The Holocaust History Podcast

Send us Fan Mail When the Einsatzgruppen began reporting that they were murdering Jews, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park intercepted and decoded the messages.  Throughout the Holocaust, these men and women deciphered the reports of the SS and documented the crimes of the Nazi state. On this episode, I talk with journalist and researcher Christian Jennings about the Holocaust Code and wh...

Send us Fan Mail The first victims were not Jews per se, but Germans.  That is to say, that the Nazis first murdered mentally and physically handicapped Germans that they considered to be unworthy of living.  In so doing, they drew on the long history of the eugenics movement.  In this episode, I talked with Marius Turda about the role eugenics played in the Nazi state, its connections to the larg...

Send us Fan Mail The topic of resistance during the Holocaust is always a controversial one. What is resistance?  What did it take to stand up to the Nazis when the vast majority of Germans did not. In this episode, I talk with historian Mark Roseman about a remarkable group of socialists in Nazi Germany who made the difficult choice to stand up in ways both big and small.  We also talk about natu...

Send us Fan Mail In addition  to the massive loss of life, the twelve years of Nazi rule in Europe created one of the largest demographic disasters in human history with millions of people scattered across the continent.  For Holocaust survivors, one of the most pressing tasks after liberation was attempting to discover the fates of relatives and friends.  A variety of international organizations...

Send us Fan Mail The behavior of the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII is one of the most hotly debated controversies in the history of the Holocaust.  And for a long time much of the evidence about that has been locked away in the Vatican Archives.  Now, historians are finally able to access these documents. In this episode, I talk with one of those who has access to those Vatican archives, David...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, has achieved an almost mythical status as a supervillain.  Yet this stereotype obscures the history of a man who was, in many ways, a product of both pre-war racial pseudoscience and the Nazi state. I am joined in this episode by David Marwell an historian who remarkably also worked with the US government to track down Dr. Mengele a...

Send us Fan Mail Was the Holocaust a unique event or did it have its roots in earlier historical events?  How do we put earlier colonial genocides in context and conversation with the Holocaust?  On this episode, we talk about the connections between the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia and its occupation of eastern Europe.  On this episode I talked with Jürgen Zimmerer about this...

Send us Fan Mail  The story of Countess Janina (Mehlberg) Suchodolska is something that would be rejected by Hollywood as too far-fetched, but it is a true story.  Janina was a Jewish Pole hiding in plain sight as a Polish noblewoman who then went on to rescue prisoners from one of the deadliest concentration camps. In this episode, I talk with historians Joanna Sliwa and Barry White about their i...

Send us Fan Mail The second largest Nazi victim group after the Jews was Soviet POWs.  The experience of these people has been documented in part by the latest volume of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos . In this week’s episode, I talked with Dallas Michelbacher, one of the researchers on this project and a scholar of the Nazi genocide of Soviet POWs....

Send us Fan Mail How did Holocaust perpetrators feel about what they did and how were they able to keep doing it?  The question of perpetrator motivation has been one that scholars of the Holocaust have been interested in from the beginning. But what about the phenomenon of perpetrators who seem to have been disgusted by what they were engaged in?  What does this signify? Is it some deep moral obj...

Send us Fan Mail                   Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) is a haunting film focused on the domestic life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family.  The family lived in a villa directly next to the Auschwitz I camp.                     In this podcast, I talk with film scholar and screenwriter Barry Langford about the history of Holocaust film as well as The Zone o...

Send us Fan Mail The story of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust is an incredibly complex and difficult one.  On the one hand, Poles and Jews both suffered horribly under the Nazis.  On the other, however, the general climate in Poland was inhospitable to Jews and many Poles took advantage of the Nazi occupation to victimize their Jewish neighbors for a variety of reasons. In this episod...

Send us Fan Mail Somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 Jews, Roma, and ethnic Serbs were murdered in the Jasenovac concentration camp in what is now Croatian.  This camp was run by Croatians without Nazi involvement.  Yet few outside of the Balkans have heard of it. In this week’s episode, I talk with Stipe Odak about the incredibly complex history of the camp as well as the Holocaust in region.  W...

