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© 2024 The Holocaust History Podcast
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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.
35 Episodes
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Send us a textHistorian Timothy Snyder wrote that, between 1941 and 1944, Belarus was the deadliest place on earth. And he was right. The population there, both Jewish and non-Jewish suffered under the full weight of the Nazi genocidal project from the Holocaust by Bullets to the Hunger Plan.In this episode, I talked with Franziska Exeler about the Holocaust in Belarus as well as its aftermath in postwar justice and its place in postwar memory. Franziska Exeler is an assistan...
Send us a textThe Bełżec extermination camp was the first of the so-called Operation Reinhard camps to open. In some ways, it provided the model for the other Reinhard camps of Sobibor and Treblinka. In this episode, Chris Webb provides a detailed history of the camp and a detailed discussion of the important role that Bełżec played in the Final Solution. Chris Webb is an independent researcher who has written multiple books on the Operation Reinhard camps. He is also t...
Send us a textIn 1985, the nine-hour film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann hit theaters. This powerful production featured survivor testimony as well as secretly filmed interviews with Nazi perpetrators. It’s length and the way it was shot challenges our understanding of what a Holocaust film is. Is it a documentary film or something else? How has it impacted both our understanding of the event as well as the ways in which others have made films and movies about the Holocaust? ...
Send us a textWhen the Einsatzgruppen began reporting that they were murdering Jews, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park intercepted and decoded the messages. Throughout the Holocaust, these men and women deciphered the reports of the SS and documented the crimes of the Nazi state.On this episode, I talk with journalist and researcher Christian Jennings about the Holocaust Code and what we can learn about the Holocaust from decoded Nazi transmissions. Christian Jennings is ...
Send us a textThe first victims were not Jews per se, but Germans. That is to say, that the Nazis first murdered mentally and physically handicapped Germans that they considered to be unworthy of living. In so doing, they drew on the long history of the eugenics movement. In this episode, I talked with Marius Turda about the role eugenics played in the Nazi state, its connections to the larger global eugenics movement, and the echoes of this history today. Marius T...
Send us a textThe topic of resistance during the Holocaust is always a controversial one. What is resistance? What did it take to stand up to the Nazis when the vast majority of Germans did not.In this episode, I talk with historian Mark Roseman about a remarkable group of socialists in Nazi Germany who made the difficult choice to stand up in ways both big and small. We also talk about nature of resistance and what makes a resister or rescuer.Mark Roseman is a distinguished profe...
Send us a textIn addition to the massive loss of life, the twelve years of Nazi rule in Europe created one of the largest demographic disasters in human history with millions of people scattered across the continent. For Holocaust survivors, one of the most pressing tasks after liberation was attempting to discover the fates of relatives and friends. A variety of international organizations worked to help these people, This also resulted in one of the most interesting ...
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 the Hol...
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 ...
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