History Commons^™

The Holocaust's Legacy: Influencing Jewish Political Identity, Jordan Eskew

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis addresses the intricate relationship between the historical persecution of the Holocaust and its enduring influence on contemporary Jewish political engagement, a subject of significant contemporary relevance in political and international relations. Despite broad recognition of the Holocaust’s impact, the specific ways in which its memory affects Jewish political attitudes and actions around the world in the modern day have not been sufficiently thoroughly examined. Utilizing qualitative methods, including interviews with 20 individuals—public figures, Holocaust survivors, their descendants, and broader members of the Jewish diaspora— this study focuses on understanding the interplay between historical trauma, community cohesion, and the …

Facing Catholic Antisemitism In Post-War France, The Finaly Affair: 1945-1953, Elizabeth Jane Spaide

Theses and Dissertations

In February 1944, Dr. Fritz and Anni Finaly, Jewish Austrians who had fled the Nazi regime for France in 1939, made a desperate decision. To protect their sons Robert and Gérald from persecution, they placed them in the care of others. The boys were eventually confined to a municipal nursery run by Antoinette Brun in Grenoble, France. After the war, Brun’s refusal to return the children to their relatives led to protracted court proceedings, rendering what came to be called the Finaly Affair, the most highly publicized post-war custody case in France. This thesis will analyze how the press coverage …

Sites Of Incarceration And Forced Labour Under The Nazi Regime And Its Allies, 1933-1945, Maja Kruse, Anne Kelly Knowles

History Faculty Scholarship

This map was commissioned by the United Nations Education Outreach Section to be part of a refreshed permanent Holocaust exhibition at UN headquarters in New York City. The contents of the map draw on years of research by Anne Kelly Knowles, Maja Kruse, and other members of the Holocaust Project research team at the University of Maine, Duke University, Washington University at St. Louis, and Middlebury College. This research was supported chiefly by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, with additional support from team members' institutions. No territorial boundaries are shown because they changed many times from 1938 …

Hogan's Heroes: Fact Or Fiction?, Mark Granicke

Undergraduate Research Symposium

When it first debuted in 1965, Hogan’s Heroes was not met with the fondness it later garnered. Set in Stalag 13, a fictional German Luftwaffe (Air Force) prisoner of war (POW) camp during World War II (WWII), the show follows the American POW Colonel Robert E. Hogan and his band of compatriots as they run a secret sabotage operation within the camp under the nose of the inept camp commandant Colonel Wilhelm Klink. Hilarity ensues as Hogan and crew outwit the Germans, portrayed as bumbling idiots, in all sorts of missions, from smuggling prisoners, stealing plans, blowing up trains, and …

Dogma: How A Convenient Narrative Led To The Holocaust, Morgan R. Schroeder

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

No abstract provided.

Sonic Salvation: A Neuroscientific Exploration Of Music's Role In Cultural Preservation In The Wake Of The Holocaust, Regan K. Recklaus

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

As easy as it would be to begin this essay with a succinct “music is” statement (e.g. “music is life” or “music is power”), it would be akin to encapsulating the boundless expanse of the cosmos in a single photograph. It would fail to honor the immeasurable richness and complexity of the force which has transformed humanity from a group of disparate apes into a symphony of interconnected souls. For all of history, music has served as a means for humans to tap into and express the very things that make them human—their emotions, culture, and individual identities. Its profound …

"Killin' Nazis": How Jews Are Portrayed In Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, Skylar Baxter

Undergraduate Research Symposium

In Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, Jews are portrayed as violent, revenge-seeking Nazi hunters. This portrayal creates an ironic conflict within Tarantino's audience because Jews are seen as capable of the same atrocities of which they were victims. Under Hannah Arendt's definition of Nazis, the actions of the Jews in Inglorious Basterds are not equivalent to the crimes that Nazis committed. Jewish revenge fantasies are thereby not the same as the actual violence that Jews received from Nazis.

Unraveling The Truth: The Wannsee Conference And Holocaust Denial, Howie Parkes

Undergraduate Research Symposium

The Wannsee Conference, held in January 1942, marked a crucial turning point in the Holocaust, as it signified the Nazi regime's decision to systematically exterminate Europe's Jewish population on an industrial scale. This poster presentation examines the role of the Wannsee Conference in Holocaust denial narratives and the portrayal of the conference in the critically acclaimed film, Conspiracy (2001). I discuss how Holocaust deniers use the Wannsee Conference to argue against the existence of a plan to exterminate Jews or to suggest that the conference never took place. Through an analysis of the conference transcript, I demonstrate its significance in …

Review Of The Book Denial Of Genocides In The Twenty-First Century, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Denial of Genocides in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Bedross Der Matossian.

Lee, Sherry Coman

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Lee (2023) directed by Ellen Kuras.

