The Holocaust History Podcast

Send us Fan Mail HAve you encountered material on the Holocaust that you find disturbing or upsetting?  Was it in your reading or at a Holocaust site or museum?  In this episode, I talk with Julie Golding about the challenges of presenting such material in Holocaust education and at Holocaust museums. How shoudl museums address the emotional wellbeing of their visitors?  What kinds of content is a...

Send us Fan Mail Even as the Holocaust was ongoing, some Jews dreamed of and sought revenge for Nazi attacks on them.  Ironically, the Nazis themselves believed in a particularly antisemitic myth of Jewish vengeance and many Germans after the war feared widespread retaliation by Holocaust survivors.  Indeed, there  were some attempts to carry out revenge attacks on Nazis after the war. In this epi...

Send us Fan Mail There are lots of popular and sensationalist accounts of the Nazi obsession with the supernatural and occult, but what is the true history of this.  The truth is that various kinds of supernatural, occult, and border scientific beliefs influenced many of the leading Nazis. In addition, these beliefs also ultimately provided a contextual background that influenced Nazi policy.  Thi...

Send us Fan Mail The Holocaust was a Nazi project, but it required the support, cooperation, complicity, and sometimes collaboration of a wide variety of non-Germans to carry out.  This complicity took a variety of forms and investigating it always generates strong emotional reaction.   In this episode, I talk with Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe about his meticulous study of the role Polish mayors pla...

Send us Fan Mail The Nuremberg trials, though not perfect, represented in many ways an epic achievement in justice for crimes against humanity.  However, a darker and lesser-known element of the trials is what happened to the convicted Nazis after ward. The overwhelming majority of sentences were never fully carried out and almost all those convicted at Nuremberg and in its subsequent trials espec...

Send us Fan Mail The Janowska concentration camp may well be the most important Holocaust place most people have never heard of.  It was central to the Holocaust in eastern Poland, was the scene of unspeakable cruelty, but also witnessed a successful armed uprising. In this episode hosted by the amazing Holocaust historian Doris Bergen, we talk about my work on the camp and what a study of Janowsk...

Send us Fan Mail How did Nazi war criminals engage with (or deny) their giult?  How was the prosecution and conviction of Nazi perpetrators dealt with in families?  What was the role of religion and faith assuaging guilt? These are some fo the fascinating questions that we cover in this episode with Katherina von Kellenbach who has engaged with this topic using a unique set of really interesting s...

Send us Fan Mail What is a concentration camp?  What are the distinguishing features of these spaces?  Where did they come from? In this episode, I talk with Andrea Pitzer about the long, global history of the concentration camp and its evolution over time.  We talk about what the definition is, what qualifies something as a concentration camp, and how different societies have learned from each ot...

Send us Fan Mail It was the largest open shooting of the Holocaust (and perhaps in history).  Yet the murder in Babi Yar of 33,000+ Jews and other victims remained for much of its postwar life, unmarked and uncommemorated, at least officially. In this episode, I talked with VIctoria Khiterer about the fascinating history of Jews in Kyiv, before, during, and after the Holocaust.  It's an insig...

Send us Fan Mail How do we approach witnessing the Holocaust? Are there appropriate or inappropriate ways to do this? Does witnessing make us more empathetic or more indifferent?  These are just some of the questions we addressed in this episode with Carolyn Dean. We also talked about the role of images in teaching about the Holocaust as well as the role of empathy in bystander behavior. Carolyn D...

Send us Fan Mail An important part of researching the Holocaust is recovering the stories of the diverse group of victims of the Nazi genocidal project.  For a very long time, queer victims have been marginalized or overlooked in this process. In this episode, I talked with Anna Hájková about her work in queering the Holocaust, that is in writing the experience of these people into the history.  W...

Send us Fan Mail How did women experience the Holocaust differently from men?  What do we learn from considering a gender perspective when we look at the past?  How did gender play a role in survival and oppression?  For a long time, women's experiences (and a gendered approach to understanding them was absent from our study of the Holocaust.  In this episode, we have a far-ranging conversati...

Send us Fan Mail How could one be a man of God in Nazi Germany?  And, especially, how can one minister to the Wehrmacht, itself an instrument of the Nazi state while professing to adhere to Christian morality?  These are the questions that Doris Bergen deals with in her book on German military chaplains. In this episode, we talk about the Nazi relationship with churches in Germany as well as about...

