Remembering the Holocaust

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold

In recognition of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we would like to present a list of new and recent Holocaust and Genocide Studies titles, as well as free access to related journal articles.

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The 75th anniversary of the founding of the East German film studio DEFA

Elizabeth Ward

On 17 May 1946, the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) was officially founded. Over the course of the following four decades, the studio produced nearly 700 feature films, as well as hundred of animation and documentary films. By the time it was finally privatised and sold following German reunification, DEFA was one of Europe’s largest film studios.

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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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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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