It was the largest open shooting of the Holocaust (and perhaps in history).  Yet the murder in Babi Yar of 33,000+ Jews and other victims remained for much of its postwar life, unmarked and uncommemorated, at least officially.

In this episode, I talked with VIctoria Khiterer about the fascinating history of Jews in Kyiv, before, during, and after the Holocaust.  It's an insightful look into challenge of Holocaust memory from the Soviet period to modern-day Ukraine.

Victoria Khiterer is a Professor of History at Millersville University.

Khiterer, Victoria. Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration (2025) 

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How do we approach witnessing the Holocaust? Are there appropriate or inappropriate ways to do this? Does witnessing make us more empathetic or more indifferent?  These are just some of the questions we addressed in this episode with Carolyn Dean.

We also talked about the role of images in teaching about the Holocaust as well as the role of empathy in bystander behavior.

Carolyn Dean is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French at Yale University. 

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An important part of researching the Holocaust is recovering the stories of the diverse group of victims of the Nazi genocidal project.  For a very long time, queer victims have been marginalized or overlooked in this process.

In this episode, I talked with Anna Hájková about her work in queering the Holocaust, that is in writing the experience of these people into the history.  We talked about the queer Jewish experience but also about the value of this kind of work for teaching us about the doing of history.

Anna Hájková is an associate professor of history at the University of Warwick.

Hájková, Anna. People without History are Dust- Queer Desire in the Holocaust (2025)

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How did women experience the Holocaust differently from men?  What do we learn from considering a gender perspective when we look at the past?  How did gender play a role in survival and oppression?

 For a long time, women's experiences (and a gendered approach to understanding them was absent from our study of the Holocaust.  In this episode, we have a far-ranging conversation looking at many of the questions listed above.

Elissa Bemporad is the Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust and is Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Bemporad, Elissa and Joyce W. Warren, eds. Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018)

Bemporad, Elissa. Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2020)

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How could one be a man of God in Nazi Germany?  And, especially, how can one minister to the Wehrmacht, itself an instrument of the Nazi state while professing to adhere to Christian morality?  These are the questions that Doris Bergen deals with in her book on German military chaplains.

In this episode, we talk about the Nazi relationship with churches in Germany as well as about the ways in which German military chaplains became complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich.

Doris Bergen is Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto.

Bergen, Doris. Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany (2025)

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The mass shooting of Jews at Babi Yar in Kiev in September 1941 was the largest open-air shooting of Jews during the Holocaust.  In some ways, it came to stand for the Einsatzgruppen killings taking place across the occupied Soviet Union.  But as it was not a camp, it left no real physical traces behind.  And this was in many ways to the liking of the Soviet government.

In this episode, I talked with Shay Pilnik about the place of Babi Yar in Soviet postwar Holocaust memory.  How did the state allow/repress commemoration of the massacre?  And, in particular, how did Soviet writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish treat the Babi Yar massacre?  It's a really enlightening conversation about the Holocaust, memory, and the ways in which the authoritarian state controls commemoration.

Shay Pilnik is Director of the Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University.

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The Nuremberg Trials were the first attempt at coming to terms with Nazi criminality.  While there was a legal component to this, there was also a psychological element.  What made Nazi minds tick?

In this episode, I talk with Jack El-Hai about his work on psychiatrist Douglas Kelley who worked with the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg.  This book also forms the basis for the new film Nuremberg.

Jack El-Hai is an author with a particular interest in medical history.

El-Hai, Jack. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII (2013)

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We often make the mistake of thinking that history is all about what happened and why.  However, its also very much about how people felt about what was happening to them.

In this episode, I talked with Amy Shapiro SImon about her work on the ways in which Jews described their oppressors in Yiddish diaries.  She researched diary writers in the Warsaw, Łodz, and Vilnius ghettos.

Amy Shapiro Simon is the William and Audrey Farber Family Chair in Holocaust Studies and European Jewish History at Michigan State University.

