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The Holocaust History Podcast features engaging conversations with a diverse group of guests on all elements of the Holocaust. Whether you are new to the topic or come with prior knowledge, you will learn something new.
28 Episodes
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Send us a textThe behavior of the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII is one of the most hotly debated controversies in the history of the Holocaust. And for a long time much of the evidence about that has been locked away in the Vatican Archives. Now, historians are finally able to access these documents. In this episode, I talk with one of those who has access to those Vatican archives, David Kertzer, about the response of the Catholic Church to the rise of the Nazis and to t...
Send us a textDr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, has achieved an almost mythical status as a supervillain. Yet this stereotype obscures the history of a man who was, in many ways, a product of both pre-war racial pseudoscience and the Nazi state.I am joined in this episode by David Marwell an historian who remarkably also worked with the US government to track down Dr. Mengele after the war. We talk about Mengele’s origins, what made him who he was, and the hunt for ...
Send us a textWas the Holocaust a unique event or did it have its roots in earlier historical events? How do we put earlier colonial genocides in context and conversation with the Holocaust? On this episode, we talk about the connections between the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia and its occupation of eastern Europe. On this episode I talked with Jürgen Zimmerer about this topic. We also looked at the role that the colonial genocides play in German po...
Send us a text The story of Countess Janina (Mehlberg) Suchodolska is something that would be rejected by Hollywood as too far-fetched, but it is a true story. Janina was a Jewish Pole hiding in plain sight as a Polish noblewoman who then went on to rescue prisoners from one of the deadliest concentration camps.In this episode, I talk with historians Joanna Sliwa and Barry White about their incredible new book about Janina Mehlberg. We talk about her incredible story, but als...
Send us a textThe second largest Nazi victim group after the Jews was Soviet POWs. The experience of these people has been documented in part by the latest volume of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos.In this week’s episode, I talked with Dallas Michelbacher, one of the researchers on this project and a scholar of the Nazi genocide of Soviet POWs. Dallas Michelbacher is an applied researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum...
Send us a textHow did Holocaust perpetrators feel about what they did and how were they able to keep doing it? The question of perpetrator motivation has been one that scholars of the Holocaust have been interested in from the beginning.But what about the phenomenon of perpetrators who seem to have been disgusted by what they were engaged in? What does this signify? Is it some deep moral objection or something else.In this episode, I talked with Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic about her...
Send us a text Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) is a haunting film focused on the domestic life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family. The family lived in a villa directly next to the Auschwitz I camp. In this podcast, I talk with film scholar and screenwriter Barry Langford about the history of Holocaust film as well as The Zone of...
Send us a textThe story of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust is an incredibly complex and difficult one. On the one hand, Poles and Jews both suffered horribly under the Nazis. On the other, however, the general climate in Poland was inhospitable to Jews and many Poles took advantage of the Nazi occupation to victimize their Jewish neighbors for a variety of reasons.In this episode, I talked with Jan Grabowski about the history of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holo...
Send us a textSomewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 Jews, Roma, and ethnic Serbs were murdered in the Jasenovac concentration camp in what is now Croatian. This camp was run by Croatians without Nazi involvement. Yet few outside of the Balkans have heard of it.In this week’s episode, I talk with Stipe Odak about the incredibly complex history of the camp as well as the Holocaust in region. We also delve into the difficult memory politics of the camp and its use during the 199...
Send us a textThe Treblinka extermination center was responsible for the murder of approximately 925,000 Jews during the Holocaust. It was the deadliest killing site after Auschwitz. Yet few people know that it was also the scene of a successful uprising and mass escape by the prisoners there. In this conversation with Chad Gibbs, we talked about the history of the camp as well as the work he has done in recreating the vital social networks among prisoners that enabled the pr...
Send us a textFrom the earliest days of the Third Reich through the end of the war, there were organized efforts to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis. Perhaps as many as 10,000 were rescued in this way, but without their parents. They ended up in a variety of countries and had diverse set of experiences. In addition, the story of the Kindertransport has worked its way into the cultural memory of the Holocaust, particularly in the United Kingdom. In this episo...
Send us a textGeneral Dwight Eisenhower’s visit to the Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945 fundamentally changed his outlook on the war and on his enemy, the Nazis. It also changed the way he carried out his duties later as US Military Governor in charge of both caring for former concentration prisoners as well as dealing with former Nazis, and, later, as President of the United States.In this conversation with Jason Lantzer, we talk about all of this and more.You can see some wart...
Send us a textWe talk a lot about learning from the Holocaust and lessons from the Holocaust, but we don’t talk nearly enough about HOW to TEACH the Holocaust. Understanding how to present this complex and often difficult material to students at a variety of different grade levels (as well as to the public at heritage sites) is a critical task.In this episode, Dr. Irene Ann Resenly talks about the pedagogy of teaching about the Holocaust, challenges of working with this material in the ...
Send us a textSome historians have argued that the experience of Romani people during the Holocaust most closely approximated that of the Jews in terms of policy and execution. Of course, there were also important differences. But, Jews and Romani also went through the Holocaust together. In this, really fascinating discussion, I talked with Ari Joskowicz about the Nazi genocide of Romani, their interactions with Jews, and the difficult challenge of preserving these historie...
Send us a textWhat motivated Nazi perpetrators? How do we explain the apparent ease with which so many Germans carried out acts of extreme violence? These are some of the most enduring questions raised by the Holocaust. And they are questions that scholars still grapple with today. In this episode, I talked with Prof. Ed Westermann about these questions including issues such as alcohol abuse, sexual violence, and the role of toxic masculinity. Warning: this does c...
Send us a textThis episode covers a lot of ground with my guests from the Auschwitz Jewish Center, Tomek Kuncewicz and Maciek Zabierowski. We talk about the history of the Jewish community in Oświęcim, Poland as well as the challenges of educating the Polish non-Jewish community about the Holocaust. We close with a discussion of the ways in which the Holocaust is used in Polish politics today. To learn more about the valuable work of the Center, click here! Tomek K...
Send us a textThe Nazis pursued a variety of strategies in their attempts to murder all the Jews of Europe. One of these was starvation, particularly within ghettos where they could control the flow of food to captive populations.In this episode, I talk with Professor Helene Sinnreich about the experience of hunger in the Warsaw, Łodz, and Krakow ghettos. She tells us about the ways in which the Nazis used hunger as a weapon, the effects it had on ghetto populations, and the diver...
Send us a textIt’s been over 20 years since the HBO television series Band of Brothers appeared, but it continues to shape the popular understanding and conception of World War II. The series is full of powerful episodes but one that viewers consistently single out as particularly moving is Episode 9: Why We Fight. In this episode, the soldier of Easy Company stumble across a Nazi concentration camp.Ever since I started this podcast, I have wanted to talk with those involved about...
Send us a textThe Nazi state was built on persecution and multiple groups in addition to Jews were victimized and killed during the Holocaust. Today’s podcast looks not only at Nazi persecution of gay and transgender people along with Nazi homophobic thought, but also explores the history of LGTBQ communities in Germany before the war.We also look at the challenges to doing this historical work as well as the recent assaults on Holocaust history by those aiming to use that past to justi...
Send us a text The story of the Topf brothers is one of the most chilling examples of corporate complicity in the Holocaust. Topf and Sons was the company who designed, built, and installed the ovens used to burn corpses in the concentration camps. Far being disinterested bureaucrats, the company’s employees were actively involved in problem-solving and helping the Nazis to destroy the bodies of their victims. &nb...
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