Blood Cries Out From The Ground: The Einsatzgruppen And The Holocaust In Ukraine, Lauren R. Letizia

Student Publications

After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht occupied much of the western Soviet regions. The Third Reich deployed special killing squads known as the Einsatzgruppen to protect its military and ideological interests. These units were responsible for murdering over two million Jews from 1941 to 1944, primarily through mass shootings. Ukraine was one of the most afflicted countries by this “Holocaust by Bullets.” Because of the efficient genocidal techniques of Einsatzgruppen units operating in the region, one in four Jews who perished in the Holocaust was Ukrainian. The scale on which these killings …

Raising The Iron Curtain: Healing Collective Oppression Through Literature, Alisa Chirkova-Holland

Student Works

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by former gulag prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is a short novel that entails an ordinary day for a prisoner, Shukhov, in a Siberian gulag. Although the work is a typical skaz, a traditional Russian narrative form, the novel was well-received by Russians at the time of publishing in 1962. This paper will explore the reason for such acclamation, understanding how Solzhenitsyn’s innovations to the skaz allowed readers to connect with their past. The paper also mentions theories such as Traumatic Realism to comprehend how such a bleak novel positively impacted post-Stalinist readers. …

The Nazis, The Vatican, And The Jews Of Rome, Patrick J. Gallo

Purdue University Press Books

On October 16, 1943, the Jews of Rome were targeted for arrest and deportation. The Nazis, the Vatican, and the Jews of Rome examines why—and more importantly how—it could have been avoided, featuring new evidence and insight into the Vatican’s involvement. At the time, Rome was within reach of the Allies, but the overwhelming force of the Wehrmacht, Gestapo, and SS in Rome precluded direct confrontation. Moral condemnations would not have worked, nor would direct confrontation by the Italians, Jewish leadership, or even the Vatican.

Gallo underscores the necessity of determining what courses of actions most likely would have spared …

Wikipedia’S Intentional Distortion Of The History Of The Holocaust, Jan Grabowski, Shira Klein

History Faculty Articles and Research

This essay uncovers the systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history on the English-language Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia. In the last decade, a group of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed version of history on Wikipedia, one touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, which whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews. Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles (Żydokomuna or Judeo–Bolshevism), blame …

Soviet Commemoration And Myth-Making Of The Nazi Extermination Camps: Case Studies On Treblinka, Sobibór, And Majdanek, Isaac Bluestein

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The Nazi extermination camps of Treblinka, Sobibór, and Majdanek, all located in Eastern Europe, are understudied, underdiscussed, and undermemorialized in public and scholarly memory. In this paper, I seek to conduct case studies of these three camps, their histories, and their commemoration efforts. Ultimately, four main factors prevented these camps from achieving the solemn recognizability they deserve and from having their victims’ stories adequately told; little remains of these camps compared to concentration camps in Germany, fewer individuals survived them to emphasize their importance, the Soviet Union possessed near complete control of their study and commemoration, which allowed for them …

The History Of Teaching The Holocaust In Public Secondary Schools In The United States, From The 1960s To The Present, Julia Highbury Spenser

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

A Summer Of Mass Murder: 1941 Rehearsal For The Hungarian Holocaust, George Eisen

Purdue University Press Books

Most accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by bullets.

The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty thousand Hungarian Jews were forcefully deported to Galicia and summarily executed. In exploring the fate …

Critique Beyond Judgment: Exploring Testimony And Truth In The Classroom, Sean Sidky

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This essay offers a set of strategies for utilizing the words of survivors and of witnesses to genocide in the classroom. Including the voices of survivors and victims in our classroom conversations about genocide, its impact, representation, and the possibilities for its prevention is crucial to an ethical and wholistic pedagogy of genocide. Discussion of these events in the classroom often finds us confronting questions from students about truth, historical accuracy, authenticity, and authority. Addressing such questions requires careful framing that takes into account student assumptions and cultural discourses about memory and witnessing, as we work with students to develop …

Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities Of Space, Time, And Memory In Twentieth-Century War And Genocide, Volker Benkert, Michael Mayer

Purdue University Press Books

Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities of Space, Time, and Memory in Twentieth-Century War and Genocide investigates interconnections between space and violence throughout the twentieth century, and how such connections informed collective memory. The interdisciplinary volume shows how entangled notions of time and space amplified by memory narratives led to continuities of violence across different conflicts creating “terrortimes” and “terrorscapes” in their wake. The volume examines such continuities of violence with the help of an analytical framework built around different themes. Its first part, spatial and temporal continuities of violence, looks at contested spaces and ideas of national, ethnic, or religious homogeneity that …

Bibliography For Charlotte Salomon Display, Ruby Blakesleay

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography created to accompany a display about Charlotte Salomon in September 2022 at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University. This display was created in partnership with the Sala and Aron Samueli Holocaust Memorial Library and the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education.