Simon, Amy Shapiro.  Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries Encountering Persecutors and Questioning Humanity (2024)

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Despite some popular perception, Holocaust perpetrators are rarely cartoonish pure evil characters.  In fact, many of them understood their guilt and actively sought to weave false narratives to exonerate themselves or avoid prosecution.

The story of Franz Lucas is one such narrative.  In this episode, I talk with Andrew Wisely about Lucas, an SS doctor at multiple concentration camps.  We discuss his complicity in the Holocaust as well as his attempts to avoid prosecution in post-war German society.65

Andrew Wisely is Professor of German at Baylor University.

Wisely, Andrew.  The Trial of a Nazi Doctor: Franz Lucas as Defendant, Opportunist, and Deceiver (2024)

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Sometimes it can still be surprising how deeply the Nazi state tainted every aspect of society...including ornithology.  In this fascinating episode, I talk with Nicholas Milton about Günther Niethammer, a famous academic who became a guard at Auschwitz where he continued his scholarly activities.

It's a really interesting examination of both individual choices during the Holocaust and the impossibility of remaining divorced from the reality of Nazi crimes.

Nicholas Milton is an historian, journalist, and birdwatcher.

Milton, Nicholas. The Birdman of Auschwitz: The Life of Günther Niethammer, the Ornithologist Seduced by the Nazis (2025)

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The Nazis’ physical war on Jews also had important cultural repercussions.  One of these was its assault on Yiddish.  The Holocaust not only murdered many Yiddish speakers and destroyed Yiddish institutions, but it also changed the language itself.

In this episode, I talk with Hannah Pollin-Galay about fascinating work on Yiddish during the Holocaust.  We talked about the new words added as well as the attempts by Jewish linguists (and survivors) to capture and understand the new Khurbn (Destruction) Yiddish.

Hannah Pollin-Galay is the Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst.

Pollin-Galay, Hannah.  Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (2024)

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We often hear the term “dehumanization” used in a variety of contexts. For example, dehumanization a set of beliefs, or a set of behaviors?  Is it metaphorical or do people actually believe their victims are less than human?

In this episode, I talk with David Livingstone Smith about his fascinating, challenging, and insightful work on dehumanization, particularly in the context of the Holocaust.  This is an episode that will definitely make you think.

David Livingstone Smith is a professor of philosophy at the University of New England.

Smith, David Livingstone. Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization (2021)

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How do we write about Holocaust perpetrators?  What does that tell us about not only the historical figures themselves but also the ways in which we approach, describe, and analyze them.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Erin McGlothlin about how writers have dealt with perpetrators in both fiction and non-fiction and also about the ways in which fiction narratives influence how we tell non-fiction stories.

Erin McGlothlin is Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Holocaust Studies  and Vice Dean of Undergraduate Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis.

McGlothlin, Erin. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (2021)

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What makes someone a perpetrator?  Are killers born or made?  One thing that is clear in studying the Holocaust and other genocides is that perpetrators come in all shapes and sizes with just as diverse a set of motivations.

On today’s episode, I talked with Alette Smeulers about her work in studying perpetrators from a variety of perspectives across many different forms of mass violence.

Alette Smeulers is a professor in the faculty of law at the University of Groningen.

Smeulers, Alette.  Perpetrators of Mass Atrocities: Terribly and Terrifyingly Normal? (2023)

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Arguably, one of the worst places for prisoners to work during the Holocaust was the Sonderkommando—the group of prisoners forced to work in and around the gas chambers, disposing of corpses.  

Yet they also managed to create a number of texts that survived the Holocaust even if they did not.  In this episode, I talk with Dominic Williams about the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, its place in the Holocaust, and the documents it left behind.

Dominic Williams is an assistant professor of history at Northumbria University.

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas, Chare. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Testimonies, Histories, Representations(2019)

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas, Chare. Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando (2019)

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas, Chare. Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz(2015)

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The concept of genocide is one of the few ideas created from scratch in the 20th century.  As a result, it can be incredibly complicated to interpret, both legally and historically.  Indeed, the definition itself has often made it difficult to prosecute.

