Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons^™

Sanctuary And Disappointment: Jewish German Refugees In The United States Army In World War Ii, Zachary P. Watts

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This paper examines the experiences of German-Jewish refugees who became intelligence soldiers in the United States Army. They are frequently called the Ritchie Boys, for their training in Camp Ritchie, Maryland. The paper focuses mostly on a single Ritchie Boy named Frank Adler, who came to the United States as a teenager from Austria in 1938 and ended up returning to his hometown as a soldier. The Ritchie History museum holds a large collection of Adler’s letters which form the most important source for this project. I have found a duality of experience from German and Austrian Jews in the …

The Queer Holocaust, Jensen B. Stoneking

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

Everyone knows that in Weimar Germany, Adolf Hitler's main target was the Jewish population, however, there were other oppressed groups who faced his wrath as well. Queer folks during this time also faced mass persecution from the Third Reich, and this essay is a focus on their struggles.

The Ravine Of Memory: Babyn Yar Between The Holocaust And The Great Patriotic War, Shay A. Pilnik

Purdue University Press Books

The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory starts when the travesty ends, telling the story of the ravine’s memory and forgetting in Soviet literature and culture—in Russian as well as in Yiddish. This book challenges the prevailing binary conceptions of Babyn Yar as exclusively a Holocaust or a “Great Patriotic War” story. It is neither the exclusive product of Soviet censorship nor individual dissidents. Babyn Yar is …

The Anatomy Of Resistance: Jewish Life, Struggle, And Revolt In The Vilna And Warsaw Ghettos, Theodore A. Evison

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland, marking the start of WWII. In the following months, the Nazis established an inconceivable array of ghettos meant to concentrate the Jewish population and facilitate their deportation to killing centers across continental Europe. Of the over 1,000 ghettos set up throughout Nazi-occupied territory, this paper focuses on two, Vilna and Warsaw. Despite the hellish conditions imposed on the Jews in the Vilna and Warsaw ghettos—conditions rivaled only by the killing centers that awaited most of their inhabitants—an important phenomenon took form: the Jews of the ghettos resisted. How, it must be contended, …

Constraints On Art During The Nazi Era And The Shift To Modern Art After World War Ii, Aria Spencer

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Due to the severe anti-Semitic beliefs expressed by the Nazi Regime both during and before World War II, the production of art was censored to fit the governments ideal perception of the regime. This caused forms of modern art and expressionism to be deemed dirty or unfit for Germans. The Nazis associated modern art with Judaism and destroyed both the art and the artists. Once the Nazis were removed from power, there was a surge in the creation of modern art. World War II and the defeat of the Nazis prompted a large expressionistic art movement throughout Germany. Through the …

Nazi-Confiscated Art: Eliminating Legal Barriers To Returning Stolen Treasures, Stephanie J. Beach

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

World War II ended over three-quarters of a century ago, but there still remain prisoners of war. Before and during the war, the Nazis confiscated approximately 650,000 works of art—an “art theft” orchestrated by Adolf Hitler to rid society of Jewish art and artists and to collect worthy works to build his own art capital. Seventy-five years later, looted Holocaust-era artworks are still either undiscovered or in the possession of museums across the globe without proper ownership attribution or payment to Holocaust survivors or their heirs. There are modern remedies, such as the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, …

Survivor’S Guilt And The Ethics Of Remembering In Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave And Cynthia Ozick’S “The Shawl”, Ryne Menhennick

All NMU Master's Theses

The focus of this thesis is an analysis of post-Holocaust Jewish-American literature with a specific emphasis on texts set in Europe. In particular, I examine how Jewish-American authors who lived in the United States during the Holocaust address issues of trauma and survivor’s guilt through fiction. Informed especially by Theodor Adorno and Elie Wiesel, I examine the ethics of fictionalizing the Holocaust. Furthermore, this thesis considers both trauma theory and the psychology of grief to investigate the ways in which the Jewish-American community at large responded to the cultural destruction perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Chapter One analyzes …

The Problem Of Jewish Agency In The Holocaust: 1939-1945, Joseph Knapik

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

This paper discusses the nuance of Jewish agency during the Holocaust. It argues that full genocide was thwarted by individual efforts which can illustrate a picture of collective defiance. Utilizing Berger’s definition of agency as, “the capacity to exert control and even to transform to some extent ‘the social relations in which one is enmeshed.’” Focusing attention to after 1939 in ghettos and camps, it investigates period sources such as ghetto witness accounts, orders, and diary entries. It allows for a comprehensive depiction of Jewish agency as neither entirely heroic or lachrymose, as painted by popular depiction.

New Perspectives On Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, The Nazi Pogrom In Global Comparison, Wolf Gruner, Steven J. Ross

Purdue University Press Book Previews

On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed an unprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out of the country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinary Germans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) and ransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops, and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes …

Eva And Otto: Resistance, Refugees, And Love In The Time Of Hitler, Tom Pfister, Kathy Pfister, Peter Pfister

Purdue University Press Books

Eva and Otto is a true story about German opposition and resistance to Hitler as revealed through the early lives of Eva Lewinski Pfister (1910–1991) and Otto Pfister (1900–1985). It is an intimate and epic account of two Germans—Eva born Jewish, Otto born Catholic—who worked with a little-known German political group that resisted and fought against Hitler in Germany before 1933 and then in exile in Paris before the German invasion of France in May 1940. After their improbable escapes from separate internment and imprisonment in Europe, Eva obtained refuge in America in October 1940 where she worked to rescue …