How can the digital humanities address and explore the Holocaust? In these days of Chat GPT, we may be rightly wary about the use of computers to analyze the past.  However, today’s episode shows how an ethical approach to using computatio...

Many of us have seen or listened to recorded Holocaust survivor testimony.  But have we thought about HOW that testimony was created?  And what role that process of eliciting testimony might play in the kinds of things survivors talk ...

Among the flood of displaced persons that washed across Germany after WWII were a large number of perpetrators, particularly from Eastern Europe.  They mostly passed unnoticed (and unbothered) by occupation authorities to start new lives e...

What is it like to have a Nazi in the family?  What if that Nazi was Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz? One of the least studied areas of Holocaust history is the ways in which the families and descendants of former Nazis engage wi...

Architecture (and architects) played a critical role in not just the Third Reich, but also the Holocaust.  Nazi architects helped embody the Nazi worldview in their monumental work but also in the designs of concentration camps.  They...

How did Jews in Germany resist the Nazis? What were the choices that they made to stand up against the regime where its authoritarian power was greatest?  In this episode, I talk with Wolf Gruner about his research on this topic and...

The Holocaust in Poland left hundreds of towns and villages that had previously had large Jewish populations empty.  However, important Jewish sites like synagogues and cemeteries remained.   Polish communities were...

Ultimately, the story of the Holocaust is one centered in places:  where something happened, where someone was from, where someone wanted to go.  In this episode, I talked with two scholars about the role of geography in the Holocaust...

How does one talk with a Holocaust survivor about their experiences?  What is the role of survivor testimony in understanding the Holocaust?  In this episode, I talk with psychologist, Holocaust scholar, and playwright Hank Greenspan ...

The Nazis first targeted mentally and physically disabled Germans for mass killing, before they targeted Jews.  However, discrimination and ableist thought predated the Nazis and followed them into the postwar era.In this ep...

In this episode, I talked with Jacob Flaws about the spaces of Treblinka.  His work analyses this extermination camp from a spatial perspective, focusing on the physical and ideological boundaries of the camp.  His work shows that the...

Philosopher Theodore W. Adorno famously said that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  Here he gives an example of the way that many thinkers and philosophers struggled with the post-Holocaust world.  In this episode, I tal...

At least 2 million Jews were murdered by mass shooting in the Soviet Union.  The perpetrators responsible for most of these killings were the men of the Einsatzgruppen.  In this week’s episode, I talk with Jürgen Mathäus about the his...

What was the relationship between Christianity?  Could one be both a Nazi and a Christian?  What was the relationship between religious antisemitism and other forms of Jew hatred?  On today’s episode, I talked with Richard Steigm...

What is it like to visit a Nazi extermination camp or even a Holocaust site in general?  Last year, I was fortunate enough to travel to Poland with three friends to a number of camps and Holocaust-related sites and museums.  I thought...

The wife of Nazi camp commandant Karl Koch, Ilse, became a lasting symbol of the evil and depravity of the Nazi state.  She was accused of a variety of crimes and underwent three trials, including one by the Nazis themselves.  However...

Historian Timothy Snyder wrote that, between 1941 and 1944, Belarus was the deadliest place on earth.  And he was right.  The population there, both Jewish and non-Jewish suffered under the full weight of the Nazi genocidal project fr...

The Bełżec extermination camp was the first of the so-called Operation Reinhard camps to open.  In some ways, it provided the model for the other Reinhard camps of Sobibor and Treblinka.  In this episode, Chris Webb provides a detaile...

In 1985, the nine-hour film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann hit theaters.  This powerful production featured survivor testimony as well as secretly filmed interviews with Nazi perpetrators.  It’s length and the way it was sho...

When the Einsatzgruppen began reporting that they were murdering Jews, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park intercepted and decoded the messages.  Throughout the Holocaust, these men and women deciphered the reports of the SS and do...

The first victims were not Jews per se, but Germans.  That is to say, that the Nazis first murdered mentally and physically handicapped Germans that they considered to be unworthy of living.  In so doing, they drew on the long history...

The topic of resistance during the Holocaust is always a controversial one. What is resistance?  What did it take to stand up to the Nazis when the vast majority of Germans did not.In this episode, I talk with historian Mark Roseman...

In addition  to the massive loss of life, the twelve years of Nazi rule in Europe created one of the largest demographic disasters in human history with millions of people scattered across the continent.  For Holocaust survivors, one ...

The behavior of the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII is one of the most hotly debated controversies in the history of the Holocaust.  And for a long time much of the evidence about that has been locked away in the Vatican Archives.  ...

Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, has achieved an almost mythical status as a supervillain.  Yet this stereotype obscures the history of a man who was, in many ways, a product of both pre-war racial pseudoscience and the Naz...