| Author | : Helen J. Whatmore-Thomson |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 308 |
| Release | : 2020-08-06 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0198789777 |
Nazi concentration camps were built close to local populations all across Europe. These nearby communities were involved with the camps in a myriad of ways, and after the war, they continued to interact with camp legacies. This study examines locality-camp relationships and how these played out during and after the war.
| Author | : Mary Fulbrook |
| Publisher | : OUP Oxford |
| Total Pages | : 440 |
| Release | : 2012-09-20 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0191611751 |
The Silesian town of Bedzin lies a mere twenty-five miles from Auschwitz; through the linked ghettos of Bedzin and its neighbouring town, some 85,000 Jews passed on their way to slave labour or the gas chambers. The principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, Udo Klausa, was a happily married family man. He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area - inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had 'known nothing about it'; and that he had personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. A Small Town Near Auschwitz re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authoritiy, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of his victims. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a 'decent' man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war. But the book is much more than a portrayal of an individual man. Udo Klausa's case is so important because it is in many ways so typical. Behind Klausa's story is the larger story of how countless local functionaries across the Third Reich facilitated the murderous plans of a relatively small number among the Nazi elite - and of how those plans could never have been realized, on the same scale, without the diligent cooperation of these generally very ordinary administrators. As Fulbrook shows, men like Klausa 'knew' and yet mostly suppressed this knowledge, performing their day jobs without apparent recognition of their own role in the system, or any sense of personal wrongdoing or remorse - either before or after 1945. This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history.
| Author | : Helen J. Whatmore-Thomson |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 304 |
| Release | : 2020-08-07 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 019250696X |
Nazi concentration camps (KZs) were established in the vicinity of local communities across Europe. Arguably, the individuals in these communities were not perpetrators, nor were they victims, like those imprisoned in the camps. Yet they did not simply stand by on the sidelines, passive, uninvolved, or untouched by the presence of the camps. Local citizenries engaged in ambiguous and highly interactive relations with their local camps, willingly and unwillingly working for the perpetrators—but also aiding inmates. After the war, Nazi camps were often repurposed, initially as post-war internment camps and subsequently as penal institutions, military compounds, or housing encampments. Over time, many were transformed into sites of memory to commemorate Nazi persecution. Governments and groups of survivors have often determined the re-use and commemoration of KZs, but these processes take place on local territory and have direct implications for nearby communities. Therefore, locals have continued to interact with camp legacies. Nazi Camps and their Neighbouring Communities examines how local populations evolved to live with the Nazi camps both before and after the war. Helen J. Whatmore-Thomson evaluates the different sorts of locality-camp relationships that developed in wartime France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and how these played out in post-war scenarios of re-use and memorialization. Using three case studies of major camps in western Europe, Natzweiler-Struthof, Neuengamme, and Vught, the book traces the contested developments of these camp sites in the changing political climates of the post-war years, and explores the interrelated dynamics and trajectories of local and national memory.
| Author | : Noah Lederman |
| Publisher | : Rowman & Littlefield |
| Total Pages | : 257 |
| Release | : 2017-02-07 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1442267445 |
This poignant memoir by Noah Lederman, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, transports readers from his grandparents’ kitchen table in Brooklyn to World War II Poland. In the 1950s, Noah’s grandparents raised their children on Holocaust stories. But because tales of rebellion and death camps gave his father and aunt constant nightmares, in Noah’s adolescence Grandma would only recount the PG version. Noah, however, craved the uncensored truth and always felt one right question away from their pasts. But when Poppy died at the end of the millennium, it seemed the Holocaust stories died with him. In the years that followed, without the love of her life by her side, Grandma could do little more than mourn. After college, Noah, a travel writer, roamed the world for fifteen months with just one rule: avoid Poland. A few missteps in Europe, however, landed him in his grandparents’ country. When he returned home, he cautiously told Grandma about his time in Warsaw, fearing that the past would bring up memories too painful for her to relive. But, instead, remembering the Holocaust unexpectedly rejuvenated her, ending five years of mourning her husband. Together, they explored the memories—of Auschwitz and a half-dozen other camps, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the displaced persons camps—that his grandmother had buried for decades. And the woman he had playfully mocked as a child became his hero. I was left with the stories—the ones that had been hidden, the ones that offered catharsis, the ones that gave me a second hero, the ones that resurrected a family, the ones that survived even death. Their shared journey profoundly illuminates the transformative power of never forgetting.
