The Holocaust History Podcast

Send us Fan Mail The story of Bulgaria and the Holocaust is often a narrative about how Bulgaria protected its Jews from the Nazis. But is this really case?  Certainly not in the case of Thrace and Macedonia.  In this episode, I talked with Nadege Ragaru about the history of the complex Holocaust in Bulgaria and its attempts to come to terms with this past.   Nadège Ragaru is a research professor...

Send us Fan Mail In December 1941,  an SS man took a series of 12 photographs of an Einsatzgruppen killing in Latvia.  The negatives were stolen by a survivor who had copies made and retrieved them after the war. In today’s episode, we explore what we can learn about the Holocaust from these photographs and, indeed, from photographs in general.  I talk with Hillary Earl and Valerie Hébert who have...

Send us Fan Mail When did the Holocaust start?  How soon after Hitler took power did anti-Jewish violence begin?  These are some of the important questions we explore in this episode as I talk with Hermann Beck and the surge in antisemitic violence in the wake of the Nazi rise to power in 1933.   In his pathbreaking book, Hermann Beck has documented an explosion of serious violence including murde...

Send us Fan Mail Among the books that many people talk about but few have read, certainly Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is one.  But it IS a difficult read.  How do we interpret this book?  How significant is it?  And what does it tell us about the Holocaust?  These are some of the questions we tackled in this episode with the editors of a new volume on the subject. In this episode, I talked with Mich...

Send us Fan Mail Many Nazis including Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and Klaus Barbie escaped Europe and fled to South America in an attempt to evade prosecution for their crimes.  We know quite a bit about their lives and crimes during the Holocaust but much less about the network of people that supported them in their new lives in South America. I spoke with Betina Anton about her...

Send us Fan Mail Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, led a terrible and fascinating life, from Nazi torturer to advisor to brutal South American dictatorships.  However, unlike many, he was eventually brought to justice for his crimes.   In this episode, I talk with Richard J. Golsan about the sensational trial of Klaus Barbie and its effect on the memory of the Holocaust in France.   Richard J. Go...

Send us Fan Mail How can the digital humanities address and explore the Holocaust? In these days of Chat GPT, we may be rightly wary about the use of computers to analyze the past.  However, today’s episode shows how an ethical approach to using computational methods can expand our understanding of the past often by showing us new questions that we hadn’t considered before.   In this episode, I ta...

Send us Fan Mail Many of us have seen or listened to recorded Holocaust survivor testimony.  But have we thought about HOW that testimony was created?  And what role that process of eliciting testimony might play in the kinds of things survivors talk about it?   In this episode, I talked with Noah Shenker about how three different archives approached gathering testimony but also about what this me...

Send us Fan Mail Among the flood of displaced persons that washed across Germany after WWII were a large number of perpetrators, particularly from Eastern Europe.  They mostly passed unnoticed (and unbothered) by occupation authorities to start new lives elsewhere.  A large number of these Holocaust perpetrators arrived in Australia where they not only remained unrepentant but established new fasc...

Send us Fan Mail What is it like to have a Nazi in the family?  What if that Nazi was Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz? One of the least studied areas of Holocaust history is the ways in which the families and descendants of former Nazis engage with their family history. I am very grateful to be joined on this week’s podcast by Kai Hoess, grandson of Rudolf Hoess, to talk about his family...

Send us Fan Mail Architecture (and architects) played a critical role in not just the Third Reich, but also the Holocaust.  Nazi architects helped embody the Nazi worldview in their monumental work but also in the designs of concentration camps.  They were willing collaborators in the use of slave labor and, ultimately, in the construction of the apparatuses of genocide.  In this episode, I talk w...

Send us Fan Mail How did Jews in Germany resist the Nazis? What were the choices that they made to stand up against the regime where its authoritarian power was greatest?   In this episode, I talk with Wolf Gruner about his research on this topic and his surprising discovery of the extent of resistance by Jewish Germans in the heart of the Nazi state.   Wolf Gruner is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in J...

Send us Fan Mail The Holocaust in Poland left hundreds of towns and villages that had previously had large Jewish populations empty.  However, important Jewish sites like synagogues and cemeteries remained.     Polish communities were then confronted with what do with these places.  In this fascinating conversation with Yechiel Weizman, we talk about his work in researching this and how some commu...

