INTRODUCTION The Development of Holocaust Research

The development of Holocaust research (and the emergence of Holocaust Studies as an academic field) was initially a very slow process but one that eventually experienced precipitous growth. The liberation of the camps at the end of the war and the trials held in the immediate aftermath brought widespread awareness but little understanding of the Final Solution as a particular and distinct program among the many shocking atrocities of the Nazi regime. Journalistic coverage of the sensational overshadowed the initial attempts of several academically-trained survivors to bring to bear this academic training on their recent experiences. Most notable here were H.G. Adler, Isaiah Trunk, and Philip Friedman, whose early classic works have gained in appreciation over time.1 The first two overviews of the Holocaust were Leon Poliakov’s Brevaire de la Haine (1951)2 and Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe (1953).3 Both were based almost entirely on the captured German documents collected for the Nürnberg Trials. Both provided understanding of the particular trajectory and contours of the Nazi persecution of the Jews during the war years, though both paid scant attention to the 1930s, much less any deeper background. A number of important document collections were also published quite early.4 The first journal dedicated to publishing Holocaust scholarship, Yad Vashem Studies, appeared in Israel in 1957, and the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ) also published some key Holocaust documents in the 1950s.5

Holocaust research was transformed by two events in 1961—the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and the publication of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews,6 though the effects of the first were far more immediately apparent than the latter. The Eichmann trial ran on two tracks. The first was the expansive presentation of survivor testimony, graphically portraying what Jews suffered during the Holocaust. These testimonies riveted observers; even when not directly connected to Eichmann’s personal guilt, they presented a perspective and narrative absent from the captured German documents. The second was the presentation of documents, many now collected from archives around Europe, that showed what a wealth of material was to be found beyond the Nürnberg documents, as well as the extensive interrogation and cross-examination of Eichmann himself. Eichmann’s guilty verdict was primarily based on this latter evidence.

Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews was based on a comprehensive study of the vast collection of captured German documents, as well as published laws and contemporary newspapers, that far exceeded the research efforts of Poliakov and Reitlinger. Moreover, Hilberg provided an overarching interpretive framework. In terms of structure, the “machinery of destruction” was a combination of the four pillars of the Nazi regime—party, military, ministerial bureaucracy, and industry—and was staffed by a cross-section of German society. It proceeded logically through the steps inherent in a bureaucratic-administrative destruction process: definition, expropriation, concentration, and annihilation. The vast bulk of the book documented how these participants carried out this sequence of measures throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. While concentrating on the perpetrators, Hilberg nonetheless also made several claims about the behavior of the victims that were crucial to how events unfolded. First, European Jews over centuries had learned that “alleviation” and “compliance” were the preferred, time-tested responses to persecution over resistance and flight—a lesson that they would not have time to unlearn quickly enough when faced with the unprecedented Nazi assault. During the Holocaust, armed resistance was attempted by only a small minority and hindered the Nazis in no significant way. Second, Jewish leadership in the form of Jewish councils or Judenräte, though subjectively trying to help their own people, were objectively and unwittingly turned into cogs in the “machinery of destruction” that facilitated their own destruction.

Hannah Arendt, observing the Eichmann trial, offered several controversial arguments. First, she generally accepted Eichmann’s own self-portrayal at the trial as a non-ideological bureaucrat incapable of morally and intellectually transcending the political culture and work environment in which he found himself. To bridge the chasm “between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them,” she articulated the concept of the “banality of evil.”7 In my opinion, Arendt’s concept provided a valuable insight for understanding many perpetrators, but not Eichmann himself. He was attempting such a defense strategy precisely because there were so many perpetrators of the kind he was pretending to be. At the time, the crux of the emotional response to Arendt was that she was allegedly trivializing the evil of the Holocaust itself. This critical reaction was intensified by her second argument that the prosecution’s narrative of the Holocaust was in effect a cover-up that tried to hide the disgraceful behavior of Jewish leadership which had vastly increased the number of victims.

Inevitably, the reactions to Arendt’s and Hilberg’s books became intertwined. His description of the Final Solution as a bureaucratic process was too easily equated with her downplaying of Eichmann as a bureaucratic non-entity. And his analysis of the Jewish councils as suffering a failure of perception, despite their best intentions, was easily conflated with Arendt’s accusation of overt moral failure. Finally, Hilberg’s minimizing of Jewish resistance was felt to be yet another gratuitous rubbing of salt in the wounded psyche of post-Holocaust Jews. Nearly a decade would pass before the magnitude of Hilberg’s accomplishment began to be appreciated. In the meantime, several of the Arendt/Hilberg controversies—assessments of the Judenräte and Jewish resistance—spun off into promising avenues of specialization that would shape the field of Holocaust research. Two other accusatory works of the 1960s—Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy8 and Arthur Morse’s While 6 Million Died9—likewise triggered the development of new subfields. Let us look at the subsequent development of these four topics—Jewish councils and Jewish resistance, and the Vatican and American responses—in succession.

The pioneering Holocaust historian, Philip Friedman, had broached the sensitive topic of the most notorious Jewish leaders—Chaim Rumkowski of Lodz, Moshe Merin of East Upper Silesia, and Jacob Gens of Vilna—in the 1950s.10 His concepts of “pseudo-saviors” and the “messianic complex” tried, critically and unapologetically, to capture the difficult psychological and contextual factors of these unusual men’s careers. In the wake of the related but different generalizations made by Hilberg and Arendt, Isaiah Trunk published his massive study of the Jewish councils in 1972.11 Surveying literally hundreds of ghetto councils, Trunk demonstrated the difficulty of making sweeping generalizations beyond the impossible situation of powerlessness in which the councils found themselves. The composition of councils changed over time, usually for the worse; various survival strategies were tried (above all bribery and survival through labor) but all ultimately failed; and in many ghettos one-man rule emerged (some hated, like Moshe Merin, and some appreciated, like Ephraim Barash of Bialystok). The ghetto leaders constantly faced what Lawrence Langer subsequently dubbed “choiceless choices,” and there were no options within their reach that would have altered their ultimate fate. The key publications of primary evidence on the internal workings of the Jewish councils in Warsaw and Lodz—Raul Hilberg’s edition of the Adam Czerniakow diaries and Lucjan Dobroszycki’s edited version of the Lodz ghetto chronicles12—reinforced the conclusion implicit in Trunk’s work that, the personal frailties of a few notorious ghetto leaders aside, the study of the ghettos and councils had to be framed as tragic rather than accusatory, powerless rather than depraved.

Key studies of individual ghettos, based on a combination of German and Jewish sources, shifted the focus from Jewish councils to the wider issues of German ghettoization policies and practices on the one hand and Jewish communal life and struggle for survival on the other. A landmark work in this regard was by resistance fighter and survivor turned historian Israel Gutman. His 1982 book, The Jews of Warsaw,13 might properly be considered the first “integrated” study of the Holocaust in its mastery of both German and Jewish sources. Studies of other key ghettos, of course Lodz14 but also Bialystok15 and Riga,16 among others, followed. In addition to two brief overviews of the ghettos,17 there are now two massive, multivolume encyclopedia projects produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, each with more than a thousand entries.18 Clearly, Isaiah Trunk’s aspiration that the entire spectrum of ghettos should be studied has been fulfilled.

Hilberg’s minimalization of Jewish armed resistance provoked three counter-approaches. The first was basically quantitative, an attempt to discover and document many instances of Jewish armed resistance that had been hitherto unknown or unappreciated.19 While fruitful in documenting many instances of armed resistance, this approach could not ultimately reverse the Hilberg verdict concerning how few Jews opted for this response and how little effect it had in hindering the Germans. A second approach was based on redefinition of the concept of resistance. Here Yehuda Bauer was central, arguing that the concept of armed resistance was too narrow. Resistance should be defined “as all active and conscious organized action against Nazi commands, policies, or wishes, by whatever means.”20 This definition, emphasizing intent to thwart German aims, proved so broad in terms of the activities it included that it tended to erase the distinction between resistance on the one hand and any efforts to survive on the other. Bauer eventually switched his emphasis to the concept of amidah, the Hebrew for “standing up against,” to distinguish armed resistance from other courageous acts of self-assertion and group maintenance.21 To the same end, Nechama Tec used the terms “resilience” and “non-submission.”22 One should note that in the study of German resistance to the Nazis, a similar attempt has been made to distinguish between attempts to oppose and overthrow the regime as resistance (Widerstand) on the one hand and dissent, non-conformity, and selective compliance on the other.

A third approach was to place Jewish resistance in a comparative context to counter the implicit accusation that the degree of Jewish resistance was less than should have been expected and thus a source of Jewish shame rather than pride. This contextual approach notes that resistance to the Nazis in other European populations was exaggerated in both degree and impact after the war, just as collaboration was falsely minimized. Furthermore, non-Jewish populations had decided advantages that Jews did not enjoy. The weight of the threat of collective retaliation clearly hung over the Jews far more ominously than other populations, making resistance an anti-communal act until the Nazi aim of total destruction became clear. Also, in terms of timing, European resistance grew substantially as Nazi defeat loomed, while 75–80 percent of all Holocaust victims were already dead when the Nazis suffered the turning-point defeat at Stalingrad. Moreover, European resistance enjoyed support from the surrounding population while Jews faced indifference if not hostility, and European resistance flourished in the more favorable terrain of mountains and forests, while most Jews were urban dwellers and had only the option of a hopeless “war of the doomed” waged in ghettos and camps.23 Both in comparison and under the circumstances, Jewish resistance was anything but minimal.

