Category : Articles
Haaretz, March 07, 2013, By Doron Halutz
Yale professor Timothy Snyder examines the killing policy that entwined the Nazi and Soviet regimes.
Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Photo by AP
Eighty years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, and almost 70 years since they were defeated in World War II, is it possible to write anything new about the Holocaust?
“Historians of the Holocaust themselves often complain that the field has reached a kind of dead end, with stale debates about representation, memory and German bureaucracy,” says Timothy Snyder, 43, a professor of history at Yale University specializing in Central and Eastern Europe. “They feel that without a methodological breakthrough, the subject could lose its vitality and centrality. A similar feeling prevails among scholars of the history of Eastern Europe with regard to questions about Communism or the national history of nations that lived under the Soviet regime, for example.” (more…)
From Jennifer L. Goss, Contributing Writer
Survivors and U.S. troops at the entrance to the Dachau concentration camp.
Picture from National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.
Auschwitz might be the most famous camp in the Nazi system of terror, but it was not the first. The first concentration camp was Dachau, established on March 20, 1933 in the southern German town of the same name (10 miles northwest of Munich). Although it was initially established to hold political prisoners of the Third Reich, only a minority of whom were Jews, Dachau soon grew to hold a large and diverse population of people targeted by the Nazis. Under the oversight of Nazi Theodor Eicke, Dachau became a model concentration camp, a place where SS guards and other camp officials went to train. (more…)
Haaretz, December 13, 2012, By Amos Goldberg
Many pivotal works about the Holocaust remain inaccessible to Hebrew readers, particularly those that don’t fit the Israeli national narrative. As a result, Israelis miss out on an important internal debate
The Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Photo by AP
The publication of the Hebrew translation of Raul Hilberg’s work, “The Destruction of the European Jews,” is good news. Widely considered a foundational text of the history of the Holocaust, and believed by many to be one of the most important works in the entire field, it appeared in English 1961 but took nearly 50 years for a Hebrew translation. In the 1960s, Yad Vashem rejected the very book it is now publishing. It was not the only publisher to do so. (more…)
Tablet Magazine, December 12, 2012, By David Goldstein
In my grandfather’s village, I found the man he’d been before memories of the Holocaust destroyed him
The author’s grandfather, 1950. (Courtesy of the author)
On Aug. 9, 1982, the day before my fifth birthday, my grandfather killed himself. After taking a fatal dose of sleeping pills, he went into the living room and lay down on the couch, where my grandmother found him the following morning.
I have few memories of my grandfather, whom we called Papa. Occasionally, there was a hushed comment or two about “the war,” but when I was young, I had little sense of what that meant. According to my mother, Papa had terrible nightmares, his screams occasionally waking her and my uncle when they were young. Like most Holocaust survivors, my grandparents rarely discussed the war with their kids, and so my mother assumed that the night terrors were perfectly normal, that all fathers occasionally woke their children with their shrieking. It was all she knew. (more…)
The New York Review of Books, December 20, 2012, By Timothy Snyder
The Final Solution: A Genocide by Donald Bloxham
Oxford University Press, 410 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 [German Occupation Policies in
Lithuania, 1941–1944] by Christoph Dieckmann
Göttingen: Wallstein, two volumes, 1,652 pp., €81.30
Jest taki piękny, słoneczny dzień: Losy Żydów szukających ratunku na wsi polskiej
1942–1945 [It Is Such a Beautiful, Sunny Day…The Fate of Jews Seeking Rescue in
the Polish Countryside 1942–1945] by Barbara Engelking
Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 292 pp., zł39.99
Judenjagd: Polowanie na Żydów 1942–1945. Studium dziejów pewnego powiatu
[Hunt for the Jews 1942–1945: A Study of the History of a Certain County] by Jan Grabowski
Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 262 pp., zł37.99
Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross with Irena Grudzińska Gross
Oxford University Press, 135 pp., $16.95
Heydrich et la solution finale by Édouard Husson
Paris: Perrin, 751 pp., €12.20 (paper)
Juden in Krakau unter deutscher Besatzung 1939–1945 [Jews in Kraków under German Occupation 1939–1945] by Andrea Löw and Markus Roth
Göttingen: Wallstein, 248 pp., €20.50 (more…)
Haaretz, December 6, 2012, By Deborah Hilberg
After refusing to publish it 50 years ago, Yad Vashem has brought out a Hebrew translation of historian Raul Hilberg’s ground-breaking study, ‘The destruction of European Jewry.’
Raul Hilberg. Parents inevitably and unavoidably are − by commission, omission or total absence − teachers to their children.Photo by Archive Photo By Rex
A few days ago, while looking for images, photographs that might possibly accompany these words, I came across a first draft of an essay or book chapter that my father had written and shared with the family. The essay was about the limitations of the historian, but what stood out to me at this particular time was the sentence: “Almost inevitably the researcher will transverse three phases. During the first phase a bewildering array of sources and pieces of information are revealed. During the second phase connections are made, insights drawn, and finally, a picture emerges.” (more…)
Haaretz, December 6, 2012, By Saguy Green
Over the last 50 years, the interpretation of the concept of Jewish heroism in the Holocaust changed.
Yvonne Deutsch, “Death Train,” 1942.
This is a case that involves historic injustice and historic justice. It revolves around the necessity to cling to an opinion and to an idea, and afterward to develop the ability to recant and revise – in other words, the ability, even the need, to change. But the case of Raul Hilberg (1926-2007) and his monumental work, “The Destruction of European Jewry,” which was recently published in Hebrew by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial institution, 51 years after it appeared in English, also has a very human side, revolving around the feelings of people, and what drives and guides them. (more…)
Commentary 27, By Kevin J. Madigan
Rather than canonize the controversial Pius XII, perhaps the church should be honoring his more courageous predecessor Pius XI
During the first four years of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI put the beatification proceedings of the controversial World War II–era pope, Pius XII, in abeyance. It was, Benedict announced, a time for “reflection”— not yet the time to grant sainthood. At the end of last year, however, the pope apparently decided that the time for “reflection” should draw to a close. In a Mass commemorating the 50th anniversary of the wartime pontiff’s death, Benedict moved Pius XII closer to canonization by declaring him “blessed” and “venerable.” (more…)
Session No. 68 23 Sivan 5721 (7 June 1961)
Presiding Judge: I declare the sixty-eighth Session of the trial open.
Decision No. 72
We confirm the request of the Attorney General and will permit the exhibition of films to illustrate the evidence of the Prosecution witnesses, on condition that the films will be sufficiently authenticated.
For reasons of security, because of the blacking-out of the hall during the screening, the public, with the exception of journalists, will not be permitted to be in the Courtroom at the time of the screening. (more…)
Address by the President of the State of Israel H.E. Shimon Peres at the German Bundestag, January 27, 2010
The speech will be delivered in Hebrew
I stand here before you, as the President of the State of Israel, the home of the Jewish People.
While my heart is breaking at the memory of the atrocious past – my eyes envision a common future for a world that is young, a world free of all hatred.
A world in which the words “war” and “anti-Semitism” will be dead words. (more…)
