Download or read book From Schmelt Camp to Little Auschwitz written by Susanne Barth and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Schmelt Camp to “Little Auschwitz”: Blechhammer’s Role in the Holocaust is the first in-depth study of the second largest Auschwitz subcamp, Blechhammer (Blachownia Śląska), and its lesser known yet significant prehistory as a so-called Schmelt camp, a forced labor camp for Jews operating outside the concentration camp system. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents and a wide array of survivor testimonies, the book provides novel findings on Blechhammer’s role in the Holocaust in Eastern Upper Silesia, a formerly Polish territory annexed to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939, where 120,000 Jews lived. Established in the spring of 1942 to construct a synthetic fuel plant, the camp’s abhorrent living conditions led to the death of thousands of young Jews conscripted from the ghettos or taken off deportation convoys from Western Europe. Blechhammer was not only used for selecting parts of the Jewish ghetto population for Auschwitz, but also for killing pregnant women and babies. As an Auschwitz satellite, Blechhammer became the scene of brutal executions and massacres of prisoners refusing to go on the Death March. This microhistory unearths the far-reaching complicity of often overlooked perpetrators, such as the industrialists, factory guards, policemen, and “ordinary” civilians in these atrocities, but more importantly, it focuses on the victims, reconstructing the prisoners’ daily life and suffering, as well as their survival strategies.
Download or read book A Small Town Near Auschwitz written by Mary Fulbrook and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a profile of the principal civilian administrator of Bñedzin, Poland and his role in enforcing Nazi policies towards Jews, along with insights into the conflicting memories of the Holocaust.
Download or read book Sala s Gift written by Ann Kirschner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-11-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Do you know why I write so much? Because as long as you read, we are together." -- Raizel Garncarz (Sala's sister), April 24, 1941 Few family secrets have the power both to transform lives and to fill in crucial gaps in world history. But then, few families have a mother and a daughter quite like Sala and Ann Kirschner. For nearly fifty years, Sala kept a secret: She had survived five years as a slave in seven different Nazi work camps. Living in America after the war, she kept from her children any hint of her epic, inhuman odyssey. She held on to more than 350 letters, photographs, and a diary without ever mentioning them. Only in 1991, on the eve of heart surgery, did she suddenly present them to Ann and offer to answer any questions her daughter wished to ask. It was a life-changing moment for her scholar, writer, and entrepreneur daughter. We know surprisingly little about the vast network of Nazi labor camps, where imprisoned Jews built railroads and highways, churned out munitions and materiel, and otherwise supported the limitless needs of the Nazi war machine. This book gives us an insider's account: Conditions were brutal. Death rates were high. As the war dragged on and the Nazis retreated, inmates were force-marched across hundreds of miles, or packed into cattle cars for grim journeys from one camp to another. When Sala first reported to a camp in Geppersdorf, Poland, at the age of sixteen, she thought it would be for six weeks. Five years later, she was still at a labor camp and only she and two of her sisters remained alive of an extended family of fifty. In the first years of the conflict, Sala was aided by her close friend Ala Gertner, who would later lead an uprising at Auschwitz and be executed just weeks before the liberation of that camp. Sala was also helped by other key friends. Yet above all, she survived thanks to the slender threads of support expressed in the letters of her friends and family. She kept them at great personal risk, and it is astonishing that she was able to receive as many as she did. With their heartwrenching expressions of longing, love, and hope, they offer a testament to the human spirit, an indomitable impulse even in the face of monstrosity. Sala's Gift is a rare book, a gift from Ann to her mother, and a great gift from both women to the world.
Download or read book Before Auschwitz written by Kim Wünschmann and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-16 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research Auschwitz—the largest and most notorious of Hitler’s concentration camps—was founded in 1940, but the Nazis had been detaining Jews in camps ever since they came to power in 1933. Before Auschwitz unearths the little-known origins of the concentration camp system in the years before World War II and reveals the instrumental role of these extralegal detention sites in the development of Nazi policies toward Jews and in plans to create a racially pure Third Reich. Investigating more than a dozen camps, from the infamous Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen to less familiar sites, Kim Wünschmann uncovers a process of terror meant to identify and isolate German Jews in the period from 1933 to 1939. The concentration camp system was essential to a regime then testing the limits of its power and seeking to capture the hearts and minds of the German public. Propagandized by the Nazis as enemies of the state, Jews were often targeted for arbitrary arrest and then routinely subjected to the harshest treatment and most punishing labor assignments in the camps. Some of them were murdered. Over time, shocking accounts of camp life filtered into the German population, sending a message that Jews were different from true Germans: they were portrayed as dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence. Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored archives, Before Auschwitz explains how the concentration camps evolved into a universally recognized symbol of Nazi terror and Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.
