Resources: Database Nazis, Hitler, and the Holocaust
Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker whose daringly innovative documentaries about a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 earned her both acclaim as a cinematic genius and contempt as a propagandist for Hitler, died Monday night at her home in Pöcking, south of Munich. She was 101. After the defeat of Germany in 1945, she was pronounced a Nazi sympathizer by the Allies and never again found work as a movie director. But her revolutionary film techniques deeply influenced later generations of documentary makers and television commercial makers, keeping alive the debate over whether her »
“We Ourselves Are the War:” Understanding the Relationship between the First World War and the Holocaust Brian E. Crim, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of History, Lynchburg College Europeans from every walk of life rejoiced at the prospect of war in 1914. The “Old Order” may have blundered into a diplomatic nightmare from which there was no escape, but Europe’s bellicose populations were more interested in the end result—a great national cleansing. After nearly a century of limited engagements within the confines of the balance of power system, colonial adventures in distant lands, and the steady triumph of bourgeois materialism at home, »
Transcript of the President’s Remarks Days of Remembrance Address (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Please, be seated. Thank you very much. To Sara Bloomfield, for the wonderful introduction and the outstanding work that she’s doing; to Fred Zeidman; Joel Geiderman; Mr. Wiesel -- thank you for your wisdom and your witness -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Senator Dick Durbin; members of Congress; our good friend, the ambassador of Israel; members of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and, most importantly, the survivors and rescuers and their families who are here today: It is a great honor for »
To the Editors: Congratulations to Professor Timothy Snyder ["Holocaust: The Ignored Reality," NYR, July 16] for expanding the conventional understanding of the mass killings of European civilians in the 1930s and 1940s beyond the symbolic limits of Auschwitz and the Gulag—with one exception. Certainly, as Snyder remarks, "memory has made some odd departures from history...." Curiously, his article makes its own odd departure from history. There is not a single word in his otherwise wide-ranging exposition about the other group singled out for extermination on racial grounds—the Romani, or "Gypsies." As Ian Hancock, a Romani and a professor at the »
Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of their »
Lavish architectural etchings cover the walls from floor to ceiling of the Toronto apartment of Robert Jan van Pelt, perhaps an expected flourish for the home of a professor at a school of architecture. Closer inspection reveals that, rather than the gothic beauty of the Chartres Cathedral or the Art Deco heights of New York's Chrysler Building, his etches are Giovanni Piranesi's dark depictions of imaginary prisons. The display of oppressive penitentiaries as architectural marvels mirrors Prof. van Pelt's proposition that the crematoria at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp that has become a symbol of the Holocaust, is one of »
Fractional justice by Devin O. Pendas The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial of 1963–65 was the largest, most public, and most important Nazi trial to take place in a West German court after 1945. Twenty-two defendants stood in the dock at the start; 20 remained at the end. They ranged in rank from major to private and represented nearly every significant administrative unit at the Auschwitz “protective custody” camps (Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II/Birkenau, and Monowitz)—from executive administration to the overseers of individual barracks to the “political section” (Gestapo) that addressed breaches of discipline. They included doctors who both »
Ben Meed, 88; Holocaust Survivor Advocate By Adam Bernstein Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 27, 2006; B07 Ben Meed, 88, a resistance figure in Poland during World War II who became a leading force in creating a reunion of other Jewish Holocaust survivors, died Oct. 24 at his home in Manhattan. He had pneumonia. Mr. Meed, a leather and textile businessman after the war, helped start the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in 1981 and was its longtime president. Every few years, he organized gatherings that attracted thousands of people to discuss their shared experiences. At its peak, »
The Holocaust's Arab Heroes By Robert Satloff Sunday, October 8, 2006; B01 Virtually alone among peoples of the world, Arabs appear to have won a free pass when it comes to denying or minimizing the Holocaust. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has declared to his supporters that "Jews invented the legend of the Holocaust." Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently told an interviewer that he doesn't have "any clue how [Jews] were killed or how many were killed." And Hamas's official Web site labels the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews "an alleged and invented story with no basis." Such Arab viewpoints are »
The Six-Million Person Question Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust. BY MARK BOWDEN Wednesday, October 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. "As to the Holocaust, I just raised a few questions. And I didn't receive any answers to my questions."--Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, interviewed in Time magazine in September 2006. When Mr. Ahmadinejad visited the U.S. last month, he backed off slightly from his earlier position that the Holocaust was a myth. The systematic extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, an atrocious historical fact that is as thoroughly documented as a fact can be, remains a living »
A PERONAL MEMOIR OF "KRISTALLNACHT" "A wave of destruction, looting, and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years War (1618-1648,ed.) and in Europe generally since the Bolshevist Revolution swept over Great Germany today as National Socialist cohorts took vengeance on Jewish shops, offices and synagogues for the murder by a young Polish Jew of Ernst vom Rath, third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris..." Thus started the article on page 1 of the New York Times of November 11, 1938, reporting the events which were to become known as the November pogrom or Kristallnacht". I recently reread this »
... Ive some sympathy with those who think we already hear too much about Hitler. It seems at times that you can hardly open a paper or switch on the television without seeing some further trivial bit of information about Hitler. Anybody could be forgiven for thinking weve reached just about saturation point. But lets just remind ourselves what lies behind this near-obsessive preoccupation with Hitler. I think it boils down to this. No single individual left such an imprint on the twentieth century Hitler did. Looking back, sixty years after 1945, we can see that the Second World War »
Adolf Hitler's Final Political Testament More than thirty years have now passed since I in 1914 made my modest contribution as a volunteer in the first world war that was forced upon the Reich. In these three decades I have been actuated solely by love and loyalty to my people in all my thoughts, acts, and life. They gave me the strength to make the most difficult decisions which have ever confronted mortal man. I have spent my time, my working strength, and my health in these three decades. It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted »
Adolf Hitler's Final Political Testament More than thirty years have now passed since I in 1914 made my modest contribution as a volunteer in the first world war that was forced upon the Reich. In these three decades I have been actuated solely by love and loyalty to my people in all my thoughts, acts, and life. They gave me the strength to make the most difficult decisions which have ever confronted mortal man. I have spent my time, my working strength, and my health in these three decades. It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted »
September 14, 2005: Features RECOVERED MEMORY A book prompts a nation to reconsider its past By Alex Barnett In the spring of 2000, Jan Tomasz Gross published a slim book called Neighbors that described a murder. On a hot July morning in 1941, the Jewish residents of a small Polish town called Jedwabne were driven from their homes and forced to gather in the town square. They were made to perform gymnastics exercises and other humiliating acts. Many were killed in isolated incidents. At some point in the day the remaining Jews were led a short distance to a large »
Deborah Lipstadt, "NOT FACING HISTORY The New Republic March 6, 1995 Abstract: The Holocaust curriculum known as "Facing History and Ourselves" is examined, and the need to reevaluate it as a tool for teaching the Holocaust is addressed. In some instances, "Facing History" distorts true historical fact instead of making it relevant. Full Text: In the recent flap over the Holocaust curriculum "Facing History and Ourselves," it was easy enough to demolish the criticisms offered of the program. Christina Jeffrey, Newt Gingrich's nominee for House historian, had, it turned out, recommended that the program be denied a Department of Education »
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