The Holocaust History Podcast
The Holocaust History Podcast features engaging conversations with a diverse group of guests on all elements of the Holocaust. Whether you are new to the topic or come with prior knowledge, you will learn something new.
Episodes
78 episodes
Ep. 77- The Clemency and Paroling of Nazi War Criminals with Robert Hutchinson
The Nuremberg trials, though not perfect, represented in many ways an epic achievement in justice for crimes against humanity. However, a darker and lesser-known element of the trials is what happened to the convicted Nazis after ward.
Ep. 76- The Janowska camp with Waitman Wade Beorn and special guest host Doris Bergen
The Janowska concentration camp may well be the most important Holocaust place most people have never heard of. It was central to the Holocaust in eastern Poland, was the scene of unspeakable cruelty, but also witnessed a successful armed...
Ep. 75- Guilt and the Postwar Lives of Nazi Perpetrators with Katherina von Kellenbach
How did Nazi war criminals engage with (or deny) their giult? How was the prosecution and conviction of Nazi perpetrators dealt with in families? What was the role of religion and faith assuaging guilt?These are some fo the f...
Ep. 74- The Global History of Concentration Camps witih Andrea Pitzer
What is a concentration camp? What are the distinguishing features of these spaces? Where did they come from?In this episode, I talk with Andrea Pitzer about the long, global history of the concentration camp and its evolutio...
Ep. 73- Babi Yar History and Memory with Victoria Khiterer
It was the largest open shooting of the Holocaust (and perhaps in history). Yet the murder in Babi Yar of 33,000+ Jews and other victims remained for much of its postwar life, unmarked and uncommemorated, at least officially.
Ep. 72- Empathy, Witnessing, and the Challenge of the Holocaust with Carolyn Dean
How do we approach witnessing the Holocaust? Are there appropriate or inappropriate ways to do this? Does witnessing make us more empathetic or more indifferent? These are just some of the questions we addressed in this episode with Carol...
Ep. 71- Queering the Holocaust with Anna Hájková
An important part of researching the Holocaust is recovering the stories of the diverse group of victims of the Nazi genocidal project. For a very long time, queer victims have been marginalized or overlooked in this process.In thi...
Ep. 70- Women in the Holocaust with Elissa Bemporad
How did women experience the Holocaust differently from men? What do we learn from considering a gender perspective when we look at the past? How did gender play a role in survival and oppression? For a long t...
Ep. 69- Wehrmacht Chaplains and the Holocaust with Doris Bergen
How could one be a man of God in Nazi Germany? And, especially, how can one minister to the Wehrmacht, itself an instrument of the Nazi state while professing to adhere to Christian morality? These are the questions that Doris Berge...
EP. 68- Babi Yar: History, Memory, and Literature with Shay Pilnik
The mass shooting of Jews at Babi Yar in Kiev in September 1941 was the largest open-air shooting of Jews during the Holocaust. In some ways, it came to stand for the Einsatzgruppen killings taking place across the occupied Soviet Union.&...
Ep. 67- Nuremberg Trials with Jack El-Hai
The Nuremberg Trials were the first attempt at coming to terms with Nazi criminality. While there was a legal component to this, there was also a psychological element. What made Nazi minds tick? In this episode, ...
Ep. 66- Feelings about Perpetrators in Yiddish Diaries with Amy Shapiro Simon
We often make the mistake of thinking that history is all about what happened and why. However, its also very much about how people felt about what was happening to them.In this episode, I talked with Amy Shapiro SImon about her wo...
Ep. 65- A Nazi doctor and Post-war Justice with Andrew Wisely
Despite some popular perception, Holocaust perpetrators are rarely cartoonish pure evil characters. In fact, many of them understood their guilt and actively sought to weave false narratives to exonerate themselves or avoid prosecution.
Ep. 64- The Birdman of Auschwitz with Nicholas Milton
Sometimes it can still be surprising how deeply the Nazi state tainted every aspect of society...including ornithology. In this fascinating episode, I talk with Nicholas Milton about Günther Niethammer, a famous academic who became a guar...
Ep. 63- Yiddish and the Holocaust with Hannah Pollin-Galay
The Nazis’ physical war on Jews also had important cultural repercussions. One of these was its assault on Yiddish. The Holocaust not only murdered many Yiddish speakers and destroyed Yiddish institutions, but it also changed the la...
Ep. 62- Dehumanization and Genocide with David Livingstone Smith
We often hear the term “dehumanization” used in a variety of contexts. For example, dehumanization a set of beliefs, or a set of behaviors? Is it metaphorical or do people actually believe their victims are less than human?In this ...
Ep. 61- Writing about Holocaust Perpetrators with Erin McGlothlin
How do we write about Holocaust perpetrators? What does that tell us about not only the historical figures themselves but also the ways in which we approach, describe, and analyze them.In this week’s episode, I talk with Erin McGlo...
Ep. 60- Perpetrators of Mass Violence with Alette Smeulers
What makes someone a perpetrator? Are killers born or made? One thing that is clear in studying the Holocaust and other genocides is that perpetrators come in all shapes and sizes with just as diverse a set of motivations.On ...
Ep. 59- The Auschwitz Sonderkommando with Dominic Williams
Arguably, one of the worst places for prisoners to work during the Holocaust was the Sonderkommando—the group of prisoners forced to work in and around the gas chambers, disposing of corpses. Yet they also managed to cre...
Ep. 58- Evolution of Genocide with Benjamin Meiches
The concept of genocide is one of the few ideas created from scratch in the 20th century. As a result, it can be incredibly complicated to interpret, both legally and historically. Indeed, the definition itself has often made it dif...
Ep. 57- Magnus Hirschfeld, the trans community, and the Nazis with Brandy Schillace
When the Nazis carried out their infanous and well-documented book burning on the Opernplatz in May 1933, the literal fuel for that fire came from Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, an institution that both studied and provid...
Ep. 56- The Holocaust in Bulgaria with Nadége Ragaru
The story of Bulgaria and the Holocaust is often a narrative about how Bulgaria protected its Jews from the Nazis. But is this really case? Certainly not in the case of Thrace and Macedonia. In this episode, I talked with Nade...
Ep. 55- Holocaust Photographs with Hilary Earl and Valerie Hébert
In December 1941, an SS man took a series of 12 photographs of an Einsatzgruppen killing in Latvia. The negatives were stolen by a survivor who had copies made and retrieved them after the war.In today’s episode, w...
Ep. 54- Early Violence against Jews in 1933 with Hermann Beck
When did the Holocaust start? How soon after Hitler took power did anti-Jewish violence begin? These are some of the important questions we explore in this episode as I talk with Hermann Beck and the surge in antisemitic violence in...
Ep. 53- Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Holocaust with Michael S. Bryand and John J. Michalczyk
Among the books that many people talk about but few have read, certainly Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is one. But it IS a difficult read. How do we interpret this book? How significant is it? And what does it tell ...