Send us Fan Mail The mass shooting of Jews at Babi Yar in Kiev in September 1941 was the largest open-air shooting of Jews during the Holocaust.  In some ways, it came to stand for the Einsatzgruppen killings taking place across the occupied Soviet Union.  But as it was not a camp, it left no real physical traces behind.  And this was in many ways to the liking of the Soviet government. In this ep...

Send us Fan Mail The Nuremberg Trials were the first attempt at coming to terms with Nazi criminality.  While there was a legal component to this, there was also a psychological element.  What made Nazi minds tick?   In this episode, I talk with Jack El-Hai about his work on psychiatrist Douglas Kelley who worked with the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg.  This book also forms the basis for the new fi...

Send us Fan Mail We often make the mistake of thinking that history is all about what happened and why.  However, its also very much about how people felt about what was happening to them. In this episode, I talked with Amy Shapiro SImon about her work on the ways in which Jews described their oppressors in Yiddish diaries.  She researched diary writers in the Warsaw, Łodz, and Vilnius ghettos. Am...

Send us Fan Mail Despite some popular perception, Holocaust perpetrators are rarely cartoonish pure evil characters.  In fact, many of them understood their guilt and actively sought to weave false narratives to exonerate themselves or avoid prosecution.   The story of Franz Lucas is one such narrative.  In this episode, I talk with Andrew Wisely about Lucas, an SS doctor at multiple concentration...

Send us Fan Mail Sometimes it can still be surprising how deeply the Nazi state tainted every aspect of society...including ornithology.  In this fascinating episode, I talk with Nicholas Milton about Günther Niethammer, a famous academic who became a guard at Auschwitz where he continued his scholarly activities. It's a really interesting examination of both individual choices during the Hol...

Send us Fan Mail The Nazis’ physical war on Jews also had important cultural repercussions.  One of these was its assault on Yiddish.  The Holocaust not only murdered many Yiddish speakers and destroyed Yiddish institutions, but it also changed the language itself. In this episode, I talk with Hannah Pollin-Galay about fascinating work on Yiddish during the Holocaust.  We talked about the new word...

Send us Fan Mail We often hear the term “dehumanization” used in a variety of contexts. For example, dehumanization a set of beliefs, or a set of behaviors?  Is it metaphorical or do people actually believe their victims are less than human? In this episode, I talk with David Livingstone Smith about his fascinating, challenging, and insightful work on dehumanization, particularly in the context of...

Send us Fan Mail How do we write about Holocaust perpetrators?  What does that tell us about not only the historical figures themselves but also the ways in which we approach, describe, and analyze them. In this week’s episode, I talk with Erin McGlothlin about how writers have dealt with perpetrators in both fiction and non-fiction and also about the ways in which fiction narratives influence how...

Send us Fan Mail What makes someone a perpetrator?  Are killers born or made?  One thing that is clear in studying the Holocaust and other genocides is that perpetrators come in all shapes and sizes with just as diverse a set of motivations. On today’s episode, I talked with Alette Smeulers about her work in studying perpetrators from a variety of perspectives across many different forms of mass v...

Send us Fan Mail Arguably, one of the worst places for prisoners to work during the Holocaust was the Sonderkommando—the group of prisoners forced to work in and around the gas chambers, disposing of corpses.   Yet they also managed to create a number of texts that survived the Holocaust even if they did not.  In this episode, I talk with Dominic Williams about the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, its pl...

Send us Fan Mail The concept of genocide is one of the few ideas created from scratch in the 20th century.  As a result, it can be incredibly complicated to interpret, both legally and historically.  Indeed, the definition itself has often made it difficult to prosecute. In this episode, I talk with Benjamin Meiches about the evolution of the concept genocide, the role of the Holocaust in its crea...

Send us Fan Mail When the Nazis carried out their infanous and well-documented book burning on the Opernplatz in May 1933, the literal fuel for that fire came from Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, an institution that both studied and provided treatment for LGBTQ Germans. In this episode, I talked with Brandy Schillace about Hirschfeld, the struggle for gay rights in Weima...