Send us a text In December 1941, an SS man took a series of 12 photographs of an Einsatzgruppen killing in Latvia. The negatives were stolen by a survivor who had copies made and retrieved them after the war. In today’s episode, we explore what we can learn about the Holocaust from these photographs and, indeed, from photographs in general. I talk …

Send us a text When did the Holocaust start? How soon after Hitler took power did anti-Jewish violence begin? These are some of the important questions we explore in this episode as I talk with Hermann Beck and the surge in antisemitic violence in the wake of the Nazi rise to power in 1933. In his pathbreaking book, Hermann Beck has documented an e…

Send us a text Among the books that many people talk about but few have read, certainly Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is one. But it IS a difficult read. How do we interpret this book? How significant is it? And what does it tell us about the Holocaust? These are some of the questions we tackled in this episode with the editors of a new volume on the s…

Send us a text Many Nazis including Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and Klaus Barbie escaped Europe and fled to South America in an attempt to evade prosecution for their crimes. We know quite a bit about their lives and crimes during the Holocaust but much less about the network of people that supported them in their new lives in Sout…

Send us a text Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, led a terrible and fascinating life, from Nazi torturer to advisor to brutal South American dictatorships. However, unlike many, he was eventually brought to justice for his crimes. In this episode, I talk with Richard J. Golsan about the sensational trial of Klaus Barbie and its effect on the memor…

Send us a text How can the digital humanities address and explore the Holocaust? In these days of Chat GPT, we may be rightly wary about the use of computers to analyze the past. However, today’s episode shows how an ethical approach to using computational methods can expand our understanding of the past often by showing us new questions that we ha…

Send us a text Many of us have seen or listened to recorded Holocaust survivor testimony. But have we thought about HOW that testimony was created? And what role that process of eliciting testimony might play in the kinds of things survivors talk about it? In this episode, I talked with Noah Shenker about how three different archives approached gat…

Send us a text Among the flood of displaced persons that washed across Germany after WWII were a large number of perpetrators, particularly from Eastern Europe. They mostly passed unnoticed (and unbothered) by occupation authorities to start new lives elsewhere. A large number of these Holocaust perpetrators arrived in Australia where they not only…

Send us a text What is it like to have a Nazi in the family? What if that Nazi was Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz? One of the least studied areas of Holocaust history is the ways in which the families and descendants of former Nazis engage with their family history. I am very grateful to be joined on this week’s podcast by Kai Hoess, gra…

Send us a text Architecture (and architects) played a critical role in not just the Third Reich, but also the Holocaust. Nazi architects helped embody the Nazi worldview in their monumental work but also in the designs of concentration camps. They were willing collaborators in the use of slave labor and, ultimately, in the construction of the appar…

Send us a text How did Jews in Germany resist the Nazis? What were the choices that they made to stand up against the regime where its authoritarian power was greatest? In this episode, I talk with Wolf Gruner about his research on this topic and his surprising discovery of the extent of resistance by Jewish Germans in the heart of the Nazi state. …

Send us a text The Holocaust in Poland left hundreds of towns and villages that had previously had large Jewish populations empty. However, important Jewish sites like synagogues and cemeteries remained. Polish communities were then confronted with what do with these places. In this fascinating conversation with Yechiel Weizman, we talk about his w…

Send us a text 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 h…

Send us a text 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”…

Send us a text The Nazis first targeted mentally and physically disabled Germans for mass killing, before they targeted Jews. However, discrimination and ableist thought predated the Nazis and followed them into the postwar era. In this episode, I talk with Dagmar Herzog about both the Nazi “euthanasia” campaign, but also the larger context of disc…

Send us a text In this episode, I talked with Jacob Flaws about the spaces of Treblinka. His work analyses this extermination camp from a spatial perspective, focusing on the physical and ideological boundaries of the camp. His work shows that the fences of the camp did not contain the truth of its existence and he details the ways in which the loc…

Send us a text Philosopher Theodore W. Adorno famously said that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Here he gives an example of the way that many thinkers and philosophers struggled with the post-Holocaust world. In this episode, I talked with philosopher and Holocaust scholar John K. Roth about the ways that philosophy approaches the H…

Send us a text At least 2 million Jews were murdered by mass shooting in the Soviet Union. The perpetrators responsible for most of these killings were the men of the Einsatzgruppen. In this week’s episode, I talk with Jürgen Mathäus about the history of these units, their evolution from 1938 on, and the role they played in the Holocaust. Jürgen Ma…

Send us a text What was the relationship between Christianity? Could one be both a Nazi and a Christian? What was the relationship between religious antisemitism and other forms of Jew hatred? On today’s episode, I talked with Richard Steigmann-Gall about these difficult but important questions. Richard Steigmann-Gall is an associate professor of h…

Send us a text What is it like to visit a Nazi extermination camp or even a Holocaust site in general? Last year, I was fortunate enough to travel to Poland with three friends to a number of camps and Holocaust-related sites and museums. I thought I would do something different in this episode and invite them to talk about their experiences. Stuart…

