2018) is a collection of memories from child survivors of the Minsk Ghetto, Belarus. These are rare and moving personal testimonies, and this is a book of some significance for it opens a window on the rarely told story of the Holocaust in Belarus, in particular the Minsk Ghetto. Between 1941 and 1943 approximately 80,000...

In the history of Nazi concentration camps, and particularly labor camps, there is probably no place that bears the same stigma of wretchedness as 'Dora-Mittelbau' at Nordhausen. Located in the Harz mountains in central Germany, next to a quarry tunnel system in the Kohnstein mountain, it served to house thousands of slave workers for an underground factory known as the Mittelwerk, which produced...

As he prepared to wage his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe and the United States's westward expansion under the banner of Manifest Destiny. The peoples of Eastern Europe were, he said, his "redskins," and for his colonial fantasy of a "German East" he claimed a historical prec...

The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942-1943 (Routledge, 2021) narrates the last days of the once prominent Jewish community of Thessaloniki, the overwhelming majority of which was transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1943. Focusing on the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki, this book maps the reactions of the authorities, the Church and the c...

Today I talked to Anthony McElligott about The Last Transport: The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean (Bloomsbury, 2024). The deportation of 1,755 Jews from the islands of Rhodes and Cos in July 1944, shortly after the last deportation from Hungary, was the last transport to leave Greece for Auschwitz and brought to a close the last significant phase of the genocide of Europe's Jews (notwithstanding...

The Allied soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 were faced with scenes of horror and privation. With breathtaking thoroughness, Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp (U Toronto Press, 2015) documents what they saw and how they came to terms with those images over the course of the next seventy years...

The 9/11 attacks, as well as the ones in Madrid, London, Paris and Brussels; the genocides in Nazi Germany, Rwanda and Cambodia; the torture in dictatorial regimes; the wars in former Yugoslavia, Syria and Iraq and currently in Ukraine; the sexual violence during periods of conflict, all make us wonder: why would anyone do something like that? Who are these people?  Drawing on 30 years of research...

Gervase Phillips' book Persecution and Genocide: A History (Routledge, 2024) offers an unparalleled range of comparative studies considering both persecution and genocide across two thousand years of history from Rome to Nazi Germany, and spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Topics covered include the persecution of religious minorities in the ancient world and late antiquity, the medi...

Utilizing Strategic Theory as a framework for warfare and incorporating the testimonies and experiences of eight genocide survivors as well as military personnel, Jonathan R. Beloff's The Strategy to End the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda: Understanding the War in Kigali (Lexington Books, 2025) examines the various tactics and operations used by the Rwandan Patriotic Army to provide critical...

In The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (University of Minnesota Press, 2019),Benjamin Meiches takes a novel approach to the study of genocide by analyzing the ways in which ideas, concepts, and understandings about what genocide is and how it is to be prevented have become entrenched politically and intellectually. At the center of this analysis is what Meiches refers to througho...

The history of antisemitism in Europe stretches back as far as Ancient Rome, but persecutions of Jews became widespread during the Crusades, beginning in the early 11th century when the wholesale massacre of entire communities became commonplace. From the 12th century, the justification for this state-sanctioned violence became the blood libel accusation: the idea that Jews ritually murdered Chris...

During the Second World War, approximately 1000 Christian chaplains accompanied Wehrmacht forces wherever they went, from Poland to France, Greece, North Africa, and the Soviet Union. Chaplains were witnesses to atrocity and by their presence helped normalize extreme violence and legitimate its perpetrators. Military chaplains played a key role in propagating a narrative of righteousness that eras...

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framew...