| Author | : Geoffrey P. Megargee |
| Publisher | : Indiana University Press |
| Total Pages | : 0 |
| Release | : 2012-05-04 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9780253355997 |
This volume offers a comprehensive account of how the Nazis conducted the Holocaust throughout the scattered towns and villages of Poland and the Soviet Union. It covers more than 1,150 sites, including both open and closed ghettos. Regional essays outline the patterns of ghettoization in 19 German administrative regions. Each entry discusses key events in the history of the ghetto; living and working conditions; activities of the Jewish Councils; Jewish responses to persecution; demographic changes; and details of the ghetto's liquidation. Personal testimonies help convey the character of each ghetto, while source citations provide a guide to additional information. Documentation of hundreds of smaller sites—previously unknown or overlooked in the historiography of the Holocaust—make this an indispensable reference work on the destroyed Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.
| Author | : Nikolaus Wachsmann |
| Publisher | : Macmillan + ORM |
| Total Pages | : 637 |
| Release | : 2015-04-14 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1429943726 |
The first comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration camps In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945. The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called "the gray zone." In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system. Examining, close up, life and death inside the camps, and adopting a wider lens to show how the camp system was shaped by changing political, legal, social, economic, and military forces, Wachsmann produces a unified picture of the Nazi regime and its camps that we have never seen before. A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the history of the twentieth century.
| Author | : Marc Buggeln |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 350 |
| Release | : 2014 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0198707975 |
Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps examines the slave labor carried out by concentration camp prisoners from 1942 and the effect this had on the German wartime economy. This work goes far beyond the sociohistorical 'reconstructions' that dominate Holocaust studies - it combines cultural history with structural history, drawing relationships between social structures and individual actions. It also considers the statements of both perpetrators and victims, and takes the biographical approach as the only possible way to confront the destruction of the individual in the camps after the fact. The first chapter presents a comparative analysis of slave labor across the different concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. The subsequent chapters analyse the similarities and differences between various subcamps where prisoners were utilised for the wartime economy, based on the example of the 86 subcamps of Neuengamme concentration camp, which were scattered across northern Germany. The most significant difference between conditions at the various subcamps was that in some, hardly any prisoners died, while in others, almost half of them did. This work carries out a systematic comparison of the subcamp system, a kind of study which does not exist for any other camp system. This is of great significance, because by the end of the war most concentration camps had placed over 80 percent of their prisoners in subcamps. This work therefore offers a comparative framework that is highly useful for further examinations of National Socialist concentration camps, and may also be of benefit to comparative studies of other camp systems, such as Stalin's gulags.
| Author | : Victoria Barnett |
| Publisher | : Praeger |
| Total Pages | : 216 |
| Release | : 1999-06-30 |
| Genre | : Art |
| ISBN | : |
A systematic study of bystanders during the Holoaust which analyzes why individuals, institutions and the international community remained passive while millions died. The work illustrates the terrible consequences of indifference and passivity towards the persecution of others.
| Author | : Kim Wünschmann |
| Publisher | : Harvard University Press |
| Total Pages | : 376 |
| Release | : 2015-03-16 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0674967593 |
Nazis began detaining Jews in camps as soon as they came to power in 1933. Kim Wünschmann reveals the origin of these extralegal detention sites, the harsh treatment Jews received there, and the message the camps sent to Germans: that Jews were enemies of the state, dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence.