“I Held On At Any Price”: Victim Self-Preservation In The Sonderkommando In Auschwitz And Treblinka, Jessica Christina Foster

All Theses

Many Holocaust victims have expressed uneasiness or even shame regarding the actions they took to stay alive in the death camps. These acts of self-preservation were usually humiliating and often came at the expense of their fellow victims. This comes out most clearly in the testimonies of the members of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz and Treblinka. Writers such as Filip Müller, Zalmen Gradowski, and Richard Glazar recount how they survived the lethal environment of the camp by appropriating the food, clothing, and valuables of the people murdered in the gas chambers. Although most scholars have interpreted these testimonies, and the …

Kalmar Family Diaries (2021.01), Robyn Conroy, Lamisa Muksitu, Tara O'Donnell

Strassler Center Archival Collection Finding Aids

Karl Kalmar (September 17, 1871 (Vienna, Austria) – December 26, 1942 (Theresienstadt)) and Margarethe Kalmar (Pollak) (December 5, 1881 (Vienna, Austria) – After May 16, 1944 (KZ Auschwitz)). They had two sons Paul Kalmar (May 31, 1908 (Vienna, Austria) – August 3, 1977 (Scotland, UK)) and George Otto Kalmar (November 16, 1913 (Vienna, Austria) – November 12, 1994 (Copake, NY)).

George Kalmar studied painting at the Kunstgewerbschule (now University of Applied Arts) in Vienna. He married Vera Rosa Kalmar (Raschkes) (August 24, 1914 (Vienna, Austria) – August 24, 1988 (Acton, Middlesex County, Massachusetts)), a fellow artist, on July 10, 1938. …

The Allies And The Holocaust, Mark Granicke

Undergraduate Research Symposium

During World War II, Nazi Germany carried out one of the most atrocious crimes in human history, the Holocaust. This systematic extermination of approximately 6 million Jews, along with other groups between 1941-1945, has become a focal point of modern human history. It is difficult to grasp the sheer magnitude of the undertaking by the Nazis. One question often asked is why the Allies did not do more to prevent this massacre. Were they simply ignorant of the entire event during the war? Knowing today the sheer magnitude of the Holocaust, it is difficult to believe knowledge of it would …

Life Is Beautiful, Or Not: The Myth Of The Good Italian, Shira Klein

History Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Life is Beautiful illustrates a popular misconception about Italy's role in the Holocaust. The film features the good Italian and the warped view that Italy treated Jews kindly in the late 1930s and during World War II. Historians have proven this claim to be grossly exaggerated, arguing that Italians persecuted Jews vigorously. Yet popular representations of the past-films, novels, museum exhibits, and websites-continue to give credence to the notion that Italians were overwhelmingly good to Jews. Although France and Germany cultivated similar self-acquitting myths in the decades immediately after the war, they eventually moved on to accept the more …

Clash Of Totalitarian Titans: Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, And The Racial And Ideological War Of Annihilation On The Eastern Front, John M. Zak

Student Publications

The eastern front in the Second World War was one of unparalleled ferocity and brutality unseen on any other front during civilization’s largest and most destructive war. This work contends that in order to understand how the eastern front was such can only be understood through the lens of Nazi ideology and its long-terms goals for Lebensraum and the Greater Germany it sought to secure. The role of Nazi racial ideology and its belief in the inherent racial inferiority of the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, along with totalitarian ideology viewing Soviet Communism as Nazism’s chief …

The Stars Kept Shining: The Wartime Diary Of Esther Mathilda Sørensen, Larisa C. Neilson

Senior Honors Theses

In fulfillment of the Liberty University Honors Department Thesis requirement, the following is a creative thesis in the form of an historical fiction novella diary, written in the first person. The story follows the life of Esther, a young Danish woman, as she navigates what it means to be a Jew in World War II era Europe. Though the characters are fictional, the story presents possible real-life experiences for a person living during this time.

The style of this novella is popular among middle and high school teachers and can be an important teaching tool as it is an engaging …

Review Of Bear And Fred: A World War Ii Story By Iris Argaman, Katie E. Gosman

Library Intern Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

The Compromise Of Return: Viennese Jews After The Holocaust, By Elizabeth Anthony., Matthew P. Berg

2021 Faculty Bibliography

No abstract provided.

The Last Prisoners Of War: How Nazi-Looted Art Is Displayed In U.S. Museums, Monica May Thompson

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

How art museums approach NLA is important today because much of the public relies on museums for their education. NLA cases are especially controversial because they are not only legal battles, but ethical ones so museums have to be extra careful approaching them. Even if the museum has won the legal battle the public may not see them as winning the ethical one therefore they might want to avoid displaying this information to the public. However, as we can see with the previous websites, it actually looks worse for museums not to be open and honest about their NLA pieces …

Gender, Age, And Survival Of Italian Jews In The Holocaust, Susan Welch

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Political scientists have examined the role of gender in genocide but have largely ignored the Holocaust in these analyses. Yet, the Holocaust is the largest genocide in human history and there is much we do not know about how gender affected individual experiences. Nor do we have a very precise understanding of the impact of age in survival, beyond the common wisdom that old and young people usually did not survive. Here we examine in more detail the impact of gender and age and their intersection among the nearly 7,000 Italian Jews deported to the east, mostly to Poland and …