In this episode, I talk with Benjamin Meiches about the evolution of the concept genocide, the role of the Holocaust in its creation, and the challenges the debate over definitions raise today.

Benjamin Meiches is an associate professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma.

Meiches, Benjamin.  The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (2019)

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When the Nazis carried out their infanous and well-documented book burning on the Opernplatz in May 1933, the literal fuel for that fire came from Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, an institution that both studied and provided treatment for LGBTQ Germans.

In this episode, I talked with Brandy Schillace about Hirschfeld, the struggle for gay rights in Weimar Germany, and the Nazi assault on the gay community as well as the connections between this homophobia and antisemitism and genocide.

Brandy Schillace, PhD is an independent historian and journalist.

Schillace, Brandy. The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story (2025)

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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 at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po Paris.

Ragaru, Nadége.  Bulgaria, the Jews, and the Holocaust: On the Origins of a Heroic Narrative (2023)

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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 written in depth about these images.

Hilary Earl is a professor of history at Nipissing University.

Valerie Hébert is a professor of history and interdisciplinary studies at Lakehead University.

Hébert, Valerie (ed). Framing the Holocaust (2025)

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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 murders in the immediate wake of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933.   Importantly, we also talk about what institutions could have done at this early stage (and why they failed to act.)

Hermann Beck a professor of history at the University of Miami.

Beck, Hermann. Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions during the Nazi Takeover (2022)

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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 Michael S. Bryant and John J. Michalcayk about this important book and how to understand it.

Michalczyk, John J, Michael S. Bryant, and Susan A. Michalzyk. Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and the Holocaust: A Prelude to Genocide(2022)

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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 work researching the people who helped Josef Mengele and her personal connection to this case.

Note: You may want to listen to Ep. 26- Josef Mengele with David Marwell for a more in-depth biography of Mengele.

Betina Anton is a journalist and international news editor at Globo TV.

Anton, Betina.  Hiding Mengele: How a Nazi Network Harbored the Angel of Death (2025)

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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. Golsan is University Distinguished Professor and Director of the French Institute at Texas A&M University.

Golsan, Richard J. Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes against Humanity (2022)

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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 talk with Todd Presner about his fascinating and impressive work with the “big data” of recorded Holocaust testimony.

Todd Presner is Chair of UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA.

Presner, Todd. Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory (2024)

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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 means for our understanding of the Holocaust and the ways that survivors remember and recount their experiences.

Noah Shenker is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Film and Media Studies at Colgate University.

Shenker, Noah. Reframing Holocaust Testimony (2015)

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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 fascist networks.  In this episode, I talk with Jayne Persian about these fascists in exile in Australia.

Persian, Jayne. Fascists in Exile: Post-War Displaced Persons in Australia (2023)

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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 history and his own journey to coming to terms with his past. As always, this podcast does not endorse any particular religion or religious doctrine.

Kai Hoess is a non-denominational Christian pastor at the Bible Church of Stuttgart.

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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 with architecture and Holocaust historian Paul Jaskot about all these facets of architecture in the Third Reich.

Paul Jaskot is Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies and co-director of the Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab at Duke University.

Jaskot, Paul. The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (1999)

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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 Jewish Studies and Professor of History and director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California.

Gruner, Wolf.  Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany (2023)

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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 communities attempted to destroy these places and how some were were quite literally haunted by their Holocaust past.

Yechiel Weizman is a lecturer in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, Bar-Ilan University.

Weizman, Yechiel. Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust (2022)

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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 the McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine.

Tim Cole is a professor of social history at the University of Bristol.

Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Paul Jaskot. Geographies of the Holocaust (2014)

Cole, Tim. Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (2003)

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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 historian and playwright at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who has been interviewing, writing about, and teaching about Holocaust survivors since the 1970s.

Greenspan, Henry. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony (2010)

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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 talk about those who tried to care for these vulnerable people as well as those who lobbied for their recognition as Nazi victims and for their rights in general in the postwar era.