Send us Fan Mail The Treblinka extermination center was responsible for the murder of approximately 925,000 Jews during the Holocaust.  It was the deadliest killing site after Auschwitz.  Yet few people know that it was also the scene of a successful uprising and mass escape by the prisoners there.   In this conversation with Chad Gibbs, we talked about the history of the camp as well as the work...

Send us Fan Mail From the earliest days of the Third Reich through the end of the war, there were organized efforts to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis.  Perhaps as many as 10,000 were rescued in this way, but without their parents.  They ended up in a variety of countries and had diverse set of experiences.     In addition, the story of the Kindertransport has worked its way into the cultura...

Send us Fan Mail General Dwight Eisenhower’s visit to the Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945 fundamentally changed his outlook on the war and on his enemy, the Nazis.  It also changed the way he carried out his duties later as US Military Governor in charge of both caring for former concentration prisoners as well as dealing with former Nazis, and, later, as President of the United States. I...

Send us Fan Mail We talk a lot about learning from the Holocaust and lessons from the Holocaust, but we don’t talk nearly enough about HOW to TEACH the Holocaust.  Understanding how to present this complex and often difficult material to students at a variety of different grade levels (as well as to the public at heritage sites) is a critical task. In this episode, Dr. Irene Ann Resenly talks abou...

Send us Fan Mail Some historians have argued that the experience of Romani people during the Holocaust most closely approximated that of the Jews in terms of policy and execution.  Of course, there were also important differences.  But, Jews and Romani also went through the Holocaust together.  In this, really fascinating discussion, I talked with Ari Joskowicz about the Nazi genocide of Romani, t...

Send us Fan Mail What motivated Nazi perpetrators?  How do we explain the apparent ease with which so many Germans carried out acts of extreme violence?  These are some of the most enduring questions raised by the Holocaust.   And they are questions that scholars still grapple with today.  In this episode, I talked with Prof. Ed Westermann about these questions including issues such as alcohol abu...

Send us Fan Mail This episode covers a lot of ground with my guests from the Auschwitz Jewish Center, Tomek Kuncewicz and Maciek Zabierowski.  We talk about the history of the Jewish community in Oświęcim, Poland as well as the challenges of educating the Polish non-Jewish community about the Holocaust.  We close with a discussion of the ways in which the Holocaust is used in Polish politics today...

Send us Fan Mail The Nazis pursued a variety of strategies in their attempts to murder all the Jews of Europe.  One of these was starvation, particularly within ghettos where they could control the flow of food to captive populations. In this episode, I talk with Professor Helene Sinnreich about the experience of hunger in the Warsaw, Łodz, and Krakow ghettos.  She tells us about the ways in which...

Send us Fan Mail It’s been over 20 years since the HBO television series Band of Brothers appeared, but it continues to shape the popular understanding and conception of World War II.  The series is full of powerful episodes but one that viewers consistently single out as particularly moving is Episode 9: Why We Fight.  In this episode, the soldier of Easy Company stumble across a Nazi concentrati...

Send us Fan Mail The Nazi state was built on persecution and multiple groups in addition to Jews were victimized and killed during the Holocaust.  Today’s podcast looks not only at Nazi persecution of gay and transgender people along with Nazi homophobic thought, but also explores the history of LGTBQ communities in Germany before the war. We also look at the challenges to doing this historical wo...

Send us Fan Mail             The story of the Topf brothers is one of the most chilling examples of corporate complicity in the Holocaust.  Topf and Sons was the company who designed, built, and installed the ovens used to burn corpses in the concentration camps.  Far being disinterested bureaucrats, the company’s employees were actively involved in problem-solving and helping the Nazis to destroy...

Send us Fan Mail             Did you know that a Holocaust survivor who served in the US Army in the Korean War won the Congressional Medal Of Honor?  Did you know that there were thousands of Holocaust survivors who fought the Nazis during WWII or served in the US military afterward?             Today’s discussion with Mike Rugel looks at the fascinating stories of some of these individuals but a...