The pattern of an initial accusatory work followed by increased scholarly research and debate repeated itself on two other issues. In 1967 Arthur Morse published While 6 Million Died, subtitled A Chronicle of American Apathy, that claimed to reveal “how America ducked chance after chance to save the Jews.”24 Henry Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue was a response that sought to avoid “fulminations” of “righteous anger” and to refine explanation through “political context.”25 He concluded that the fate of European Jewry was never as central to Roosevelt as it was to Hitler; that the task of killing Jews within the Nazi grasp was far easier than the task of rescuing them from outside; that fathoming the significance of what was happening was beyond the capacities of both Roosevelt and the American population at the time; and that the nation-state was an utterly inadequate institution to mobilize an imagined but non-existent conscience of mankind. The struggle to find an appropriate balance between condemnation and explanation, moralism and realism, has shaped the debate over Roosevelt and rescue ever since. Monty Penkower argued that “disbelief, indifference, antisemitism, and, above all, political expediency … doomed a powerless people.”26 The title of David Wyman’s carefully researched book The Abandonment of the Jews likewise seemed to imply that it had been within American power to prevent the Holocaust, though in fact the book ultimately made a much more limited claim that with different decisions and policies at least several hundred thousand Jews could have been saved.27 The book focused above all on Roosevelt’s disinterest, the missed opportunities, and the false excuses that marked America’s inadequate response until 1944. To a greater extent than other scholars, Theodore Hamerow’s Why We Watched emphasized the importance of pervasive American antisemitism during the 1930s and war years, and the consequent apprehension of American authorities about framing the war effort as one fought by Americans for Jews.28 Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman’s FDR and the Jews presented the most balanced assessment of Roosevelt, noting that periods of lack of engagement (1933–36 and 1939–43) on his part alternated with periods of engagement (1937–39 and 1944–45). They concluded that “Roosevelt reacted more decisively to Nazi crimes against Jews than did any other world leader of his time.”29 I would argue that, tragically, the Jews of Europe were captured by the Nazis who had the power and will to kill them, while the Allies had neither the power nor the will (and this latter element is the real cause of our retrospective shame and moral condemnation) to save the vast majority of them. Aside from avoiding the massive military defeats inflicted by German arms in 1939–41, there was no missed Allied opportunity to prevent the Holocaust.

In the first two decades after the war, the German churches were generally taken at their word that they had conducted a “church struggle” against the Nazi regime, and Pius XII was viewed as a valiant and outspoken cold warrior condemning communist oppression in Eastern Europe. This changed in the mid-1960s on both fronts. Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy excoriated Pius XII for his silence vis-à-vis the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, and attributed this silence to the most sordid motives: cold-hearted diplomatic calculation, antisemitism, obsessive anti-communism, and materialistic concern for church property.30 Simultaneously, a number of studies examined the relationship between the Nazi regime and the German Catholic Church that was found to be far more supportive than adversarial. They suggested that Pius XII’s reluctance to place German Catholics in a “crisis of conscience” was based in part on the correct assumption that, if put to the test, their loyalty to the Nazi state would clearly have prevailed over faithfulness to the Church.31 The shared and overlapping values of antisemitism, authoritarianism, nationalism, imperialist expansion, and anti-communism far outweighed differences. Without the catalyzing polemic around the figure of Pope Pius XII, research on Protestant complicity proceeded more gradually, ultimately exposing the “church struggle” not to have been waged by the Protestant Church against the Nazi regime (and certainly not in defense of Jews) but rather among quarreling factions of German Protestants over the extent to which their institutions and theology would be Nazified.32

Subsequent research on the German Protestants and the Holocaust has made increasingly clear that prominent Protestant leaders and theologians as well as most pastors and parishioners initially welcomed the Nazi regime, seldom rid themselves of wishful thinking regarding it, and remained passive toward if not complicitous in its anti-Jewish policies.33 The Deutsche Christen, overtly antisemitic and in favor of intensified Nazification of the Church, including its basic theological tenets, were not some anomalous and fringe phenomenon but represented major continuities within the history of the German Protestants. Furthermore, they were embraced by a large number of pastors and dominated theological faculties.34

The polemics over Pius XII did not moderate.35 But four scholars have become indispensable to any reappraisal. David Kertzer’s The Popes against the Jews makes clear that the Vatican’s official antisemitism was not some antiquated relic of medieval theological disputation but updated and integral to its nineteenth-century struggle against what it considered the evils of secularization and modernization. And his The Pope at War documents the frequent diplomatic contacts between Pius XII and the two fascist dictators, as well as greater knowledge of the Holocaust than ever officially admitted.36 Susan Zuccotti’s Under His Very Windows denied the apologist claim of extensive but covert papal involvement in Jewish rescue, especially in Italy.37 Michael Phayer combined his study of Pius XII with that of Catholic rescuers during the war and Catholic reformers after the war. In The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, he portrays Pius XII as obsessed with the physical safety of Rome and the Vatican, convinced that Germany was the only bulwark against communist takeover in Europe (and whose war effort must therefore not be undermined), fixated on preserving his potential role as neutral diplomatic mediator for a compromise peace, and committed to specific Catholic interests over any universal or humanitarian obligation to Jews.38 Jacques Kornberg’s The Pope’s Dilemma reviews the long historiographical war over Pius XII and places greatest emphasis on his determination to preserve Catholic institutions and not force European Catholics to choose between Church and State. The former’s dispensing of the sacraments necessary for salvation in the next life, not the prevention of Catholics committing sins and Jews suffering genocide in this life, was paramount.39

Another trend in Holocaust research that began to take shape in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was the examination of the fate of the Jews in individual European countries. Several volumes of reports prepared by German historians on the role of the Third Reich in shaping Jewish policy in countries allied to Germany were published by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, the purpose of which was to establish German responsibility even in non-occupied countries.40 Leon Poliakov and Jacques Sabille published a collection of articles, The Jews under Italian Occupation, that documented the protection of Jews in the Italian occupation zones in Greece, Croatia, and France.41 In contrast, Renzo de Felice published a much less self-congratulatory history of the fate of Italian Jews under fascism, noting that Mussolini’s antisemitic turn was not due to direct Hitlerian pressure but strongly influenced by Italy’s experience of racial imperialism in Ethiopia.42 Thereafter most national studies aimed at exposing forms of indigenous collaboration and responsibility, not simply blaming the Germans for everything. Among these pioneering national studies were: Jacob Presser’s The Destruction of the Dutch Jews;43 Frederick Chary’s The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution 1940–1944;44 and an important collection of articles on Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe.45 Meir Michaelis’s Mussolini and the Jews46 was even more emphatic than de Felice on Italy’s path to persecution autonomous of German pressure or demands, and Marrus and Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews47 made an ever more devastating case regarding Vichy. Randolf Braham’s two-volume The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary48 was a comprehensive work covering both Hungarian and German roles. In a very different celebratory vein, and rightfully so, was Leni Yahil’s The Rescue of Danish Jewry.49 Since 1981 numerous additional national studies have been written, on France and Italy in particular, but Norway, Belgium, Romania, Serbia, and Croatia have now also been covered.50

During the 1970s, research and debate about the Holocaust began to center on the decision-making process that led to the Final Solution and the role of Hitler in particular. Karl Schleunes in The Twisted Road to Auschwitz and Uwe Dietrich Adam in Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich both ventured the argument that Nazi Jewish policy evolved in the 1930s as the product of competing interests and successive failures within the polycratic Nazi regime, without the guidance of a master plan or micromanagement by Hitler. Adam carried his study through the year 1941 and, quite unusual for that time, suggested that a decision for the Final Solution had not occurred until fall of that year.51 Martin Broszat went a step further, arguing that there had never been a comprehensive decision for the Final Solution; rather it developed “bit by bit and little by little” out of a series of separate killing actions in late 1941 and early 1942 that were improvised responses to the “blind alley” (a combination of deporting Jews eastward without yet conquering the anticipated receptions areas) into which the Nazi regime had maneuvered itself.52

In the same decade, Eberhard Jäckel and Andreas Hillgruber published seminal works on the key importance of Hitler’s ideology. For Jäckel, a “blueprint” for both the conquest of Lebensraum and the destruction of the Jews crystallized in Hitler’s mind in the 1920s. Hillgruber likewise argued that a war against the Soviet Union for Lebensraum and the destruction of the Jews constituted the “nucleus” of the “racial-ideological program of National Socialism.”53 Even more adamantly, Lucy Dawidowicz argued that as early as 1918 or 1919 Hitler had conceived of killing the Jews. The “grand design was in his head,” and mere implementation decisions were taken as they became timely and opportune.54

The debate itself, though not its framework, was still quite peripheral to mainstream history of the Third Reich. At a conference at Cumberland Lodge in May 1979, sponsored by the German Historical Institute in London, prominent German and British historians met to debate the “structure and politics” of the “Führer State.” Tim Mason insightfully articulated how historians of the Third Reich had increasingly become divided between two polarized interpretational approaches, “intentionalists” and “functionalists.” The former was Hitlerocentric, explaining the course of the Third Reich through Hitler’s intentions. He made the key decisions, and they in turn were logically derived from his ideological program. The latter focused on the structure and functioning of the Third Reich, with emphasis on unplanned improvisation and “cumulative radicalization” resulting from polycratic competition and contingency. Hitler (a “weak dictator” in Hans Mommsen’s memorable phrase) functioned as the source of legitimization for vague goals but was not engaged in systematic decision-making.55 But as Ian Kershaw later noted, neither the Final Solution nor more generally the Nazi persecution of the Jews figured centrally in the debate at this landmark conference on the Third Reich.56 The Holocaust was not yet seen as central to understanding Hitler and National Socialism, much less the Second World War or twentieth-century European history. This decisive shift in the study of Nazi Germany did not take place until the following decade of the1980s.