Dagmar Herzog is a Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Herzog, Dagmar. The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (2024)

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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 interacted with the Nazi killing process and its victims.

Jacob Flaws is an assistant professor of history at Kean University.

Flaws, Jacob. Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (2024)

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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 understanding of the world. 

John K. Roth is Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College.

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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 Research Program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The views expressed in this segment are those of the speaker; they do not necessarily represent the opinions of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Matthäus, Jürgen, Jochen Böhler, and Klaus-Michael Mallmann. War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (2014)

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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.

Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945(2009)

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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 strong family connections to WW2. He has photographed for the National WW2 Museum, and is currently working on the Band of Brothers Currahee to Normandy documentary project.

Mary Brazier is a Mental Health Social Worker in the NHS with an MA in military history and a special interest in psychiatry in the Second World War.

Lesley Moore is an accountant that is interested in the history of the Holocaust during WW2, in particular Operation Reinhard. She has recently starting guiding Holocaust tours in Krakow, Poland

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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 Ilse Koch ascended as the mythic epitome of Nazi evil.

Tomaz Jardim is a professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Jardim, Tomaz. Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald” (2024) 

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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 aftermath in postwar justice and its place in postwar memory.

Franziska Exeler is an assistant professor at the Free University Berlin and a research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge.

Exeler, Franziska. Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (2022)

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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 researcher who has written multiple books on the Operation Reinhard camps.  He is also the creator of three important web resources on the Holocaust: the Holocaust Historical Society, ARC: The Aktion Reinhard Camps, and HEART: Holocaust Education and Research Team.

Webb, Chris. The Belzec Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (2016)

Webb, Chris. The Sobibor Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (2017)

Webb, Chris. The Treblinka Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (2014)

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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 well as the ways in which others have made films and movies about the Holocaust?  In this discussion with Dominic Williams, we dive into all these questions and more!

 
Dominic Williams is an assistant professor of history at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK.

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas Chare. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Testimonies, Histories, Representations (2019)

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas Chare. Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz (2016)

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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 what we can learn about the Holocaust from decoded Nazi transmissions.

Christian Jennings is a British author and foreign correspondent, and the author of ten non-fiction books of modern history and current affairs. THis latest book is The Holocaust Codes: Decrypting the Final Solution. He has lectured for Bletchley Park on German codebreaking, and from 1994-2012 he spent fifteen years reporting for newspapers and TV on international current affairs and complex war crimes investigations, including genocide and its aftermath, across twenty-three countries in the Western Balkans and Africa.

Jennings, Christian. The Holocaust Codes: The Untold Story of Decrypting the Final Solution (2024)

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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 larger global eugenics movement, and the echoes of this history today.

Marius Turda is a professor and historian of eugenics and the Holocaust as well as the director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University.

Turda, Marius. Modernism and Eugenics (2010)

Turda, Marius. Eugenics and Nation in Early 20th Century Hungary (2014)

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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 nature of resistance and what makes a resister or rescuer.

Mark Roseman is a distinguished professor of history and the Pat M Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University.

Roseman, Mark. Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany (2020)

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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 worked to help these people,  This also resulted in one of the most interesting archives: the archives of the International Tracing Service.

In this episode, I talk with Dan Stone about the search for the missing, the challenges of documenting the Holocaust, the secretive political history of the search for survivors.

 Dan Stone is a professor and director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway University in London.

Stone, Dan.  Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (2023)

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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 Kertzer, about the response of the Catholic Church to the rise of the Nazis and to the Holocaust.  

 
David Kertzer is a Pulitzer-prize-winning author and professor of social science at Brown University/

Kertzer, David, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (2022)

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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 after the war.  We talk about Mengele’s origins, what made him who he was, and the hunt for him after the end of World War II.

David Marwell is an historian and the former director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.  As former Chief of Investigative Research for the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations, helped to hunt down Nazi war criminals.

Marwell, David. Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death" (2021)

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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 topic.  We also looked at the role that the colonial genocides play in German popular memory as well as the fierce current debate over German official apologies and reparations.

