New Books In Genocide Studies

Suzanne Brown-Fleming suggests that most people think the archives of the International Tracing Service is largely a list of names and addresses. I was one of these people until I read her excellent new book Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). What Brown-Fleming makes clear in her work is that the archive is far richer and more interesting than that. The book is partly an extended discussion of the contents of the archive. But Brown-Fleming’s goals are broader than this. She hopes to help people recognize the new kinds of research questions the archive makes it possible to ask and answer. She tries to help researchers imagine how they might employ Big Data approaches to open new vistas on old questions. And she hopes to give people personal examples of the stakes of these questions by offering specific examples of stories, tragedies and conflicts drawn from the archive itself. Anyone who is intereste

Some books fly high above the field, making sweeping generalizations about big questions. Other books circle over a specific problem, analyzing it in great detail to say something important about a single subject. Joshua Zimmerman‘s The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) shows how important and valuable books that adopt the latter approach can be. The book is an exceptionally rich account of the attitudes, politics, policies and actions of the Polish Underground regarding Polish Jews during the Second World War. Zimmerman, Associate Professor of History at Yeshiva University in New York, spent years exploring archives, memoirs and secondary sources in preparing the book. Nearly every page of the book displays this research, with extensive quotes from newspapers, internal communications and leaders within the army. Zimmerman is well-aware of the historical and political stakes involved in his question. His answers are careful, nuanced and balanced. I can imagine

In her new book Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP, 2016), Hillary Chute analyses the documentary power in the comics-form sometimes known as “graphic novels.” Chute is particularly interested in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Keiji Nakazawa’s I Saw It, and Joe Sacco’s series Palestine, but she also introduces us to the long history of hand-drawn documentation of war-time trauma dating to Goya and Callot. Chute treats comics as a serious literary form that is especially efficacious for representing the act of witness-to-war and those who witness. It is through the power of graphic illustration combined with the written word–the comics-form–that the otherwise unspeakable atrocities of modern war can be conveyed. The book also serves as a primer to the language of comics–words like “gutter” and “tier”–and the craft of decoding comics as practiced by scholars such as Chute. In this interview Chute respon

In his book, In the Shadow of Hitler: Alabama’s Jews, the Second World War, and the Holocaust (University of Alabama Press, 2014), Dan J. Puckett, Associate Professor of History at Troy University, traces how Alabama’s Jews overcame community divisions to work together on behalf of European Jewry during the Holocaust.  Utilizing a variety of archival sources, Puckett shows how Alabama’s Jews lobbied policymakers and community leaders across the state and the nation in support of their cause.  The story helps us think about the regional importance of the South in American Jewish history.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation. Timothy Snyder does just this with his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015). He does so by boldly arguing that we don’t really understand what happened during the Holocaust. He argues in favor of an emphasis on ideology with Adolf Hitler at the center. But he also stresses the importance of the experience of occupation and the role of state structures, incentives and punishments. It was, he suggests, the persistence or disappearance of states that made all the difference in the way the Holocaust emerged over time. Because of our misunderstanding of the nature of the Holocaust, we’ve misunderstood the lessons that it should teach us. Because the world of our time rhymes with that of the Holocaust, this misunderstanding poses real threats to our world. It’s a tremendous book, fully worth of the extensive praise it has receive

Anniversaries are funny things. Sometimes, as with the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, they are accompanied by a flood of discussion and debate.  Other times they are allowed to pass in silence. The hundredth year anniversary of the Genocide of the Armenians has gotten somewhat lost amidst the outpouring of books about the war.  Still, we’ve seen a small number of excellent historical studies, mostly focused on the memory of the event. Ron Suny’s recent book ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’:  A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015) offers a different kind of contribution.  Suny offers a deep history of the Armenian genocide.  It is simultaneously a careful explication of how and why the Armenians were killed and a carefully-reasoned engagement with the prevailing attempts to explain the genocide. It’s a book everyone who cares about the genocide needs to read.  Suny writes well and has an eye for quotes bot