Two major international conferences in Paris (1982) and Stuttgart (1984) marked this transition.57 On a personal note, I can say that both conferences were pivotal to the development of my own career. On the basis of a brief reply to Martin Broszat that he had graciously published in the journal he edited, I was invited to participate in the Paris conference despite my very junior standing in the profession at that time.58 I applied Tim Mason’s concepts of “intentionalism” and “functionalism” to the debate over decision-making for the Final Solution, and staked out a position as a self-described “moderate functionalist” in opposition to what I called the “ultra-intentionalist” position of Lucy Dawidowicz and “ultra-functionalist” position of Martin Broszat. I argued that Hitler was the key decision-maker and that there had been a two-stage decision-making process (as first argued by Raul Hilberg) determining the fate of first Soviet and then European Jews (in spring 1941 and summer/fall 1941 respectively). The decisions were the culmination of a process in which Nazi Jewish policy had evolved by virtue of both contingent factors and polycratic competition for Hitler’s favor within the Nazi regime. Hitler’s antisemitism had served as a spur to the continuous search of a solution to the Jewish question, not as a premeditated grand design.

By the time when many of the major protagonists assembled in Stuttgart in 1984, yet another “front” had opened in the debate over decision-making. The notion hitherto accepted by everyone except Uwe Adam, that at least the fate of Soviet Jewry had been sealed in the spring of 1941 when the, Einsatzgruppen were assembled, was challenged first by Christian Streit and then Alfred Streim, both in works devoted primarily to the fate of Soviet POWs.59 They argued that a policy for the systematic killing of Soviet Jews did not crystallize until the summer of 1941 after the invasion. At the conference, this notion was vehemently debated between Streim and Helmut Krausnick.60 Otherwise most participants reiterated their now finely honed arguments.61 Perhaps the major exception was Raul Hilberg, who straddled the divide. In his revised edition of Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1985, he seemed to side with the “functionalists” in eliding previous references to Hitler’s decision-making. At the same time, however, he also ignored the dysfunction and polycratic competition emphasized by the “functionalists” and attributed the lethal effectiveness of the German bureaucracy to “a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization.”62

The “intentionalist-functionalist” controversy over Hitler and the Final Solution dominated the 1980s, but in retrospect it has been dismissed by some as an arcane and scholastic debate begging for synthesis between artificially polarized and stubbornly held positions.63 I, of course, thought I had provided such a synthesis.64 But more importantly, the controversy should not be dismissed so cavalierly for two reasons. First, it generated a tremendous amount of new and valuable research. By the end of the decade, we knew far more about the emergence of the Final Solution than we did at the beginning. And second, it forged the connection between German and Holocaust history that has endured. The attempt of a small group of conservative German historians to reverse this accomplishment in the so-called Historikerstreit of the late 1980s was soundly repudiated by the vast majority of historians. Attempts to either relativize the Holocaust or diminish its place in German history failed.

The collapse of communism and the opening of hitherto closed archives on the one hand, and the emergence of a new generation of young scholars on the other, opened the way for a wave of immensely productive scholarship in the 1990s. This new wave of scholarship on Nazi Judenpolitik had two aspects. The first was a series of regional studies of German occupation regimes in Eastern Europe that filled in the blank spots in our knowledge as to how the murder of the Jews in their areas of densest population had been carried out.65 The second utilized both the fruits of this new research and newly available key documents, such as hitherto unpublished sections of the Goebbels diaries and Himmler’s appointment and telephone log, significantly to enrich our overall reconstruction of the decision- and policy-making process.66

In comparison to the historiographical polarization of the previous decades, a surprising degree of consensus emerged. First, most historians agreed that there was no “big bang” theory for the origins of the Final Solution, predicated on a single decision made at a single moment. Rather there had been an incremental decision-making process. Second, 1941 and early 1942 were seen as the decisive time period, but there was also a shift toward emphasizing continuity over discontinuity between the Final Solution and the earlier atrocities of the Polish campaign and policies of ethnic cleansing and population “resettlement.”67 I referred to the policy of this 1939–41 period as one of “expulsion and decimation.” Third, most scholars accepted the Streit/Streim thesis that the transition to systematic genocide on newly conquered Soviet territory did not occur until the summer of 194168 and that a second decision-making process subsequently sealed the fate of European Jews west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. Fourth, there was general acceptance of a “consensus” model (in place of the previous functionalist emphasis on rivalries and competition within the Nazi system), as anticipated by Hilberg’s second edition, in which both the center and “periphery” interacted to mutually radicalize one another. Cooperation among a full panoply of participants (of course the SS but also military, civil administration, Order Police, economic planners, local collaborators, and auxiliary police) was more important than their rivalries and conflicts.

Differences, of course, also remained. When was the “tipping point” for the second decision sealing the fate of European Jewry? Was it the product of “victory euphoria,” disappointment and frustration over the derailment of Barbarossa, or calculated reaction to the entry of the USA into the war? I argued for September/October 1941 and “euphoria of victory.”69 What was the proper balance in assessing the relative impacts of center and “periphery”? Regional studies tended to emphasize the importance of local initiatives, while Peter Longerich, Richard Breitman, and I placed relatively greater emphasis on the center, in particular Hitler and Himmler.70 And how should the historian weight the respective roles of ideological versus economic and other situational factors behind the decision-making process?

Another subfield of Holocaust research that became salient in the post-1989 period was “perpetrator studies” or Täterforschung. Certainly, important work had been done through case studies on certain professions, such as the industrialists of IG Farben or bureaucrats of the German Foreign Office.71 But the role of the academic,72 medical,73 and military professions74 had received the most attention. For the medical profession, its role in the T-4 program for killing the German handicapped was especially fateful,75 while the participation of the Wehrmacht in the mass death of Soviet POWs76 as well in preparing and implementing the “war of destruction” against the Soviet Union was most salient. After 1989, scholarship in these areas continued,77 with the controversy over the role of the Wehrmacht in Nazi programs of mass killing gaining particular attention in Germany. In the late 1990s, the traveling “Wehrmacht exhibition”78 graphically documented through photos and letters the criminal involvement of even ordinary German soldiers that scholars both in Germany and abroad had long accepted but not the German public, which by and large had clung to the legend of the “clean Wehrmacht.” The mislabeling of some photographs required the organizers to redesign the exhibit in a less graphic manner, but continuing scholarship overwhelmingly affirmed the verdict of Wehrmacht complicity, both on the institutional and individual level.79

Also controversial in Täterforschung was the debate over motivation among grass-roots killers. In 1992 I published a case study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the role of its “ordinary men” in lethal ghetto clearing and deportation to Treblinka, mass shooting of Polish Jews on the spot, as well as the relentless “Jew hunt” for hidden survivors.80 I emphasized a multi-causal explanation of motivation, with emphasis on social-psychological factors that influenced the dynamics of group behavior, such as conformity, peer pressure, and role adaptation, as well as a spectrum of individual behavior that stretched from eager killers through compliers to evaders. Four years later, Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust argued that a culturally embedded “eliminationist” antisemitism particular to Germany drove ordinary Germans uniformly to kill not only with a belief in the justice and necessity of their actions but also with “gusto” and extreme personal cruelty.81

The controversy was important to Holocaust Studies in general in shifting the focus away from abstract debates over ideology and structure (with mostly faceless perpetrators) to the actual human actors and their motivations and behavior. The controversy also stimulated fruitful scholarship in various ways, and especially to transcend the false dichotomy of sharply opposed cultural/anthropological vs. situational/social-psychological explanations. As Leonard Newman pointed out, situations are culturally constructed and interpreted, so that cultural and situational factors are in fact inseparable.82

The controversy also stirred intensive research on other police battalions of the Order Police and their respective roles in the Final Solution, enabling us to answer the question concerning RPB 101’s typicality.83 RPB 101 was not typical of the first two generations of police battalions recruited in 1937–39 and 1939–40 respectively. These battalions were thoroughly trained and indoctrinated, and highly Nazified. Many of these battalions then had the brutalizing experience of prolonged occupation duty in Eastern Europe before Barbarossa. In contrast, RPB 101 was a third-generation police battalion composed of older men randomly conscripted from the bottom of the manpower pool in 1941–42 who were not disproportionately Nazified and had little time for training and indoctrination before being sent east. Nonetheless, without special selection, disproportionate Nazification, or intensive indoctrination, and also starting its murderous rampage fully a year after Barbarossa, RPB 101 became the fourth most lethal police battalion in the Third Reich. It remains a sobering example of what “ordinary men” can be harnessed to do.