 
Jürgen Zimmerer is a Professor of History at the University of Hamburg.

Zimmerer, Jürgen. From Windhoek to Auschwitz?: Reflections on the colonial-Nationalsocialist nexus (2023)

 Zimmerer, Jürgen. German Rule, African Subjects: State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in Colonial Namibia (2022)

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 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 incredible new book about Janina Mehlberg.  We talk about her incredible story, but also what it means for our understanding of rescue and Polish-Jewish relations.

Joanna Sliwa is an historian and Administrator of the Saul Kagan Fellowship for Advanced Shoah Studies and of the University Partnership Program in Holocaust Studies at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Elizabeth White is an historian who has worked as an historian in the US State Department’s Office of Special Investigations tracking down Nazi war criminals and also at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Sliwa, Joann and Elizabeth White. The Counterfeit Countes: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust(2024)

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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.

Dallas Michelbacher is an applied researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

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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 objection or something else.

In this episode, I talked with Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic about her truly thought-provoking work on interpretating these expressions of disgust.

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic is a philosopher and teaching associate professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

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                  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 of Interest.  We cover a lot of ground from technical choices to the nature of the so-called “banality of evil.”

                  The Zone of Interest is available for free on Amazon Prime UK and for purchase on Amazon US.

Barry Langford is a professor of film studies at Royal Holloway University.  He is also an award-winning professional screenwriter.

Langford, Barry and R. Eaglestone (eds). Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (2007)

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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 episode, I talked with Jan Grabowski about the history of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust.  We talked about the role of the Blue Police in hunting down and killing the Jews and we also talked about the polarizing memory battles and weaponization of this history in Poland today.

Jan Grabowski is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa.  He is a renowned scholar of the Holocaust and author of several important books on the topic.

Grabowski, Jan. On Duty - The Polish Blue & Criminal Police in the Holocaust (2024)Grabowski, Jan. Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland (2022)Grabowski, Jan. Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland(2013)

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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.  We also delve into the difficult memory politics of the camp and its use during the 1990s Balkan genocides.

Stipe Odak is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and, as of September 2024, an assistant professor in the field of applied ethics at the same university. He received his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from UC Louvain (Belgium) and a doctorate in Theology from KU Leuven (Belgium).

Odak, Stipe and Andriana Kuznar, Danijeila Lucic, eds. Jasenovac Concentration Camp: An Unfinished Past (2023)

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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 he has done in recreating the vital social networks among prisoners that enabled the prisoner revolt.

Chad Gibbs is an Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies and the Director of Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston.  His forthcoming book deals with the history of the prisoner uprising at Treblinka.

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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 cultural memory of the Holocaust, particularly in the United Kingdom.  In this episode, I spoke with Amy Williams about the incredibly complex history of these operations and the ways in which they have been commemorated.

Dr. Amy Willams is currently a fellow at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School, New York. For the past two years she was the module leader of the undergraduate module “Holocaust and Genocide” at Nottingham Trent University. Her new co-authored book with Prof. Bill Niven “Memory of the Kindertransport in National and Transnational Memories: Exhibitions, Memorials, and Commemorations” has recently been published by Camden House. She is working on her next co-authored book with Bill for Yale University Press on the transnational history of the Kindertransport, due to be published in 2026. Her third book for Mitteldeutscher Verlag entitled “Kindertransport: Eine Spurensuche” or “In Search of the Kindertransport” is a testimony book based on 150 interviews.

Williams, Amy and William Niven. National and Transnational Memories of the Kindertransport: Exhibitions, Memorials, and Commemorations (2023)

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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.

In this conversation with Jason Lantzer, we talk about all of this and more.

You can see some wartime footage of Eisnehower’s visit to Ohrdruf here courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Jason Lantzer is an historian and also Assistant Director of the Honors Program at Butler University.

Lantzer, Jason. Dwight Eisenhower and the Holocaust: A History (2023)

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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 about the pedagogy of teaching about the Holocaust, challenges of working with this material in the classroom, and the ways in which heritage sites engage with visitors.