Send us Fan Mail Ultimately, the story of the Holocaust is one centered in places:  where something happened, where someone was from, where someone wanted to go.  In this episode, I talked with two scholars about the role of geography in the Holocaust but also about how we use geographical approaches and methodologies to ask (and answer new important historical questions.    Anne Kelly Knowles is...

Send us Fan Mail How does one talk with a Holocaust survivor about their experiences?  What is the role of survivor testimony in understanding the Holocaust?  In this episode, I talk with psychologist, Holocaust scholar, and playwright Hank Greenspan about his lifetime of talking with survivors and what he has learned from that experience. Henry “Hank” Greenspan is an emeritus psychologist, oral h...

Send us Fan Mail The Nazis first targeted mentally and physically disabled Germans for mass killing, before they targeted Jews.  However, discrimination and ableist thought predated the Nazis and followed them into the postwar era. In this episode, I talk with Dagmar Herzog about both the Nazi “euthanasia” campaign, but also the larger context of discrimination against disabled people.  We also ta...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I talked with Jacob Flaws about the spaces of Treblinka.  His work analyses this extermination camp from a spatial perspective, focusing on the physical and ideological boundaries of the camp.  His work shows that the fences of the camp did not contain the truth of its existence and he details the ways in which the local population from the surrounding area intera...

Send us Fan Mail Philosopher Theodore W. Adorno famously said that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  Here he gives an example of the way that many thinkers and philosophers struggled with the post-Holocaust world.  In this episode, I talked with philosopher and Holocaust scholar John K. Roth about the ways that philosophy approaches the Holocaust and how Nazi genocide challenges our...

Send us Fan Mail At least 2 million Jews were murdered by mass shooting in the Soviet Union.  The perpetrators responsible for most of these killings were the men of the Einsatzgruppen.  In this week’s episode, I talk with Jürgen Mathäus about the history of these units, their evolution from 1938 on, and the role they played in the Holocaust.   Jürgen Mathäus is the director of the Applied Researc...

Send us Fan Mail What was the relationship between Christianity?  Could one be both a Nazi and a Christian?  What was the relationship between religious antisemitism and other forms of Jew hatred?  On today’s episode, I talked with Richard Steigmann-Gall about these difficult but important questions.     Richard Steigmann-Gall is an associate professor of history at Kent State University. Steigman...

Send us Fan Mail What is it like to visit a Nazi extermination camp or even a Holocaust site in general?  Last year, I was fortunate enough to travel to Poland with three friends to a number of camps and Holocaust-related sites and museums.  I thought I would do something different in this episode and invite them to talk about their experiences. Stuart Bertie is an architect and photographer with...

Send us Fan Mail The wife of Nazi camp commandant Karl Koch, Ilse, became a lasting symbol of the evil and depravity of the Nazi state.  She was accused of a variety of crimes and underwent three trials, including one by the Nazis themselves.  However, there is more to the story. In this episode, I talk with Tomaz Jardim about the real Ilse Koch and he unpacks the three trials as well as how the I...

Send us Fan Mail Historian Timothy Snyder wrote that, between 1941 and 1944, Belarus was the deadliest place on earth.  And he was right.  The population there, both Jewish and non-Jewish suffered under the full weight of the Nazi genocidal project from the Holocaust by Bullets to the Hunger Plan. In this episode, I talked with Franziska Exeler about the Holocaust in Belarus as well as its afterma...

Send us Fan Mail The Bełżec extermination camp was the first of the so-called Operation Reinhard camps to open.  In some ways, it provided the model for the other Reinhard camps of Sobibor and Treblinka.  In this episode, Chris Webb provides a detailed history of the camp and a detailed discussion of the important role that Bełżec played in the Final Solution.   Chris Webb is an independent resear...

Send us Fan Mail In 1985, the nine-hour film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann hit theaters.  This powerful production featured survivor testimony as well as secretly filmed interviews with Nazi perpetrators.   It’s length and the way it was shot challenges our understanding of what a Holocaust film is.  Is it a documentary film or something else? How has it impacted both our understanding of the event as...