New Books in Genocide Studies

One of the defining characteristics of the Nazi regime that ruled Germany from 1933 until 1945 was its attention to presentation as a means of winning support. In Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda (Routledge, 2017), Nicholas O’Shaughnessy details the centrality of political marketing to how the Nazis governed Germany, showing how vital it was to its success. As he exp...

In less than thirty years, California’s Indian population fell from 150,000 to 30,000. In An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Benjamin Madley, Associate Professor of History at UCLA, argues that war or disease can’t explain this population drop. The state and federal government carried out genocide against Californ...

How did a generation of Germany’s best and brightest become radicalized? What convinced young intellectuals to join the SS and perpetrate genocide in pursuit of a racial utopia? Find out in our conversation with Christian Ingrao about his book Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine (Polity Press, 2015). Christian traces the experiences of the war youth generation from defining ev...

In 2017 half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1% of the population. In his new book, The Great Leveler Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017), Walter Scheidel explores economic inequality and sets forth the provocative thesis that only violence and catastrophes have truly reduced it throughout history. Scheid...

In Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Alexander Prusin delineates the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II. He starts from the medium-term background, reaching back to the unification of Yugoslavia, and covers both the chronological process and its wide thematic breadth, with issues ranging from collaborationism to resistance. Th...

​​Witnessing Unbound: Holocaust Representation and the Origins of Memory (Wayne State University Press, 2017) is a ​collection of essays and interviews that offer fresh ​insight on the last of the primary witnesses to the Holocaust​. The book interrogates the stylization of the ​narrative ​account of the primary witness, and it offers significant new scholarship on the Halakhic witness​ — Orthodox...

People study atrocities and mass violence for a variety of reasons. When asked, many offer thoughtful intellectual or political explanations for their choice. But in truth, the field is a practical response to a cry of the heart. How, people ask, how can people do this to one another? How can men and women do such terrible things? How can they do them to people they know? Max Bergholz asks these q...

This podcast marks the beginning of a new occasional series of podcasts about the genocide in Rwanda. In the next few months we’ll hear from Timothy Longman, Sara Brown, Erin Jessee and others. We start with Michael Barnett. Barnett has recently published a new edition of his seminal text Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2016). Barnett was a member...

Every time I teach Comparative Genocide, I distribute a letter to the students preparing them for the particular challenges of taking a course about mass violence. In the letter, I point out a simple fact. People, including academics, say the words “never again” repeatedly. Yet, the suffering goes on in Serbia, South Sudan, the DRC, Burma, and so on. So what does it mean to study the Holocaust in...

Michael Bryant’s book is both less and more ambitious than its title. He’s writing less of a history of war crimes than he is a history of the idea and concept of war crimes. He’s most interested in what people have considered a breach of the norms of warfare and how this concept has changed over time. The triumph of A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2016) i...

Rwanda’s homegrown gacaca law has been widely hailed as a successful indigenous solution to the unprecedented problem of the country’s 1994 genocide. In his book Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice After Genocide (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), Bert Ingelaere complicates this received wisdom by focusing on the way the post-genocide gacaca trials unfolded, rather than on their lof...

James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, began researching the book that became Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press, 2017) by wondering whether Jim Crow laws in the U.S. had any impact on the development of the Nuremberg Laws. Some scholars have denied any influence. Professor W...

In my time doing this podcast, I’ve covered a number of books about transitional justice. All have been insightful and interesting. But few of them focused carefully on the trials themselves. Anuradha Chakravarty seeks to remedy this. Her book Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2016) looks carefully a...

Trying to figure out what Hitler “really” thought about anything is difficult because he was–among many other things–a clever, opportunistic politician and a very prolix one at that. Over the course of his 20+ career he gave thousands of speeches, wrote two long books “explaining” (if that’s the right word) his beliefs, and offered endless monologues to his acolytes on every imaginable topic. He w...

In her most recent book, Holocaust: An American Understanding (Rutgers University Press), Deborah Lipstadt reviews and analyzes the emergence of Holocaust scholarship in the academy, and Holocaust consciousness in the American public, in the second half of the twentieth century. Professor Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, demonstrates tha...

The intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’t really think of the Soviet Union and the American west as colonial spaces. But while there are limitations to this, both fit well into a kind of geography of colonialism. This is why Edward Westermann‘s new book Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars:...

In Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016), Rabbi Mark Glickman, of Temple Bnai Tikvah in Calgary, examines the massive theft of Jewish books by the Nazis. He offers a compelling account of the history of Jewish books in Europe, the place of Jewish books and culture in Nazi ideology and Jewish efforts to save these books during the Holocaust and rescue...

For non-specialists, the Holocaust in Hungary is a history both familiar and murky. Many Americans have read memoirs like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Judith Magyar Isaacson’s Seeds of Sarah in high school or college and have some sense of their experience. But the actual history of Hungary and the Holocaust remains opaque. Ferenc Laczo aims to change this. Laczo, an associate professor of history at M...

The unprecedented crime of the 1994 Rwandan genocide demanded an unconventional legal response. After failed attempts by the international legal system to efficiently handle legal cases stemming from the genocide, Rwandans decided to take matters into their own hands and reinstate Gacaca law, which had been the sole legal system in Rwanda prior to colonization. Gacaca, a Kinyarwanda word referring...

Part detective story, part travelogue, Noah Lederman decided to write A World Erased: A Grandson’s Search for his Family’s Holocaust Secrets (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) to find answers to the questions he had since childhood about his grandparents experiences during the Holocaust. Through conversations with family members, visiting his ancestral town, and combing available documents, this memoi...

What difference can a trial make, really? In Guatemala: The Question of Genocide (Taylor and Frances, 2016), Elizabeth Obglesby and Diane Nelson start from this question to examine much more broadly the memory and politics of genocide in Guatemala. To do so, they invited many of the scholars familiar with the conflict in Guatemala to reflect on the role genocide has played in that country. Many au...

During the mid- to late 1930s, a small but socially prominent group of right-wing Britons took a public stance in support of the Nazi regime in Germany. While many of them curtailed their activities upon Britain’s declaration of war in 1939, as Richard Griffiths reveals in his book What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45 (Routledge, 2016) some of them...

Benjamin Martin’s The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) examines the attempt by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to forge a European cultural empire out of their military conquests during World War II. Martin shows that the idea of Europe as a discrete political and cultural entity did not come from the postwar period (much less the European Union of the 19...

Why does the UN intervene in some cases of mass violence and not others? Why and how have public attitudes toward humanitarian intervention changed over the past decades? And how do the stories we tell each other about cases of violence and civil war impact our decisions about when intervention is appropriate? Carrie Booth Walling’s recent book, All Necessary Measures: The United Nations and Human...

During the Second World War millions of Britons tuned in nightly to hear the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw coming from Nazi Germany. Though the label was broadly applied to a number of English-speaking broadcasters, it was most famously associated with William Joyce. In Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce (Routledge, 2016), Colin Holmes provides a study of Joyce’s life th...