Irene Ann Resenly has worked as a Holocaust educator and scholar for nearly two decades in diverse settings and is currently a middle school social studies teacher in suburban Wisconsin.

Resenly, I. A. (2022). Site Educators in Germany’s Perceptions of Practice: The Sense-Maker and the Storyteller. In Tour Guides at Memorial Sites and Holocaust Museums: Empirical Studies in Europe, Israel, North America and South Africa. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. pp. 33-45.

Schweber, S., & Resenly, I. A. (2018). Curricular Imprints or the Presence of Curricular Pasts: A Study of One Third Grader’s Holocaust Education 12 Years Later. Holocaust Education in Primary Schools in the Twenty-First Century: Current Practices, Potentials and Ways Forward. pp. 3-18.

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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, their interactions with Jews, and the difficult challenge of preserving these histories.

Ari Joskowciz is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University.

Joskowicz, Ari.  Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (2023)

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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 abuse, sexual violence, and the role of toxic masculinity.  Warning: this does contain some disturbing content.

Ed Westermann a Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M University- San Antonio.

Westermann, Edward. Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (2021) 

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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.

To learn more about the valuable work of the Center, click here!

Tomek Kuncewicz is the director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oświęcim, Poland.

Maciek Zabierowski is head of the education department at Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oświęcim, Poland.

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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 the Nazis used hunger as a weapon, the effects it had on ghetto populations, and the diverse ways in which different Jewish communities confronted this assault.

Helene J. Sinnreich is a professor and head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennesse-Knoxville.

Sinnreich, Helene J. The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II (2023)

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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 concentration camp.

Ever since I started this podcast, I have wanted to talk with those involved about the choices made in this episode and what it was like to be involved.  I am incredibly grateful to John Orloff who wrote the episode and Ross McCall the actor who played Jewish soldier Joe Liebgott for taking the time to chat with me about this.

For those interested in the camp depicted in the film was Kaufering IV, a subcamp of Dachau.  You can find a short film from the US National WWII Museum on the liberation of Kaufering here.  If you would like to see actual wartime photographs of the camp at liberation, you can find them here from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

John Orloff is a writer and producer.  He wrote two episodes of the Band Of Brothers series.  More recently, he is the creator, writer, and co-executive producer for Masters of the Air.

Ross McCall is an actor. Beyond playing CPL Joseph Liebgott in the Band of Brothers series, Ross has appeared in numerous feature films and television series.

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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 work as well as the recent assaults on Holocaust history by those aiming to use that past to justify current intolerance.

Laurie Marhoefer is a history professor at the University of Washington.

Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (2015)

Marhoefer, Laurie. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love (2022)

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            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 the bodies of their victims.

            This really enlightening conversation with author Karen Bartlett lays bare the ways in which Topf engineers knowingly enabled Nazi mass murder.  It exp[lores the complexities of perpetrator choices as well as the ways in which their decendants approach the crimes of their family members.

              You can learn more about Topf & Sons as well at the Topf & Sons Memorial and Museum in Erfurt, Germany.

Karen Bartlett is a writer and journalist and the author of several books on the Holocaust. 

Her book on Topf & Sons is:
Bartlett, Karen.  Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Holocaust (2018)

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            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 also explores issues such as the liberation of concentration camps by Jewish soldiers and the various ways in which Jews fought the Nazis as well as how their experiences in the Holocaust affected their own service.

Mike Rugel is the Director of Programs and Content for the National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington, DC. 

Cohen, Daniel. Single Handed: The Inspiring True Story of Tibor "Teddy" Rubin (2016)

Task and Purpose Article on Ted Rubin

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How do we uncover new evidence about the Holocaust?  In this podcast episode, we look at the fascinating topic of Holocaust archaeology.  Our guest, Professor Caroline Sturdy-Colls has investigated over 50 Holocaust sites including the Treblinka extermination camp where she first identified the location of the gas chamber buildings.