Harald Welzer and Thomas Kühne went beyond the narrow focus on antisemitism as a motive and anchored the particular perceptions and behavior of “ordinary” German policemen and soldiers in the contingent context of twentieth-century German history and society and emphasized the transformation of moral norms under the Nazis that made it possible for them to kill Jews and other non-combatants without a sense of guilt or criminality. Kühne in particular noted the powerful resonance of two concepts—Kameradschaft and Volksgemeinschaft (comradeship and racial community)—that enabled the Nazi regime to harness Germans to its murderous ideological mission.84

The issue of the “ordinary” Germans who killed on behalf of the Nazi regime raised further questions about the relationship between regime, society, and the Holocaust. Robert Gellately argued that enforcement of racial policy was possible because of active citizen participation through denunciation and that for most Germans the regime depended less on coercion than consent.85 Peter Fritzsche explored the degree to which Germans internalized National Socialism and engaged in “racial grooming,”86 while Claudia Koonz examined how the regime instilled an “ethnic conscience” as an essential backdrop for its genocidal policies.87 In The Law of Blood, Johann Chapoutot argued that the “moral world” of the Nazis was ultimately based on “a single yardstick”—the “life of the race”—that permeated German society.88 In short, the Nazi regime enjoyed considerable success in infusing German society with a racialized perspective through which to view and understand their world. But the question that dominated above all others in this regard is what did the Germans know and think about the persecution and mass killing of the Jews at the time?

Historians who explored this question in the pre-1989 period emphasized the difference between hardcore Nazis, for whom the “Jewish question” was a priority, and ordinary Germans, who accepted the regime’s legal discrimination and persecution but were averse to crass public violence and wanton destruction of property. Ultimately, widespread “indifference” to the fate of the Jews allowed the regime to pursue its own antisemitic priorities without penalty. Ian Kershaw summed up this position in the memorable phrase that “the road to Auschwitz was built by hatred, but paved with indifference.” The Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka generally accepted this description of “strikingly abysmal indifference” and “general passivity” on the part of the German population, but found the term “indifference” itself too morally neutral and proposed instead the more judgmental term of “passive complicity.”89

In the post-1989 period, historians placed a greater emphasis on an “anti-Jewish consensus” and acceptance of the Jew as the enemy that allowed for radicalization of persecution in the war years. However, awareness of the Final Solution as an “open secret” (especially in terms of mass shootings in the East and the general if not specific fate of deportees) combined with the increasing probability of defeat led to growing fear of retribution, a sense of “guilt” or “bad conscience,” a distancing from the regime, and repression of what they had known and done. According to David Bankier, Germans (who “knew enough to know that it was better not to know more”) were “caught between feelings of guilt and an urge to deny responsibility.” As Peter Longerich noted, Germans embraced repression, denial, and a “Flucht in der Unwissenheit” or “flight into ignorance.”90 Nonetheless, Daniel Blatman was able to document the chilling involvement of “criminal communities” in Germany when unwanted “death marches” arrived on their doorsteps in the last days of the Third Reich.91

If one strand of Täterforschung examined ordinary Germans, a second strand took a closer look at the Nazi “true believers.” Ulrich Herbert’s exemplary study of Werner Best and Michael Wildt’s collective biography of the RSHA leadership highlighted the key role played by a particular cohort of ideologically committed young Nazis. Born shortly before the outbreak of World War I, educated in German universities in the early 1920s, they embraced an ultra-nationalist, anti-democratic, racist, and völkisch Weltanschauung (racialized world view) and an allegedly sober and scientific rather than emotional antisemitism. They became the intellectual cadres of the Nazi police state and exercised a fateful influence far beyond their numbers in society.92 Recently Richard Evans placed the ideologues in a wider spectrum of Nazi leaders, as he published Hitler’s People—a collective study of twenty-four Nazi perpetrators divided into twenty-two categories, ranging from Hitler and his “paladins” to “enforcers” and “instruments.”93 No figure of the Nazi mid-level elite attracted as much attention as Adolf Eichmann. In unanimous rejection of Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann as the bureaucratic non-entity unmoved by antisemitism or ideology, the post-1989 studies portrayed him as a fanatical Nazi, professional antisemite, and ambitious careerist, though in varying degrees they also strove to see him as a product of his time and place.94

Looking at the broad sweep of Holocaust Studies, I would suggest that at least five other themes have gradually emerged since the 1980s. One has been the salience of economic factors. The works of Helmut Genschel and Avraham Barkai studied the confiscatory policies of the regime and the economic struggle of the Jews in Germany respectively.95 Gerhard Botz published a path-breaking exploration of the connection between social and housing policy and Jewish policy in Vienna,96 and Frank Bajohr demonstrated how the distribution of Jewish property created widespread complicity in Hamburg.97 Several case studies focused on the extent and nature of corporate complicity. Peter Hayes in particular led the shift in focus from the complicity of big business in Hitler’s rise (“who paid for Hitler”) to their complicity in the confiscation of Jewish property and lethal exploitation of Jewish slave labor.98 Götz Aly argued that the massive theft and distribution of Jewish property was crucial to Hitler’s Gefälligkeitsdiktatur (a dictatorship of favors) and its ability to maintain Germans’ loyalty to the end.99 Martin Dean confirmed the vast extent of this robbery across the entire continent,100 and Jan Gross captured the corrupting effect that the lure of Jewish property had on local populations.101 Christoph Dieckmann and Christian Gerlach argued that food shortages precipitated or accelerated the mass murder of Jews at different times and places.102 Wolf Gruner and I argued for a more complex, contested, and often temporarily utilitarian Nazi exploitation of Jewish labor rather than uniform policies of either “destruction through labor” or labor as torment.103 Adam Tooze demonstrated how inseparable Nazi economic planning was from the regime’s racial ideology.104

Perhaps the most controversial “economic interpretation” of the Holocaust was articulated by Götz Aly and Susanne Heim. They argued that the driving force behind the Final Solution was a group of modernizing technocrats or “planning intelligentsia” who sought to break the vicious cycle of poverty, low productivity, and overpopulation in German-occupied Eastern Europe. These technocrats advocated the mass murder of Jews as the way to diminish surplus population, consolidate small and backward handicraft production into rationalized modern industry, induce Polish villagers to move into the cities through new economic opportunity, and create a prosperous Polish middle class with a stake in the German New Order. Thus the Holocaust was a quite conscious and rational albeit inhumane policy for the technocratic and capitalist modernization of the German empire in the East.105 In contrast, I argued that there was conflict rather than consensus among local technocrats and administrators in Poland who divided between policies of “attrition” and “production” concerning ghettoized Jews, that for the most part a policy of ghetto self-maintenance prevailed until reversed by Berlin in favor of ghetto liquidation, and that the Final Solution was ultimately carried out primarily for ideological reasons in spite of its economically counterproductive killing of large numbers of Jewish workers in a time of growing labor scarcity.106

A second theme that has gathered scholarly momentum since the 1980s is a gendered approach to the Holocaust. Concerning perpetrators, National Socialism represented male dominance, but in their own sphere women were encouraged to provide the normalizing marriage and home life that enabled men to continue doing terrible things.107 Moreover, women working in the East provided essential staff for the occupation, helped to implement Nazi racial imperialism, witnessed horrific events, and even participated personally in committing atrocities.108 Initially, a gendered approach to the victims encountered skepticism and even resistance; some objected that gender artificially divided a people who had been commonly targeted for total extermination because of its race, and others that a sacred history was being appropriated for a “feminist agenda.”109 In the long run, at least three propositions have generally been accepted: that Nazi policies affected Jewish men and women differently at different times; that biological and cultural factors rendered women vulnerable in unique ways; and thus, while Jewish men and women faced the same ultimate fate at the hands of the Nazis, their experience along the path to that common fate differed. The experience of Jewish men was not a universal template for Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, and the experience of women must be recognized and studied in its own right.110 Debate is still waged over the relative survival aptitudes and skills of men and women and over the extent of sexual violence against women in the Holocaust.