For a couple of decades, scholars have moved toward a broad consensus that context, rather than ideology, is most important in pushing ordinary men and women to participate in mass murder. The “situationist paradigm,” as Abram de Swaan labels this, concludes from studies by psychologists, sociologists, historians and others, that individuals are malleable, easily influenced by their surroundings, easily enough that they can be moved to do things that, in other contexts, would be easily recognizable as morally bankrupt. de Swaan rejects this conclusion. He asserts instead that most people would not participate in mass murder without a much deeper set of framing events and incentives. His book The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder (Yale University Press, 2015) lays out an alternate theory for the participation of both regimes and individuals in cases of mass murder. de Swaan brings his decades of experience in sociology to bear in crafting a thoughtful, well articulated and well-con

In Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), Kim Wunschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern European History and a Member of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, tells the relatively unknown story of the Nazi pre-war concentration camps. From 1933 to 1939, these sites of terror isolated, ostracized, and excluded Jews from German society. Drawing on a range of unexplored archives, Wunschmann explores the evolution and systematization of the concentration camp system.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it’s easy to lose track of some basic questions. What did Germans think they were fighting for? Why did they support the war? How did they (whether the they were soldiers fighting in France or Russia, women working to support the war effort, or mothers or fathers worrying about their children) experience the war? Nicholas Stargardt‘s new book The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 (Basic Books, 2015) sets out to answer these questions. The book is a delight. Stargardt approaches his subject with a depth of feeling and of insight that all historians aspire to. His analysis is careful, measured and nuanced, shedding new light on a variety of important questions. But the book’s strength lies in the way it immerses itself into the lives of ordinary Germans. Stargardt’s retelling of their stories is compassionate and empathetic. It is the nature of the lives of his subjects that many of his stories end sudde

The assassination of the Armenian-Turkish activist Hrant Dink in 2007 raised uncomfortable questions about a historical tragedy that the leaders of the Turkish Republic would like people to forget: the Armenian genocide. In his new book Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks, and a Century of Genocide (Oxford UP, 2015), the journalist/historian Vicken Cheterian offers a scholarly, yet high readable account of this injustice and the century-long silence surrounding it. With engaging prose, he explains how and why this genocide took place, including a description of the violence that Kurds carried out against Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also helps readers better grasp the continuities in how Sultan Abudhamid II, the Young Turks, and Mustafa Kamal's Turkish Republic employed violence to deal with their "Armenian problem" and other "internal enemies" such as Greeks, Assyrians, and the Yezidis. Not one to mince words, Cheterian offers a fascinating description of the Turkish efforts t

Today’s podcast marks the beginning of what I hope might become a regular feature on the podcast. The session was recorded live on the campus of Bryant University at the end of weekend conference with the title Genocide in World History, sponsored by the New England region of the World History Association. I’m hoping that occasional reports from conferences will help shed light on new research and new directions in the field. They will of necessity be a bit rawer than ordinary interviews. But I think the benefits far outweigh occasional blemishes. The conference at Bryant stressed the need to see genocide through the lens of the discipline of world history. Individual panels tended to focus on specific cases. But several papers took an explicitly comparative perspective. And the capstone session looked carefully at what it might mean to study genocide from the perspective of a world historian. The podcast features four participants from the conference: Jonathan Bush, Jon Cox, Tommy O’Conn

Do dead bodies have human rights? This is one of many fascinating questions Adam Rosenblatt asks in his compelling new book Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity (Stanford University Press, 2015) Rosenblatt, a faculty member at Haverford College, doesn’t try to recount the emergence of forensic science  in investigating mass violence.  Instead, he’s really interested in examining the political, ethical and philosophical questions that surround the study of dead bodies in the aftermath of atrocities.  His book is a thought examination of these questions.  He considers how the interests of the various constituents of forensic investigations often clash.  He thinks about the way in which dead bodies become political footballs.  He considers how to balance the sometime competing claims of religion, lawyers and politicians to human remains.  And he asks how best to recognize the rights of the dead. Digging for the Disappeared is a rich, introspective and thoughtful treatment of a

Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museums’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah Helm about the women’s camp of Ravensbruck, Nik Wachsmann about the evolution of the concentration camp system and Dan Stone about the liberation of the camps. Today I’ll conclude the series with an interview with Shelly Cline about female guards in the camps. This is something of a departure for the podcast, which usually focuses on the authors of published books. But Shelly’s dissertation “Women at Work: The SS Aufseherin and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust” (Ph. D. Diss, U of Kansas, 2014) is a perfect conclusion to the series. It examines carefully

