The Holocaust History Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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Ultimately, the story of the Holocaust is one centered in places:  where something happened, where someone was from, where someone wanted to go.  In this episode, I talked with two scholars about the role of geography in the Holocaust but also about how we use geographical approaches and methodologies to ask (and answer new important historical questions. 

Anne Kelly Knowles is the McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine.

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

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

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

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How does one talk with a Holocaust survivor about their experiences?  What is the role of survivor testimony in understanding the Holocaust?  In this episode, I talk with psychologist, Holocaust scholar, and playwright Hank Greenspan about his lifetime of talking with survivors and what he has learned from that experience.

Henry “Hank” Greenspan is an emeritus psychologist, oral historian and playwright at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who has been interviewing, writing about, and teaching about Holocaust survivors since the 1970s.

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

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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The Bełżec extermination camp was the first of the so-called Operation Reinhard camps to open.  In some ways, it provided the model for the other Reinhard camps of Sobibor and Treblinka.  In this episode, Chris Webb provides a detailed history of the camp and a detailed discussion of the important role that Bełżec played in the Final Solution.

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

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

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

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

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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In 1985, the nine-hour film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann hit theaters.  This powerful production featured survivor testimony as well as secretly filmed interviews with Nazi perpetrators.  

It’s length and the way it was shot challenges our understanding of what a Holocaust film is.  Is it a documentary film or something else? How has it impacted both our understanding of the event as well as the ways in which others have made films and movies about the Holocaust?  In this discussion with Dominic Williams, we dive into all these questions and more!

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

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

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

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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When the Einsatzgruppen began reporting that they were murdering Jews, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park intercepted and decoded the messages.  Throughout the Holocaust, these men and women deciphered the reports of the SS and documented the crimes of the Nazi state.

On this episode, I talk with journalist and researcher Christian Jennings about the Holocaust Code and what we can learn about the Holocaust from decoded Nazi transmissions.

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

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

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

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The first victims were not Jews per se, but Germans.  That is to say, that the Nazis first murdered mentally and physically handicapped Germans that they considered to be unworthy of living.  In so doing, they drew on the long history of the eugenics movement. 

In this episode, I talked with Marius Turda about the role eugenics played in the Nazi state, its connections to the larger global eugenics movement, and the echoes of this history today.

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

Turda, Marius. Modernism and Eugenics (2010)

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

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The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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The topic of resistance during the Holocaust is always a controversial one. What is resistance?  What did it take to stand up to the Nazis when the vast majority of Germans did not.

In this episode, I talk with historian Mark Roseman about a remarkable group of socialists in Nazi Germany who made the difficult choice to stand up in ways both big and small.  We also talk about nature of resistance and what makes a resister or rescuer.

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

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

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The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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In addition  to the massive loss of life, the twelve years of Nazi rule in Europe created one of the largest demographic disasters in human history with millions of people scattered across the continent.  For Holocaust survivors, one of the most pressing tasks after liberation was attempting to discover the fates of relatives and friends.  A variety of international organizations worked to help these people,  This also resulted in one of the most interesting archives: the archives of the International Tracing Service.

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

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

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

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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The behavior of the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII is one of the most hotly debated controversies in the history of the Holocaust.  And for a long time much of the evidence about that has been locked away in the Vatican Archives.  Now, historians are finally able to access these documents.

In this episode, I talk with one of those who has access to those Vatican archives, David Kertzer, about the response of the Catholic Church to the rise of the Nazis and to the Holocaust.  

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

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

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, has achieved an almost mythical status as a supervillain.  Yet this stereotype obscures the history of a man who was, in many ways, a product of both pre-war racial pseudoscience and the Nazi state.

I am joined in this episode by David Marwell an historian who remarkably also worked with the US government to track down Dr. Mengele after the war.  We talk about Mengele’s origins, what made him who he was, and the hunt for him after the end of World War II.

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

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

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

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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