A third general development has been the shift in focus eastward and downward. This shift away from Germany and centralized decision-making began in the 1990s with the opening of East European archives and the burgeoning of regional studies of the Nazi occupation regime in the East noted above. This shift has now continued from the regional to the local level, and beyond the German occupier to the local populations with whom both Germans and Jews interacted. This approach also emphasized a longer time span to encompass how inter-ethnic relations developed before the arrival of the Germans and especially how first the dissolution of multi-national empires since 1919 and then the Soviet occupation of borderland regions between 1939 and 1941 explosively impacted the situation. Shimon Redlich’s Together and Apart in Brzezany and Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz offered two key local case studies for Ukraine.111 Martin Dean’s Collaboration in the Holocaust was a pioneering work on the role in the Holocaust of the local auxiliary police recruited by the Germans in Belarus and Ukraine.112 But most controversial has been recent scholarship on local Holocaust history in Poland. Jan Gross’s Neighbors, focusing on the massacre of the Jewish population of Jedwabne at the hands of its Polish neighbors (whatever the degree of German instigation) provoked furious debates.113 A veritable flood of new research into local Holocaust history in Poland followed. Jan Grabowski’s landmark Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, focusing on the fateful role of the Poles in the uncovering and killing of hidden Jews in one rural county, was followed by Barbara Engelking’s Such a Beautiful Sunny Day and Grabowski’s On Duty.114

A fourth development has been attempts to contextualize in two ways: Jewish victims in the context of other victims of National Socialism,115 and the Holocaust in the context of other genocides. Research on the Nazi destruction of the German handicapped has demonstrated how both experienced personnel and the technology of gassing, first used to kill fellow Germans, were later transferred to Operation Reinhard death camps, and an ideology of racial purification underpinned both T-4 and the Final Solution.116 The Roma and Sinti, virtually ignored by Hitler, were nonetheless increasingly included in the persecutory and destructive anti-Jewish policies of the regime, demonstrating how insidiously and easily such measures could be expanded to encompass other victims of pervasive racial prejudice.117 The number of Soviet POW victims exceeded the number of Jewish victims of National Socialism until the spring of 1942 and totaled 3.3 million by the end of the war. Slavic populations were the primary target of the regime’s ruthless pacification and anti-partisan measures as well as its utopian plans for remaking the demographic map of Europe. The “Hunger Plan” envisaged the starvation of “umpteen million” inhabitants of the Soviet Union, and one version of the Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) called for the expulsion of 31 million Slavs into Siberia.118 Some twelve million people experienced forced labor under the Third Reich, more than seven million were in Germany at the end of the war, and those of Slavic origin were treated worse than others.119 German homosexuals, especially gay men, were viewed as race traitors withholding their reproductive capacities from the Volksgemeinschaft as well as non-conforming Asozialen (asocials) threatening to seduce German youth and corrupt the ethos of male bonding so central to Nazi organizations.120 In short, many millions of non-Jews were also victimized by the Nazi regime, almost always in relation to its wider racist ideology.

Two kinds of approaches marked the discussion of the Holocaust within the context of the wider phenomenon of genocide. One was a comparative framework, which first had to get past the “uniqueness” issue.121 One approach was to re-assert uniqueness through comparative study.122 A more common approach was to study the Holocaust alongside other selected genocides and highlight selected thematic commonalities. Robert Melson argued that the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust were “total genocides” of ethnoreligious minorities that had experienced rapid social progress and were produced by revolutionary regimes trying to transform their respective societies.123 Similarly, Eric Weitz saw Nazi Germany, the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, the Khmer regime in Cambodia, and Milosevic’s Serbia as revolutionary regimes trying to eliminate racial difference to create homogenous nations.124 Taking a longer and broader view, Ben Kiernan saw the Holocaust as fitting into a paradigm of genocide that emerged “from combinations of religious or racial hatred with territorial expansionism and cults of antiquity and agriculture.”125

Yet another approach shifts from thematic comparison to continuity and focuses on the relationship between European colonialism and the Holocaust. Examining Germany’s previous genocide of the Herero and Nama, Jürgen Zimmermann argued that both it and the Holocaust shared common ideological justifications (the racial binary of superior German and inferior native) and similar means (forced labor, eviction from the land, “scorched earth” war, massacre, and mass death in camps). But ultimately Zimmermann did not equate the two; rather, he found Southwest Africa as a connecting point between “genocidal moments” on the colonial frontier and the “unprecedented” extent of “planned murder” in the “largest colonial war in history” waged by the Nazi regime.126 Carroll Peter Kakel, focusing on the American “wild West” and German “wild East,” found similar patterns of relentless expansion, settler colonialism, assumptions of racial superiority, and genocidal warfare, and thus characterized the Holocaust as a “colonial genocide.”127 Examining the same two cases, Edward Westermann found a fundamental difference between an American “intentional policy of subjugation” involving many specific acts of atrocity and massacre and a Nazi “intentional policy of annihilation.”128 A. Dirk Moses noted that the Nazis sought to achieve systematically and quickly in the East what unsystematic settler colonization had achieved gradually and incrementally in North America, with the same consequences for Slavs and Native Americans. But the fate of the Jews under the Nazis was somewhat different. They were treated as the “colonial other” but they were also victims of a “subaltern genocide” in which the Nazis conceived of the Jews as oppressors from whom the Germans needed to free themselves through the equivalent of a genocidal war of national liberation.129 But German oppression at the hands of the Jews was an imagined fantasy, not a historical reality. Ultimately, the Jews of Europe were not murdered because their land was coveted or they were deemed a primitive and doomed population standing in the way of progress, but rather because they were considered a unique threat. The colonial paradigm illuminates many Nazi policies in the East but not their paranoid fantasies about the Jews. The Nazi “war against the Jews” as they conceived and propagandized it went far beyond any colonial analogy.130

A fifth development has been the greater appreciation and growing use of Jewish testimonies, beyond published diaries and memoirs, that resulted from transcribed or taped survivor interviews. In the immediate post-war period, written testimonies were collected by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and Yad Vashem. David Boder, visiting the displaced persons centers, was the first to make audio recordings.131 Then after a long pause, videotaping of survivor testimonies began in 1979, and the first notable collection of such testimonies was assembled in the Fortunoff Archive at Yale University. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum began its own videotaping of survivors in the 1980s, years before the museum itself opened. And by far the largest collection was assembled by the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive in the 1990s, with the special support of Steven Spielberg in the wake of his movie Schindler’s List. The pioneering scholars who first analyzed testimonies as a special kind of evidence were Henry Greenspan and Lawrence Langer.132 Donald Niewyk focused on recovering early testimonies.133 Annette Wieviorka noted the growing historiographical salience of survivor testimony in The Era of the Witness.134 Noah Shenker analyzed how the different interview formats and agendas of three major collecting institutions—the Fortunoff Archive, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Visual History Archive—shaped the resulting interviews.135 And Sharon Kangisser Cohen looked at how the passage of time affected survivor testimonies.136 Mark Roseman wrote a pioneering study of a single survivor, utilizing both an exceptional cache of contemporary documents and extensive post-war testimony.137 In trying to write my history of the Wierzbnik ghetto and Starachowice factory slave labor camps, my major sources were the collections of survivors’ early testimonies from the late 1940s, the 1960s judicial interviews for German trials, the filmed testimonies of the 1980s and 1990s, and my personal interviews with survivors in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I sought to demonstrate that such evidence could be used not only to examine issues of survivor memory but also to establish a factually reliable historical record.138

Finally, there has been a succession of attempts to write comprehensive histories or overviews of the Holocaust, employing different unifying strategies. Leni Yahil made the first attempt at an overview that combined perpetrator and victim accounts with her survey that interspersed typical chapters on the German persecution with occasional chapters on Jewish response.139 The concept of an “integrated” history was articulated by Saul Friedlander in his two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews. The first volume was a tapestry that wove together five strands of continuing stories through the 1930s: Hitler, the hardcore Nazi “redemptive antisemites,” the German elites, ordinary Germans, and German Jews. The second volume was a mosaic composed of fragments of illuminating contemporary documents of all kinds, especially Jewish diaries and letters, spanning the entire continent during the war years. Friedlander denied the possibility of writing such a history through a “single conceptual framework” or “seamless interpretation,” but nonetheless emphasized the “crisis of liberalism” in which the destruction of the European Jews could proceed “without the interference of any major countervailing interests.”140 More recently, David Cesarani attempted an overview that gave considerable voice to the victims but also subsumed the Final Solution into the war as “the single most important thing that determined the fate of the Jews.”141 Christian Gerlach’s The Extermination of the Jews revolves around three axes: “the participatory character of violence, multiple victim groups and multi-causality.”142 Non-Jewish victims, non-German perpetrators, and non-ideological causes receive considerable attention alongside and often even eclipsing the traditional focus on Germans, Jews, and Nazi racial antisemitism. Timothy Snyder ventured two approaches: subsuming the Holocaust into a geographical rubric of the “bloodlands,” that is, the borderland territories occupied by both Stalin and Hitler, as well as an ecological approach, with the Holocaust as the by-product of a “colonial war” caused by Hitler’s “ecological panic” and “fear of hunger.”143 Bloodlands certainly captured the horror and massive loss of life in the ill-fated regions victimized by double occupation, but downplayed the self-inflicted wounds of local populations as historical actors pursuing their own agendas. Black Earth emphasized the importance of state destruction in rendering victims vulnerable, but downplayed the crucial role of the Nazi state itself as the administrative-bureaucratic core of the genocidal process—the antithesis of Hilberg.

One major topic beyond the scope of this historiographical introduction is the pre-Holocaust history of European antisemitism. Furthermore, many topics within the burgeoning field of aftermath studies concerning post-1945 ramifications (such as restitution, memorialization and museums, literature and cinema, etc.) are omitted. Clearly for a subject that for at least twenty-five years after the war scarcely had legitimacy or recognition as an academic field, Holocaust Studies has experienced remarkable growth and considerable scholarly achievement in a very short time.