Every year I ask my students to tell me when the Holocaust ended. Most of them are surprised to hear me say that it has not yet. Today’s podcast is the fourth of a summer long series of podcasts about the system of camps and ghettos that pervaded Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah Helm about the women’s camp of Ravensbruck and Nik Wachsmann about the evolution of the concentration camp system. I’ll conclude the series in a few weeks with an interview with Shelly Cline about the female guards who staffed some of the camps. In this fourth episode, Dan Stone makes a convincing case that the Holocaust reverberated for years after the war came to a close. The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press, 2010),is slender but packed with information and insights. It certainly provides a top-down dis

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and Sarah Helm about her book on Ravensbruc. Later, I’ll talk with Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. Today I had the great pleasure to chat with Nikolaus Wachsmann about his new book titled KL:A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015).Nik began his career interested in justice and prisons in Nazi Germany. Having published a book on that subject, he made the natural jump to the concentration camp system. After pushing the research further as editor of three compilations of essays, he has now published a comprehensive survey of the camp system.The book is tremendous: a well-conceived mixture of institutional history, narrative storytelling and careful analysis. It’s not always easy to read–I read it on my Kindle as I le

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Later, I’ll talk with Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. Today, however, I got the chance to talk with Sarah Helm. Sarah has written a tremendous book titled Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (Nan A. Talese, 2015). The books is at turns grim, touching and, just occasionally, inspiring. It’s one of the most accessible of the many books I’ve read about the concentration camp system. And it focuses on on of the under-served groups of victims of the genocide: women.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every semester when I get to the point in World Civ when we’re talking about Nazi Germany, I ask my students to guess how many camps and ghettos there were. I get guesses anywhere from a few, to a few dozen, to a couple thousand. When I tell them that the true number is above 40,000, I get astonished stares and a barrage of ‘your kidding’ (and stronger words). The camps and ghettos were an essential part of the Nazi system.So today we’re beginning a five part series dedicated to the camps and ghettos in Germany, the areas Germany controlled and in Germany’s allies. Later this summer we’ll hear from Sarah Helms, Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. The series starts, however, with an interview with Geoff Megargee. Geoff is the general editor of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos (Indiana University Press 2009-).This is a monumental project. Each of the first two volumes runs well over 1000 pages and includes an enormous amount of

Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938-1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) together. His instinct was sound. While they deal with different subjects, they share a common approach and structure that casts new light on each subject individually and on the war more generally. Often, works on the Holocaust focus on Germany, Poland and the USSR while marginalizing smaller and weaker countries. The two books here certainly address these countries. But they do the topic a great service by bringing other areas to the forefront. Each book is structured geographically, with contributors examining the course of racial science or the genocide of the Roma in a specific country. This allows the authors to look in depth at the historical context that led to different decisions an

Who, in the field of genocide studies, hasn’t at least once used the phrase “The century of genocide?”  Books carry the title, journalists quote it in interviews and undergrads adopt it. There’s nothing wrong with the phrase, as far as it goes.  But, as Scott Straus points out, conceptualizing the century in that way masks a fundamental truth about the period–that there were many more crises that could have led to genocide but which stopped short than there were actual genocides. And this is a problem for the academic study of genocide.   For if that discipline is at least in part attempting to understand what causes genocides and how to prevent them, ignoring the dog that didn’t bark is a serious challenge. This is the point Straus makes in his wonderful new book Making and Unmaking Nations:  War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell University Press, 2015).  A political scientist, Straus looks to address two methodological issues in understanding genocide.  T

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical developments on the field. Utilizing scholarly research, personal interviews and first-person accounts, Kuriloff contends in our interview that the events that analysts lived through in the years leading up to, and through World War II, led them to disavow the effects of trauma on their work. It has only been more recently, when later generations have reconsidered these events, and with the emergence of the relational paradigm, that analysts have been able to integrate concepts of trauma and dissociation into their analytic lives. Her book is essential reading not only for psychoanalysts and students of history but for an