Download or read book A World History of War Crimes written by Michael S. Bryant and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatly expanded and enhanced 2nd edition of A World History of War Crimes provides an authoritative and accessible introduction to the global history of war crimes and the laws of war. Tracing human efforts to limit warfare, from codes of war in antiquity designed to maintain a religiously conceived cosmic order to the gradual use in the modern age of the criminal trial as a means of enforcing universal humanitarian norms, Michael S. Bryant's book is a masterful one-volume account of the subject. This new edition includes, for the first time: * Two chapters providing extensive coverage of the Americas, Africa and the Middle East * Strengthened chronological boundaries – a new chapter on the Incas, Aztecs, Mayan, and North American Indian tribes, as well as more material across all regions in ancient times; discussion of contemporary war crimes committed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar and Syria * A historiographical essay to broaden your understanding of the field * An added final chapter focusing on the social, cultural and psychological aspects of the subject A World History of War Crimes is vital reading for anyone needing to understand the history of war in one of its most significant contexts.
Download or read book The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 1945 Volume I written by Geoffrey P. Megargee and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-22 with total page 1701 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: “This valuable resource covers an aspect of the Holocaust rarely addressed and never in such detail.” —Library Journal This is the first volume in a monumental seven-volume encyclopedia, reflecting years of work by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which will describe the universe of camps and ghettos—many thousands more than previously known—that the Nazis and their allies operated, from Norway to North Africa and from France to Russia. For the first time, a single reference work will provide detailed information on each individual site. This first volume covers three groups of camps: the early camps that the Nazis established in the first year of Hitler’s rule, the major SS concentration camps with their constellations of subcamps, and the special camps for Polish and German children and adolescents. Overview essays provide context for each category, while each camp entry provides basic information about the site’s purpose; prisoners; guards; working and living conditions; and key events in the camp’s history. Material from personal testimonies helps convey the character of the site, while source citations provide a path to additional information.
Download or read book Auschwitz written by James Deem and published by Enslow Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yet, my little Diary, I don't want to die, I still want to live... Eva Heyman, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl, wrote these words in her last diary entry in the spring of 1944. Soon after, she was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. During the Holocaust, the Nazis murdered more than one million people at Auschwitz. The largest of all the Nazi camps, Auschwitz was both a death camp and a forced labor camp. Author James M. Deem examines this place of unspeakable horror from the perspective of those who experienced it, from the construction of the camp to its final days.
Download or read book The Greater German Reich and the Jews written by Wolf Gruner and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1935 and 1940, the Nazis incorporated large portions of Europe into the German Reich. The contributors to this volume analyze the evolving anti-Jewish policies in the annexed territories and their impact on the Jewish population, as well as the attitudes and actions of non-Jews, Germans, and indigenous populations. They demonstrate that diverse anti-Jewish policies developed in the different territories, which in turn affected practices in other regions and even influenced Berlin’s decisions. Having these systematic studies together in one volume enables a comparison - based on the most recent research - between anti-Jewish policies in the areas annexed by the Nazi state. The results of this prizewinning book call into question the common assumption that one central plan for persecution extended across Nazi-occupied Europe, shifting the focus onto differing regional German initiatives and illuminating the cooperation of indigenous institutions.
Download or read book Holocaust From the persecution of the Jews to mass murder written by David Cesarani and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Narrow Bridge to Life written by B Gutterman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is why, although the process of genocide was proceeding at top speed, some Jews were diverted from the gas chambers and sent to work at Gross-Rosen. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the main provider of inmate slave laborers for the Gross-Rosen armaments, munitions, and other factories owned by giant private enterprises, such as Krupp, J.G. Farben, and Siemens. Jewish inmates were also used in the construction of Hitler's secret headquarters in the local Eulen Mountains and the secret underground tunnels used to store weapons.