In this collection of essays, I begin with revisiting two controversies that have been focal points of historiographical debate since the 1980s. The first has been central to my own scholarship for my entire career, namely Hitler, ideology, and decision-making.144 The second, concerning the concepts of Holocaust and genocide, has recently been complicated by adding a third component of settler colonialism. Chapter 2 was presented at an online symposium honoring Yehuda Bauer on his 95th birthday. These two chapters are my attempts to remain current in these ongoing discussions.

The focus then shifts eastward and downwards, and in the latter regard from the regional to the very local level. The two towns I have concentrated on are Starachowice in the Radom district of Poland and Marcinkance on the Polish-Lithuanian border. The Wierzbnik ghetto and the slave labor camps of Starachowice are of course the topic of my book Remembering Survival.145 One of the key merits of local studies is to elucidate the complexities and differing constellations of inter-ethnic relations and perceptions at the local level that were important in determining the course of the Holocaust in each locale. Using Starachowice as my case study, that is the special focus of Chapter 3. If the death camps were depersonalized assembly lines of industrial mass murder and ghetto-clearing units were outsiders carrying out their lethal rampages against masses of victims they did not know, the Judenjagd or “Jew hunt” was an individualized hunt for escapees and killing on a face-to-face basis. Chapter 4 seeks to convey the numerical significance of the Judenjagd and what that implied not only for the fate of the victims but for the intensity of participation of the local German policemen as perpetrators. It also seeks to show that the Judenjagd was experienced by the victims in two phases: first, the post-Aktion searches and forest sweeps by German units, and second (and most memorable for the survivors) the continuing and never-ending search by Polish neighbors for hidden Jews who had escaped the German dragnet. Since this chapter first appeared, this second phase has become the subject of far more detailed and extensive studies by Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking.146

One of the major obstacles to writing village-level local histories of the Holocaust is the scarcity of sources. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the village of Marcinkance and demonstrate how three unusual documents that I pieced together over time—a contemporary German investigative file, a collective witness testimony compiled in a DP camp in Germany soon after the war, and a very unusual post-war German memoir—provide the basis for a multi-perspective history of the Holocaust here that has not been possible for most villages.

In Ordinary Men, I examined the actions of low-level perpetrators collectively but did not have sufficient evidence to delve into individual biographies. I thought I had uncovered the dynamics of these men acting as a group (and the spectrum of behavior they exhibited within that group) but little in the way of explaining why particular individuals had behaved as they did. In two cases (Chapters 7 and 8), however, I became involved in examining the actions and agency of Germans who had been minor figures during the war and established highly successful post-war careers. They had not been major perpetrators, yet by virtue of their having served in the German military and civil service respectively, their post-war successes eventually raised the issue of their wartime roles.

The third biographical case (Chapter 9) is very different. After decades of studying perpetrators, I was the recipient of a documentary windfall of journals and letters that allowed me to study a little-known but nonetheless remarkable young American rescuer, Tracy Strong Jr. Here was no “ordinary” man. Nurtured in an unusual family ethos of altruism, humanitarianism, and internationalism, and blessed with extraordinary resourcefulness and courage, he had the unusual combination of traits needed to make the right choices and take the right actions that enabled him to save others.

The final two chapters look at ways in which, as a historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, I have become engaged in post-war trials and politics. A particularly unusual role of Holocaust historians has been to serve as expert witnesses in post-war trials. This has been a form of what might be called “applied” history that historians in most other fields never experience. Most of these trials have involved defendants charged with participating in Nazi crimes, and I have been involved in six such cases. Much more unusual have been a small number of Holocaust “denial” court cases. In Chapter 10, I relate my experiences as an expert witness in the second Zündel trial in Toronto in 1988 and the Irving v. Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books trial in London in 2000.

Finally, recent events in American and world politics have posed questions to historians of fascism, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust about the degree to which current events resemble the period and topics we have studied, and about what relevant insights we have gained that might help us to better understand the present. This is in effect another form of “applied” history. In the concluding chapter, I undertake an examination of the similarities and differences between that earlier era and our own that might help us to better understand current events.147

