New Books in Genocide Studies

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and Sarah Helm about her book on Ravensbruc. Later, I’ll talk with Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. Today I had the great pleasure to chat with Nikolaus Wachsmann abou...

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Later, I’ll talk with Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. Today, however, I got the chance to talk with Sarah Helm. Sarah has written a tremendous book ti...

Every semester when I get to the point in World Civ when we’re talking about Nazi Germany, I ask my students to guess how many camps and ghettos there were. I get guesses anywhere from a few, to a few dozen, to a couple thousand. When I tell them that the true number is above 40,000, I get astonished stares and a barrage of ‘your kidding’ (and stronger words). The camps and ghettos were an essenti...

Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938-1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) together. His instinct was sound. While they deal with different subjects, they share a common appr...

Who, in the field of genocide studies, hasn’t at least once used the phrase “The century of genocide?”  Books carry the title, journalists quote it in interviews and undergrads adopt it. There’s nothing wrong with the phrase, as far as it goes.  But, as Scott Straus points out, conceptualizing the century in that way masks a fundamental truth about the period–that there were many more crises that...

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical devel...

Historians have spent the last two decades detailing and explaining the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union.  We now know much more than we used to about the escalation of violence in 1941 and the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets.” The actions of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, in contrast, are less well known. But they are crucial to understanding the evolution of violence against Jews...

Adolf Hitler famously (and probably) said in a speech to his military leaders “Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?” This remark is generally taken to suggest that future generations won’t remember current atrocities, so there’s no reason not to commit them. The implication is that memory has something like an expiration date, that it fades, somewhat inevitably, of i...

I’ll be leaving soon to take students on a European travel course. During the three weeks we’ll be gone, in addition to cathedrals, museums and castles, they’ll visit Auschwitz, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and a variety of other Holocaust related sights.  And I’ll ask them to think about what we can say about how people in East-Central Europe remember the Holocaust based on the pla...

So I should start out with a confession. I don’t know much about the history of Argentina (I said something similar about Guatemala a year or so ago on the program). And I don’t think it would have occurred to me to do a comparative study Argentina and Nazi Germany. Fortunately, Daniel Feierstein was more imaginative than I. The resulting study, recently translated into English as Genocide as Soci...

Genocide studies is one of the few academic fields with which I’m acquainted which is truly interdisciplinary in approach and composition. Today’s guest Abdelwahab El-Affendi, and the book he has edited, Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities (Bloomsbury Academic 2014), is an excellent example of how this works out in practice. The question this book addres...

After “Schindler’s List,” it became customary for my students, and I, to repeat the slogan “Never Again.” We did so seriously, with solemn expressions on our faces and intensity in our voices. But, if I’m being honest, I also uttered this slogan with some trepidation. For, while I believed absolutely in the necessity of such a commitment, I didn’t really know how to carry it out. Looking at Bosnia...

Alon Confino‘s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014) begins with a vivid and devastating scene in the small German town of Fürth on November 10, 1938: Jews are forced from their homes and assembled in the main square. Many are made to stand for hours at the local community center; the men are beaten, humiliated, and transported to Da...

As a graduate student at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I remember watching the collapse of Yugoslavia on the news almost every night and reading about it in the newspaper the next day. The first genocidal conflict covered in real time, dozens of reporters covered the war from the front lines or from a Sarajevo under siege. Not surprisingly, the media coverage was accompanied by a flood of memoirs...

Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigration, or politics and raised questions about society and geography. In many ways, these nineteenth-century maps were the predecessors to the maps made through Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In the...

In his biography of Jozef Tiso, Catholic priest and president of independent Slovakia (1939-1944), James Ward provides a deeper understanding of a man who has been both honored and vilified since his execution as a Nazi collaborator in 1947. Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Cornell University Press, 2013) is also a fascinating look at Catholicism, na...

As a teenager, I heard or read or saw (in films or on television) story after story about the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Despite the occasional ‘corrective’ offered by Hogan’s Heroes, the impression given was that the Gestapo were all knowing and ever present. We now know differently, of course. But knowing that the Nazi state functioned as much or more through consensus as coercion has led...

The field of genocide studies is surprisingly young. As Sam Totten and I discussed in an interview earlier this year, it dates back to the late 1980s or early 1990s. That makes the field about 25 years old. That’s about the time it takes for a generation of scholars to lay out their ideas and to train new researchers to follow in their footsteps. And, as it usually goes, that new generation often...

What is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier wat...

I live and work in the state of Kansas in the US.  We think of ourselves as living in tornado alley and orient our schedules in the spring around the weather report.  Earthquakes are something that happen somewhere else. Recently, however, our southern neighbor, Oklahoma, has been rocked repeatedly by minor earthquakes.  Why this is so has been the subject of endless speculation.  In the midst of...

In 1994 I was in graduate school, trying hard to juggle teaching, getting started on my dissertation and having something of a real life. The real life part suffered most of all.  But every once in a while, the world around me would startle me out of my cave and remind me that life was proceeding without me. The genocide in Rwanda was one of these events. Along with the ongoing ethnic cleansing in...

Works in the field of genocide studies tend to fall into one of a few camps.  Some are emotional and personal.  Others are historical and narrative.  Still others are intentionally activist and aimed at changing policy or decisions. Martin Shaw‘s works fit into a fourth category.  A historical sociologist, Shaw brings the very best of the social sciences to bear on the subject.  His work is carefu...

Most of the authors I’ve interviewed for this show have addressed episodes in the past, campaigns of mass violence that occurred long ago, often well-before the author was born. Today’s show is different. In his book Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan (Transaction Publishers, 2012), Samuel Totten addresses the violence against the people of the Nuba Mountains of the Sudan.  This vi...

My marginal comment, recorded at the end of the chapter on the Belzec trial in Michael Bryant‘s fine new book Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 (University of Tennessee Press, 2014), is simple:  “!!!!”  Text speak, to be sure, but it conveys the surprise I felt. One can ask many questions about the trials of the German guards and administrators of Belzec,...

It seems quite reasonable to wonder if there’s anything more to learn about the Holocaust. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have been researching and writing about the subject for decades. A simple search for “Holocaust” on Amazon turns up a stunning 27,642 results. How can there still be uncovered terrain? Wendy Lower shows it is in fact possible to say new things about the Holocaust (to be...