Download or read book The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 1945 Volume II written by Geoffrey P. Megargee and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-04 with total page 2015 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Stands without doubt as the definitive reference guide on this topic in the world today.” —Holocaust and Genocide Studies This volume of the extraordinary encyclopedia from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 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 nineteen 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. “A very detailed analysis and history of the events that took place in the towns, villages, and cities of German-occupied Eastern Europe . . . .A rich source of information.” —Library Journal “Focuses specifically on the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe . . . stands without doubt as the definitive reference guide on this topic in the world today. This is not hyperbole, but simply a recognition of the meticulous collaborative research that went into assembling such a massive collection of information.” —Holocaust and Genocide Studies “No other work provides the same level of detail and supporting material.” —Choice
Download or read book Fate Unknown written by Dan Stone and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-06 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service. Set up by the Allies at the end of World War II, the ITS has worked until today to find missing persons and to aid survivors with restitution claims or to reunite them with loved ones. From retracing the steps of the 'death marches' with the aim of discovering the burial sites of those murdered across the towns and villages of Central Europe, to knocking on doors of German foster homes to find the children of forced labourers, Fate Unknown uncovers the history of this remarkable archive and its more than 30 million documents. Under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the tracing service became one of the most secretive of postwar institutions, unknown even to historians of the period. Delving deeply into the archival material, Stone examines the little-known sub-camps and, after the war, survivors' experience of displaced persons' camps, bringing to life remarkable stories of tracing. Fate Unknown combs the archives to reveal the real horror of the Holocaust by following survivors' horrific journeys through the Nazi camp system and its aftermath. The postwar period was an age of shortage of resources, bitterness, and revenge. Yet the ITS tells a different story: of international collaboration, of commitment to justice, and of helping survivors and their relatives in the context of Cold War suspicion. These stories speak to a remarkable attempt by the ITS, before the Holocaust was a matter of worldwide interest, to carry out a programme of ethical repair and to counteract some of the worst effects of the Nazis' crimes.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust written by Tom Lawson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is the most comprehensive and up-to-date single volume on the history and memory of the Holocaust in Britain. It traces the complex relationship between Britain and the destruction of Europe’s Jews, from societal and political responses to persecution in the 1930s, through formal reactions to war and genocide, to works of representation and remembrance in post-war Britain. Through this process the handbook not only updates existing historiography of Britain and the Holocaust; it also adds new dimensions to our understanding by exploring the constant interface and interplay of history and memory. The chapters bring together internationally renowned academics and talented younger scholars. Collectively, they examine a raft of themes and issues concerning the actions of contemporaries to the Holocaust, and the responses of those who came ‘after’. At a time when the Holocaust-related activity in Britain proceeds apace, the contributors to this handbook highlight the importance of rooting what we know and understand about Britain and the Holocaust in historical actuality. This, the volume suggests, is the only way to respond meaningfully to the challenges posed by the Holocaust and ensure that the memory of it has purpose.
Download or read book KL written by Nikolaus Wachsmann and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Subjectivity in Att r Persian Sufism and European Mysticism written by Claudia Yaghoobi and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adopting an empirical and systematic approach, this interdisciplinary study of medieval Persian Sufi tradition and ʿAttār (1145-1221) opens up a new space of comparison for reading and understanding medieval Persian and European literatures. The book invites us on an intellectual journey that reveals exciting intersections that redefine the hierarchies and terms of comparison. While the primary focus of the book is on reassessing the significance of the concept of transgression and construction of subjectivity within select works of ʿAttār within Persian Sufi tradition, the author also creates a bridge between medieval and modern, literature and theory, and European and Middle Eastern cultures through reading these works alongside one another. Of significance to the author is ʿAttār's treatment of enlightenment with regard to class, religious, gender, and sexuality transgressions. In this book, the relation between transgression and the limit is not viewed as one of liberation from oppressive restrictions, but of undoing the structures that produce constraining binaries; it allows for alternatives and possibilities. In conjunction with the concepts of transgression and the limit, the presence of society's marginalized pariahs, outcasts, and untouchables are central to the book's main argument about construction of subjectivity, which the author believes is framed within ʿAttār's notion of mystical love and human diversity. The book addresses the question of whether concepts such as transgression, limit, and subjectivity are solely applicable to modern times, or they can shed light on our understanding of transgression and subjectivity from the past. The author's comparative inquiries aim to intensify our understanding of these notions advanced in both the medieval and the modern world. Through summoning works from various genres, disciplines, cultures, and times, the author posits that medieval literary works are living texts that can reveal as much about our present selves as they do about the past.
Download or read book By Bread Alone written by Mel Mermelstein and published by Mel Mermelstein. This book was released on 1981 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mermestein's haunting memoir chronicles his Czech family's descent into German concentration camps, his ultimate survival as the only member of his immediate family, and his continuing fight against Holocaust dissenters.
Download or read book The Last Train to the Concentration Camp written by Dirk van Leenan and published by . This book was released on 2018-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While everyone knew that the war would soon be over, Nazi Captain Wuerff is so fanatical that he'll continue his struggle to the bitter end. He is determined to crush the Dutch Resistance and rid The Hague of every last Jew. While his leaders amass tremendous fortunes in looted treasure, and prepare for their escape from Europe, Captain Wuerff remains focused on his deadly mission. Resistance hero Kees van Rijn is resolved to undermine Wuerff's plans. With his friends in the Resistance, he fights to keep hidden Jewish families alive and safe from the camps. During the war, over ten thousand Jews were hidden throughout the Netherlands, thus avoiding the Fuehrer's "Final Solution." While they suffered great hardships, they were at least alive.Kees stays on the run, moving families from one hiding place to another, often right under the noses of the Nazis. But Captain Wuerff has a plan to snare Kees and his comrades, and to round up the Jews in one fell swoop. If he can lure Kees' beautiful wife, Johanna, and his boy, Cornelius, into the trap, so much the better. In the last days of the war, Captain Wuerff plans to earn distinction by filling one last train with Jews for the concentration camps, and he intends for the van Rijn family to join them on this deadly final trip.