Notes

1. 1. H.G. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945: Das Anlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft: Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1955); Isaiah Trunk, Lodz Ghetto: A History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) [originally published in Yiddish in 1962]; and Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980), a collection of numerous path-breaking articles written in the 1950s.
2. 2. The English translation was published as Harvest of Hatred (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1954).
3. 3. New York: Beechhurst Press, 1953.
4. 4. In addition to the published records of the Nürnberg Trials, there were also important collections in the Biuletyn Glownej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich W Polsci and Dokumenty I Materialy Do Dziejow Okupacji Niemieckiej W Polsce for Poland, the Cartea Negra for Romania, and numerous volumes produced by the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in France, among others.
5. 5. Most important, perhaps, the Gerstein report, Himmler’s May 1940 memorandum on the treatment of alien populations in the German-occupied East, and documents concerning the Generalplan Ost: VfZ 1 (1953), 177–194; 5 (1958), 194–198; 6 (1958), 281–325, respectively.
6. 6. Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1961.
7. 7. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, Enlarged and Revised Edition, 1965), 54.
8. 8. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Originally published as Der Stellvertreter in 1963.
9. 9. New York: Random House, 1967.
10. 10. Reprinted as Philip Friedman, “Pseudo-Saviors in the Polish Ghettos: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski of Lodz,” “The Messianic Complex of a Nazi Collaborator in a Ghetto: Moses Merin of Sosnowiec,” and “Jacob Gens: ‘Commandant’ of the Vilna Ghetto,” Roads to Extinction, 333–380.
11. 11. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York: Stein and Day, 1972).
12. 12. Adam Czerniakow, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, ed. by Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermiz (New York: Stein and Day, 1979); and Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941–1944 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).
13. 13. Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Similarly, former resistance fighter and historian Yitzhak Arad wrote Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1980). For a more recent work on Warsaw, see Barbara Engelking and Jacob Leociak, Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to a Perished City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
14. 14. Andrea Löwe, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt: Lebensbedingungen, Selbstverwahrnehmung, Verhalten (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006); Gordon Hurwitz,Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).For a study of the German Lodz ghetto administration: Peter Klein, Die “Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt” 1940–1944: Eine Dienststelle im Spannungsfeld von Kommunalbürokratie und staatlicher Verfolgungspolitik (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2009).
15. 15. Sara Bender, The Jews of Bialystok during World War II and the Holocaust (Hannover: University Press of New England, 2008).
16. 16. Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, Die “Endlösung” in Riga: Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941–1944 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).
17. 17. Gustavo Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos: Voices from a Beleaguered Society 1939–1944 (London: Arnold, 2002); Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also the collected papers in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ghettos 1939–1945: New Research and Perspectives on Definition, Daily Life, and Survival (Washington DC, 2005).
18. 18. Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean, eds., introduction by Christopher R. Browning, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, vol. II, Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe, Parts A and B (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) and vol. III, Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany, ed. by Joseph R. White (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018); Guy Miran, ed., The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust, 2 vols (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009).
19. 19. Typical of this approach were: Yuri Suhl, They Fought Back (New York, 1967), and Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe (New York: Elek, 1974).
20. 20. Yehuda Bauer, “Jewish Leadership Reactions to Nazi Policies,” The Holocaust as Historical Experience, ed. by Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), 173–174; see also Bauer’s They Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1973) and The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979).
21. 21. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 134; and The Death of the Shtetl (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). For a recent example of a study of Jewish unarmed, non-violent defiance of Nazi persecution: Wolf Gruner, Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023).
22. 22. Nechama Tec, Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4.
23. 23. For the comparative, contextual approach, Nechama Tec’s Resistance is exemplary.
24. 24. Arthur Morse, While 6 Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York: Random House, 1967). For another early accusatory approach to rescue, see also: Saul Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973).
25. 25. Henry Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970), ix–x.
26. 26. Monty Noam Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), vii.
27. 27. David D. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
28. 28. Theodore S. Hamerow, Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
29. 29. Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 315. Two apologetic works are: William D. Rubenstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (New York: Routledge, 1997), and Robert N. Rosen, Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust (New York: Mariner Books, 2000).
30. 30. Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy (New York: Grove Press, 1964). The play was first performed and published in Germany in 1963.
31. 31. Carl Amery, Die Kapitulation (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963); Hans Müller, Katholische Kirche und Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Nymphenberger, 1963); Gordon Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s War (New York, 1962); Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).
32. 32. John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–45 (New York: Basic Books, 1968); Franklin Littell and Hubert Locke, The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974); Ernest C. Helmreich, The German Churches under Hitler (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979).
33. 33. Robert Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Manfred Gailus, Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Durchdringung des protestantischen Sozialmilieus in Berlin (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001); Werner Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
34. 34. Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
35. 35. For most vitriolic critique, see: John Cornwall, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999).
36. 36. David Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001); The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (New York: Random House, 2014); and The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (New York: Penguin, 2022).
37. 37. Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
38. 38. Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). See also: John Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews during the Holocaust, 1939–43 (New York: KTAV, 1980).
39. 39. Jacques Kornberg, The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
40. 40. Gutachten des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, vol. I (Munich, 1958), and vol. II (Stuttgart, 1966). See in particular the contributions by Martin Brozsat, Hermann Graml, and S. Fauck.
41. 41. Leon Poliakov and Jacques Sabille, eds. The Jews under Italian Occupation (Paris, 1955).
42. 42. Renzo de Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani setto il fascismo (Turin, 1961).
43. 43. Jacob Presser, The Destruction of the Dutch Jews (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969) [first appeared in 1965].
44. 44. Frederick B. Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution 1940–1944 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972).
45. 45. Bela Vago and George Mosse, eds. Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe (New York and Jerusalem, 1974).
46. 46. Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy 1922–1945 (London: Clarendon Press, 1978).
47. 47. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy Fance and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
48. 48. Randolf Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
49. 49. Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969).
50. 50. Samuel Abrahamsen, Norway’s Response to the Holocaust: A Historical Report (London: Holocaust Library, 1991); Walter Manoschek, “Serbien ist judenfrei.” Militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941–1942 (Munich: Oldenburg, 1993); Dan Michman, ed., Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1998); Radu Ionid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); and Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Alex Korb, Im Schatten des Weltkrieges: Massengewalt der Ustasa Gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013).
51. 51. Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews 1933–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1972).
52. 52. Martin Broszat, “Hitler und die Genesis der ‘Endlösung’: Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 25/4 (1977), 740–775, esp. 746–759.
53. 53. Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung: Entwurf einer Herrschaft (Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich Verlag Hermann Leins, 1969); and Andreas Hillgruber, “Die Endlösung und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kenrstück des rassenideologischen Programms des Nationalsozialismus,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 20/2 (1972), 133–151.
54. 54. Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), esp. 3–22, 150–163.
55. 55. Tim Mason, “Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism,” Der “Führerstaat”: Mythos und Realität, ed. by Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 23–42.
56. 56. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 12–13.
57. 57. Francois Furet, ed., L’Allemagne Nazie et le Génocide Juif (Paris: Gallimard Le Seuil, 1985), and in subsequent English translation, Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1989); and Eberhard Jäckel and Jürgen Rohwer, eds. Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: DVA, 1985). Several earlier conferences in New York (1975) and San Jose (1977 and 1978) had begun the process of mainstreaming the study of the Holocaust within the historical profession. See: Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich, eds. The Holocaust as Historical Experience (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), occasioned by the publication of Isaiah Trunk’s Judenrat, and Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, eds. The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy and Genocide: The San Jose Papers (New York: Kraus International Publications, 1980).
58. 58. Christopher R. Browning, “Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat,” Vierteljarhshefte für Zeitgeschichte 29/1 (1981), 97–109, and “The Decision Concerning the Final Solution,” Unanswered Questions, 96–118.
59. 59. Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1978), 126–127; and Alfred Streim, Die Handlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangenen im “Fall Barbarossa” (Heidelberg: C.F. Müller, 1981), 74–93.
60. 60. Helmut Krausnick, “Hitler und die Befehle an die Einsatzgruppen im Sommer 1941,” and Alfred Streim, “Zur Eröffnung des allgemeinen Judenvernichtungsbefehls gegenüber den Einsatzgruppen,” Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 88–106. The debate continued: Alfred Streim, “The Tasks of the Einsatzgruppen,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 4 (1987), 309–328, and Krausnick-Streim exchange, SWCA 6 (1989), 311–347.
61. 61. Including Hans Mommsen, who had entered the fray with “Die Realisierung des Utopischen: Die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ im ‘Dritten Reich’,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983), 381–420.
62. 62. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Rev. ed., 3 vols (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), esp. 54–55, 995–998.
63. 63. To give but one example of the intemperance with which this debate was sometimes conducted, when I first tried to have my revised dissertation published as a book, the anonymous reader took the ultra-intentionalist view that any interpretation that diverged from Hitler as sole decision-maker, antisemitism as sole motive, and the SS as sole institution of implementation was wrong. Thus the reader concluded that my manuscript could not “be regarded as providing any contribution, no matter how minor, to scholarship in the field.” The manuscript was subsequently published by a different press (with a different reader) as: The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland 1940–43 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978).
64. 64. Christopher R. Browning, “Beyond ‘Intentionalism’ and ‘Functionalism’: The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered,” The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 86–121.
65. 65. For the Lublin District: Dieter Pohl, Von der “Judenpolitik” zum “Judenmord”: Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouvernements 1939–1944 (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1993); Bogdan Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouvernement: Eine Fallstudie zum Distrikt Lublin 1939–1944 (Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag, 1999); and David Silberklang, Gates of Tears: The Holocaust in the Lublin District (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2013). For Ostgalizien: Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung im Ostgalizien 1941–1944: Die Organization und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997); and Thomas Sandkühler, Die “Endlösung” in Galizien: Der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berhold Beitz 1941–1944 (Bonn: Dietz Verlag, 1996). For Silesia: Sybille Steinbacher, “Musterstadt” Auschwitz: Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien (Munich: KG Saur, 2000). For Belarus: Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999). For Lithuania: Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011). For Estonia: Anton Weiss-Wendt, Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009). For Latvia: Andrew Ezergailus, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941–1944: The Missing Center (Riga and Washington DC, 1996). For Ukraine: Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003); Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge: Belknap, 2004); Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Eric Steinhart, The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For the Warthegau: Michael Albertini, Die Judenverfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–1945 (Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag, 2006). For the Radom Ddstrict: Robert Seidel, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Polen: Der Distrikt Radom 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2005); and Jacek Andrzej Mlynarcyzk, Judenmord in Zentralpolen: Der Distrikt Radom im Generalgouvernement 1939–1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellchaft, 2007).
66. 66. For example: Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich: Piper, 1998); Christopher R. Browning, Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
67. 67. Alexander Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2003); Jochen Böhler, Auftak zum Vernichtungskrieg: Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2006); Götz Aly, “Endlösung”: Völkerschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1995); Philip Rutherford, Prelude to the Final Solution: The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939–1941 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007); Magnus Brechtken, “Madagaskar für die Juden”: Antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1885–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997).
68. 68. See especially Ralf Ogerreck, Die “Einsatzgruppen” und die “Genesis der Endlösung” (Berlin: Metropol, 1996).
69. 69. Among others, Christian Gerlach makes the most sustained argument for December 1941 and the US entry: “Die Wannsee-Konferenz, das Schicksal der deutschen Juden und Hitlers Grundsatzentscheidung, alle Juden Europas zu ermodern,” Werktstattgeschichte 18 (1997), 7–44. I have summarized these debates in: Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26–57; and “The Decision-Making Process,” The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. by Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 173–196.
70. 70. Richard Breitman, Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991); Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung.
71. 71. For example: Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office.
