Tag: Genocide History

Do Petitions matter? Rethinking Jewish Petitioning during the Holocaust

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan and Wolf Gruner

Raul Hilberg’s path-breaking 1961 study The Destruction of the European Jews rightfully remains on the reading list of any serious student of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Hilberg’s insistence on European Jews‘ alleged “almost complete lack of resistance” has been subjected to frequent scholarly criticism. He partially based this claim on a cursory reading of petitions: “Everywhere, the Jews pitted words against rifles” and “everywhere they lost.”

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June is Gypsy, Roma, Traveller History Month

Pictured: The French Holocaust survivor Raymond Gurême (1925-2020), an outstanding personality of the Sinti and Roma civil rights movement in Europe.

Gypsy, Roma, Traveller History Month recognizes the history and celebrates the cultures, traditions, and contributions of Gypsy, Roma and Traveler communities. See a growing list of digital #GRTHM2020 activities here.

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Voices on War and Genocide

Omer Bartov, Brown University

Now available in print and eBook, VOICES OF WAR AND GENOCIDE “assembles three extraordinarily rich personal accounts covering different periods and aspects of the history of the Galician town and region of Buczacz. Such narratives are extremely rare; even rarer are ones that are as informative and illuminating as these three” (Thomas Kühne, Clark University). Learn more here.

This book is derived from research I carried out for my recent monograph, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018). In the course of looking for documents in scores of archives and libraries, as well as  seeking personal accounts that would help me reconstruct the “biography” of a small town in eastern Europe, I found three remarkable diaries about events in Buczacz during the two world wars. While the monograph I was writing attempted to capture the individual voices of the town’s residents as a way of understanding how a community of interethnic coexistence was transformed into a site of communal genocide, it was not possible to bring to light the different protagonists’ personal stories as told from their own perspective. This is precisely what Voices on War and Genocide offers. 

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Viktor Frankl: 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz

TIMOTHY E. PYTELL

The recent United Nations General Assembly declaration that the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – January 27 – be designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day reflects the reality that the Holocaust has become a touchstone in global memory. Given the magnitude of the “unprecendented” destruction, this is not surprising. However, the conflation of the Holocaust with Auschwitz also distorts our understanding. For example, although Auschwitz is the culmination of the Holocaust, by the time the gas chambers came onto line at Auschwitz in April of 1943 three quarters of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were already dead. The vast majority of the Soviet and Polish Jews were killed east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line and often by bullets. In Timothy Snyder’s words “Auschwitz is the coda to the death fugue.” (Snyder Bloodlands p. 383).

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HAPPY BASTILLE DAY

Eiffel Tower, Fireworks, Paris, Monument, Architecture
Celebrated on July, 14, Bastille Day is the French national day and one of the most important bank holidays in France. The day commemorates the beginning of the French Revolution with the storming of the Bastille on the 14th July 1789, a medieval fortress and prison which was a symbol of tyrannical Bourbon authority and had held many political dissidents, and symbolizes the end of absolute monarchy and the birth of sovereign Nation.
In recognition of the 230th anniversary, Berghahn Journals would like to offer FULL ACCESS to French Politics, Culture & Society* until July 28!
To access, use the code BastilleDay19. View redemption instructions.

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Victory Day to commemorate the end of WWII

Victory Day celebrated through Europe on 8 May 1945 to mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces marketing the end of World War II in Europe. Victory Day in Russia, as well as some former Soviet Union republics, is celebrated on May 9 as Germany’s surrender was signed late in the evening on May 8, 1945 when it was already May 9 in Russia. For most European nations, and especially for the Russian people, that war had a profound impact on national memory and its trauma is still very much alive.
In recognition of the day Berghahn is pleased to offer a selection of our WWII History books and relevant Berghahn Journals special issues (access to journals until May 16).
Please note that this year Berghahn Books turns 25 and to mark this important milestone, we are offering 25% off all print and eBooks throughout the site. For print titles, please add the coupon code BB25. For eBooks, the discount is automatic.

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In Paperback

EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY
The Second World War in Europe
Edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens

Volume 7, Contemporary European History

CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC BOOK OF THE YEAR 2011

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