Our conversation ranges from the Soviet Union to the Channel Islands and also touches on issues of ethics, memory, and commemoration.

Professor Caroline Sturdy-Colls is a professor of Conflict Archaeology and Genocide Investigation and director of the Centre of Archaeology at Staffordshire University.

You can find out more about her Finding Treblinka project here.  To learn more about the camps she mentions on Alderney, visit the Occupied Alderney site.

Professor Colls is the author of several books on Holocaust archaeology including:

Sturdy Colls, C. Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions (2015)

Sturdy Colls, C. and Kevin Colls. 'Adolf Island': The Nazi occupation of Alderney (2022)

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            The Nazis murdered at least 167,000 Jews in the small extermination center of Sobibor located today in far-eastern Poland on the border with Ukraine.  In 2020, an album belonging to the Deputy Commandant, Johann Niemann, surfaced and was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by his family.

            This album contains never before seen images of Sobibor and the lives of its SS, but also its prisoners.  Martin Cüppers joins the podcast to talk about the history of the camp and what these photos tell us about its history.

            All of the photographs mentioned in the podcast can be found online here courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Martin Cüppers is Professor of history and director of the Ludwigsburg Research Center at the University of Stuttgart.

He is the co-author along with Ann Leppers and Jürgen Matthäus of From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor- An SS Officer's Photo Collection.

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                  What did the US do to rescue Jews from the clutches of the Nazis?  This week we talk with Rebecca Erbelding about the War Refugee Board and American efforts to help those targeted by the Nazis.

                  In this discussion, we touch on a lot of important topics including American immigration policy as well as what the US government and public knew about the Holocaust and when.  But, most importantly, we talk about the War Refugee Board and the remarkable ways in which it sought to fight for refugees and against the Nazis.]

Rebecca Erbelding is an historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  She can be found on Twitter @rerbelding and on BlueSky at @rerbelding.bsky.social.

Her award-winning book is Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe.

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

How do you write the history of something that never happened?  What were the chances of Nazis creating a Fourth Reich?  And what do our fears of a Nazi resurgence tell us about the past and present.

In this wide-ranging conversation with Gavriel Rosenfeld, we talk about the history of the Fourth Reich, both as a rhetorical device but also as a very real political reality that former Nazis tried to engineer.  We also discuss the challenges postwar Germany faced in coming to terms with the very real Third Reich.  We also look at the uses and abuses of the Nazi past in the context of the rise of the modern political far-right.

Gavriel Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University.  He can be found on Twitter @gavrieldrosenfe

His book is The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present.

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Approximately 220,000 Romanian Jews died during the Holocaust, but their story is much less well-known.  In this conversation with Grant Harward, we talk about the history of the Holocaust in Romania.  He leads us through a really informative survey of both the history of Romania and the impact it had on the later unfolding of Romania’s attack on Jews in the region.

We look at the history of antisemitism and the rise of fascism there as well as the ways in which Romanian authorities Jews under their control.  The discussion also turns to comparisons between the Nazi and Romanian approaches to anti-Jewish policy.  

Grant Harward is an historian at the US Army Medical Center of History and Heritage.  He can be found on Twitter @GHarward.

His new book is Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust 

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

In his latest book, Omer Bartov notes that “Indicating where the line between truth and fiction lies is difficult, if not impossible, because in certain cases there may be more truth in fiction that in the mere retelling of facts.” 

In this our first episode of the podcast, we take a look at what happens when an historian turns to writing fiction about the past.  This was a really great conversation with Omer Bartov about his new book, the Butterfly and the Axe which is a fictionalized account of two families seeking the truth about their Holocaust past in Ukraine.

It was great to talk about memory and the complexity of historical truth as well as how one combines personal histories with scholarly ones.

We end our discussion by thinking a bit about how the Holocaust is being used and abused in the context of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  It’s a really thoughtful conversation that I think is fascinating.

Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.  He can be found on Twitter @bartov_omer.

His most recent book discussed here is: The Butterfly and the Axe 

You should also check out: Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz 

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Welcome to the podcast!

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.