72. 72. A classic early work was Max Weinrich, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s War against the Jewish People (New York: YIVO, 1946) [republished in 1999 by Yale University Press]. See also: Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastward: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Götz Aly and Suzanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutsche Pläne fur die europaische Ordnung (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1991).
73. 73. For example: Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Michael Kater, Doctors under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Paul Weindling, Health and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
74. 74. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, “Kommissarbefehl und Massenexecutionen sowjetischer Kriegsgefangenen,” Anatomie des SS-Staates (Freiburg: Walter Verlag, 1965), vol. 2, 161–278; Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat: Zeit der Indoktrination (Hamburg: Decker, 1969); Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen des Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938–1942 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1981), which documented the close relationship between the Army and SS in Poland and the USSR; Jürgen Förster, “Das Unternehmen ‘Barbarossa’ als Eroberungs -und Vernichtungskrieg,” Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: DVA, 1983), vol. 4, 412–447; Omar Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986) and Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Theo Schulte, The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989); and Christopher R. Browning, “Wehrmacht Reprisal Policy and the Murder of the Male Jews in Serbia,” Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 39–56.
75. 75. Ernst Klee, “Euthanasia” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983).
76. 76. The works of Christian Streit and Alfred Streim were key on this topic.
77. 77. For academics, for example: Alan Steinweis, Studying the Jews: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For medicine and “euthanasia”: Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Steven P. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Robert Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For the role of historians in particular, see the summary of Konrad Jarausch, “Unasked Questions: The Controversy about Nazi Collaboration among German Historians,” Lessons and Legacies, VI: New Currents in Holocaust Research, ed. by Jeffrey M. Dieffendorf (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 190–208.
78. 78. Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, ed., Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1944: Aufstellungskatalog (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002); Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, ed., The German Army and Genocide: Crimes against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians in the East, 1939–1944 (New York: New Press, 1999).
79. 79. Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008); Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostrkieg: Front und militärische Hinterland 1941–42 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009); Felix Römer, Der Kommissarbefehl, Wehrmacht, und NS-Verbrechen an der Ostfront 1941/42 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008); Geoffrey Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front 1941 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Waitman Beorn, Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
80. 80. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
81. 81. Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).
82. 82. Leonard S. Newman, “What Is a ‘Social-Psychological’ Account of Perpetrator Behavior? The Person versus the Situation in Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners’,” Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust, ed. by Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43–67.
83. 83. Alfons Kenkmann, ed., Villa Ten Hompel: Sitz der Ordnungspolizei im Dritten Reich (Münster: Agenda Verlag, 1996); Edward Westermann, “‘Ordinary Men’ or ‘Ideological Soldiers’? Police Battalion 310 in Russia 1942,” German Studies Review 21/1 (1998), 41–68, and Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005); Harald Buhlan and Werner Jung, eds. Wessen Freund und wessen Helfer? Die Kölner Polizei im Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Emons Verlag, 2000); Alfons Kenkmann and Christoph Spieker, eds. Im Auftrag: Polizei, Verwaltung, und Vernichtung (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2001); Karl Schneider, Auswärts eingesetzt: Bremer Polizeibataillone und der Holocaust (Essen: Klartext, 2011); Wolfgang Curilla, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei und der Holocaust im Baltikum und in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), and Die Judenmord in Polen und die deutsche Ordnungspolizei 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011).
84. 84. Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2005); Thomas Kühne: Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); and Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Also fundamental: Klaus-Michael Mallmann, “Vom Fussvolk der ‘Endlösung’: Ordnungspolizei, Ostkrieg, und Judenmord,” Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte XXVI (1997), 355–391; and Gerhard Paul, “Von Psychopathen, Technokraten des Terrors und ‘ganz gewöhnlichen’ Deutschen: Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung,” Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialistischen oder ganz normale Deutschen, ed. by Gerhard Paul (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002), 13–90.
85. 85. Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
86. 86. Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
87. 87. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
88. 88. Johann Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2018).
89. 89. Marlis Steinart, Hitler’s War and the Germans (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1977), 132–147; Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), esp. 277; Otto Dov Kulka, “‘Public Opinion’ in Nazi Germany and the ‘Jewish Question’,” Jerusalem Quarterly 25 (Fall 1982), 121–144, and 26 (Winter 1982), 34–45; Kulka and Aron Rodrigue, “The German Population and the Jews in the Third Reich: Recent Publications and Trends in Research on German Society and the ‘Jewish Question’,” Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984), 421–435; Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
90. 90. David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), esp. 115; Peter Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2006); Frank Bajohr, “Vom antijüdischen Konsens zum schlechten Gewissen: Die deutsche Gesellschaft und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945,” Der Holocaust als Offenes Geheimnis (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006).
91. 91. Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011).
92. 92. Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996); Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Fïuhrerkorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002).
93. 93. Richard Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2024).
94. 94. Yaacov Lozowick, Hitlers Bürokraten: Eichmann, seine willigen Vollstrecker, und die Banalität des Bösen (Zurich: Pendo, 2000); David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: Heinemann, 2004); Irmtrud Wojak, Eichmanns Memoiren: Ein Kritischer Essay (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2001); Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (New York: Knopf, 2014); Christopher R. Browning, “Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann,” Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 3–36. For another classic perpetrator study, of Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, see: Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London: Andre Deutsch, 1974).
95. 95. Helmut Genschel, Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich (Göttingen, 1966); Avraham Barkai, Vom Boykott zu “Endjudung”: Der wirtschafliche Existenzkamp der Juden im Dritten Reich 1933–1943 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1988).
96. 96. Gerhard Botz, Wohnungspolitik und Judendeportation in Wien 1938–1945: Zur Funktion des Antisemitismus als Ersatz nationalsozialistischer Sozialpolitik (Vienna: Geyer, 1975).
97. 97. Frank Bajohr, “Arisierung” in Hamburg: Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer 1933–45 (Hamburg: Hans Christians, 1997).
98. 98. In addition to Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era, see: Peter Hayes, From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025). See also: Gerald Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
99. 99. Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005).
100. 100. Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust 1939–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
101. 101. Jan Gross, Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
102. 102. Christoph Dieckmann, “Der Krieg und die Ermordung der litauischen Juden,” Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen, ed. by Ulrich Herbert (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1998), 292–329; Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998).
103. 103. Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Christopher R. Browning, “Jewish Workers in Poland: Self-Maintenance, Exploitation, Destruction,” Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 58–88, and Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).
104. 104. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin, 2006).
105. 105. Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, “Die ökonomie der ‘Endlösung’: Menschenvernichtung und wirtschaftliche Neuordnung,” Beiträge zur Nationalsozialistischen Gesundheitsund Sozialpolitik, vol. V, Sozialpolitik und Judenvernichtung: Gibt es eine ökonomie der Endlösung? (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1987), 7–90; and Aly and Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung. Also emphasizing the compatibility between National Socialism, modernization, and the Holocaust, though with much greater emphasis on ideology: Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
106. 106. Christopher R. Browning, “Vernichtung und Arbeit,” Vernichtungspolitik: Eine Debatte über den Zusammenhang von Sozialpolitik und Genozid im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, ed. by Wolfgang Schneider (Hamburg, 1991), 37–51; Aly and Heim’s contributions in this volume, 11–24 and 165–175. See also: Ulrich Herbert, “Arbeit und Vernichtung: Ökonomische Interesse und Primat der ‘Weltanschauung’ im Nationalsozialismus,” Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte?, ed. by Dan Diner (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987), 198–236.
107. 107. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); Gudrun Schwarz, Eine Frau an seiner Seite: Ehefrauen in der “SS-Sippengemeinschaft” (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1997).
108. 108. Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2013).
109. 109. Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” Commentary (June 1998), 42–46.
110. 110. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds. Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993); Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds. Women in the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Lenore J. Weitzman, “Women,” The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 203–217.
111. 111. Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians 1919–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018). Patrick Dubois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008) also highlighted testimony of Ukrainian villagers.
112. 112. Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–1944 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
113. 113. Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also: Antony Polansky and Joanna Michlic, eds. The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Anna Bikont, The Crime of Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
114. 114. Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2013); and On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue Police and Criminal Police in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2024); and Barbara Engelking, Such a Beautiful Sunny Day: Jews Seeking Refuge in the Polish Countryside 1943–1945 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016).
115. 115. Michael Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis (New York: New York University Press, 1990); Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
116. 116. Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung. Das T4-Reinhardt Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor, und Treblinka (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013).
117. 117. Guenter Lewy, The Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage” (Hamburg: Christians, 1996); Martin Holler, Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Roma in den besetzten Sowjetunion (Heidelberg: Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma, 2009); Anton Weiss-Wendt, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
118. 118. Helmut Heiber, ed., “Der Generalplan Ost: Dokumentation,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 6 (1958), 281–325; Czeslaw Madayczyk, ed., Vom Generalplan Ost zum Genaralsiedlungsplan (Munich: Saur, 1994); Karl Heinz Roth, “‘Generalplan Ost’–Gesamtplan Ost’: Forschungsstand, Quellenprobleme, neue Ergebnisse,” Der “Generalplan Ost”: Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungsund Vernichtungspolitik, ed. by Mechtild Rössler and Sabine Schleiermacher (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993).
119. 119. Edward Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967); Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangenen und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa (Stuttgart: DVA, 2001).
120. 120. Geoffrey Giles, “The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic in the Third Reich,” Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. by Robert Gellately and Nathan Stolzfus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 223–255; and “The Most Unkindest Cut of All: Castration, Homosexuals, and Nazi Justice,” Journal of Contemporary History 27/1 (January 1992), 41–61.
121. 121. Alan Rosenbaum, ed., Is The Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
122. 122. Steven Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1, The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
123. 123. Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
124. 124. Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
125. 125. Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), citation from p. 3.
126. 126. Jürgen Zimmermann, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz: Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Berlin: Lit, 2011), and “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Toward an Archeology of Genocide,” Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. by A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 49–76.
127. 127. Carroll Peter Kakel, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s “Indian Wars” in the “Wild East” (New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2013).
128. 128. Edward Westermann, Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2016), citation on p. 251.
129. 129. A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History,” Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 3–54, esp. 34–40.
130. 130. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
131. 131. David Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949).
132. 132. Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Remembering and Life History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1990); and Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
133. 133. Donald Niewyk, Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survivors (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
134. 134. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
135. 135. Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
136. 136. Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Testimony and Time: Holocaust Survivors Remember (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014).
137. 137. Mark Roseman, A Life in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany (New York: Metropolitan, 2001).
138. 138. Browning, Remembering Survival.
139. 139. Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
140. 140. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I, The Years of Persecution 1933–39 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), and vol. II, The Years of Extermination, 1939–45 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), citations from pp. xv, xvii, xxi.
141. 141. David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49 (London: Macmillan, 2016), citation from p. xxxiii.
142. 142. Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), citation from p. 1.
143. 143. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Duggan Books, 2015).
144. 144. For a more detailed re-examination of this topic, see: Christopher R. Browning, “Hitler, the Nazi Leadership, and the Evolution of the ‘Final Solution’,” The Cambridge History of the Holocaust, vol. II, ed. by Mary Fulbrook and Jürgen Matthäus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), 27–50.
145. 145. Browning, Remembering Survival.
146. 146. See endnote 114.
147. 147. “Lessons from Hitler’s Ascent,” The New York Review of Books (hereafter NYRB) LXIV/7 (April 7, 2017), 10–14; “The Suffocation of Democracy,” NYRB LXV/16 (October 25, 2018), 14–17; “How Hitler’s Enablers Undid Democracy in Germany,” The Atlantic, October 28, 2022; “A New Kind of Fascism,” The Atlantic, July 25, 2023; “Hitler’s Enablers,” NYRB LXXI/17 (November 7, 2024), 52–54; “Trump, Antisemitism, and Academia,” NYRB LXXII/6 (April 10, 2025), 42; “Surely Not?,” NYRB LXXII/9 (May 29, 2025), 11.

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