Send us a text The wife of Nazi camp commandant Karl Koch, Ilse, became a lasting symbol of the evil and depravity of the Nazi state. She was accused of a variety of crimes and underwent three trials, including one by the Nazis themselves. However, there is more to the story. In this episode, I talk with Tomaz Jardim about the real Ilse Koch and he…

Send us a text Historian Timothy Snyder wrote that, between 1941 and 1944, Belarus was the deadliest place on earth. And he was right. The population there, both Jewish and non-Jewish suffered under the full weight of the Nazi genocidal project from the Holocaust by Bullets to the Hunger Plan. In this episode, I talked with Franziska Exeler about t…

Send us a text 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 S…

Send us a text 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 impa…

Send us a text 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 Chr…

Send us a text 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 i…

Send us a text 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 wa…

Send us a text 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 frien…

Send us a text 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 w…

Send us a text 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 wit…

Send us a text Was the Holocaust a unique event or did it have its roots in earlier historical events? How do we put earlier colonial genocides in context and conversation with the Holocaust? On this episode, we talk about the connections between the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia and its occupation of eastern Europe. On this epi…

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 histori…

Send us a text The second largest Nazi victim group after the Jews was Soviet POWs. The experience of these people has been documented in part by the latest volume of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. In this week’s episode, I talked with Dallas Michelbacher, one of the researchers on this project and …

Send us a text How did Holocaust perpetrators feel about what they did and how were they able to keep doing it? The question of perpetrator motivation has been one that scholars of the Holocaust have been interested in from the beginning. But what about the phenomenon of perpetrators who seem to have been disgusted by what they were engaged in? Wha…

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 T…

Send us a text The story of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust is an incredibly complex and difficult one. On the one hand, Poles and Jews both suffered horribly under the Nazis. On the other, however, the general climate in Poland was inhospitable to Jews and many Poles took advantage of the Nazi occupation to victimize their Jewish neig…

Send us a text Somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 Jews, Roma, and ethnic Serbs were murdered in the Jasenovac concentration camp in what is now Croatian. This camp was run by Croatians without Nazi involvement. Yet few outside of the Balkans have heard of it. In this week’s episode, I talk with Stipe Odak about the incredibly complex history of t…

Send us a text The Treblinka extermination center was responsible for the murder of approximately 925,000 Jews during the Holocaust. It was the deadliest killing site after Auschwitz. Yet few people know that it was also the scene of a successful uprising and mass escape by the prisoners there. In this conversation with Chad Gibbs, we talked about …

Send us a text From the earliest days of the Third Reich through the end of the war, there were organized efforts to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis. Perhaps as many as 10,000 were rescued in this way, but without their parents. They ended up in a variety of countries and had diverse set of experiences. In addition, the story of the Kindertra…

Send us a text General Dwight Eisenhower’s visit to the Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945 fundamentally changed his outlook on the war and on his enemy, the Nazis. It also changed the way he carried out his duties later as US Military Governor in charge of both caring for former concentration prisoners as well as dealing with former Nazis, a…

Send us a text We talk a lot about learning from the Holocaust and lessons from the Holocaust, but we don’t talk nearly enough about HOW to TEACH the Holocaust. Understanding how to present this complex and often difficult material to students at a variety of different grade levels (as well as to the public at heritage sites) is a critical task. In…

Send us a text Some historians have argued that the experience of Romani people during the Holocaust most closely approximated that of the Jews in terms of policy and execution. Of course, there were also important differences. But, Jews and Romani also went through the Holocaust together. In this, really fascinating discussion, I talked with Ari J…

Send us a text What motivated Nazi perpetrators? How do we explain the apparent ease with which so many Germans carried out acts of extreme violence? These are some of the most enduring questions raised by the Holocaust. And they are questions that scholars still grapple with today. In this episode, I talked with Prof. Ed Westermann about these que…

Send us a text This episode covers a lot of ground with my guests from the Auschwitz Jewish Center, Tomek Kuncewicz and Maciek Zabierowski. We talk about the history of the Jewish community in Oświęcim, Poland as well as the challenges of educating the Polish non-Jewish community about the Holocaust. We close with a discussion of the ways in which …

Send us a text The Nazis pursued a variety of strategies in their attempts to murder all the Jews of Europe. One of these was starvation, particularly within ghettos where they could control the flow of food to captive populations. In this episode, I talk with Professor Helene Sinnreich about the experience of hunger in the Warsaw, Łodz, and Krakow…

Send us a text It’s been over 20 years since the HBO television series Band of Brothers appeared, but it continues to shape the popular understanding and conception of World War II. The series is full of powerful episodes but one that viewers consistently single out as particularly moving is Episode 9: Why We Fight. In this episode, the soldier of …

Send us a text The Nazi state was built on persecution and multiple groups in addition to Jews were victimized and killed during the Holocaust. Today’s podcast looks not only at Nazi persecution of gay and transgender people along with Nazi homophobic thought, but also explores the history of LGTBQ communities in Germany before the war. We also loo…

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-solvin…

Send us a text Did you know that a Holocaust survivor who served in the US Army in the Korean War won the Congressional Medal Of Honor? Did you know that there were thousands of Holocaust survivors who fought the Nazis during WWII or served in the US military afterward? Today’s discussion with Mike Rugel looks at the fascinating stories of some of …

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