The Holocaust History Podcast

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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 shot challenges our understanding of what a Holocaust film is.  Is it a documentary film or something else? How has it impacted both our understanding of the event as well as the ways in which others have made films and movies about the Holocaust?  In this discussion with Dominic Williams, we dive into all these questions and more!

 
Dominic Williams is an assistant professor of history at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK.

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas Chare. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Testimonies, Histories, Representations (2019)

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas Chare. Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz (2016)

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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 documented the crimes of the Nazi state.

On this episode, I talk with journalist and researcher Christian Jennings about the Holocaust Code and what we can learn about the Holocaust from decoded Nazi transmissions.

Christian Jennings is a British author and foreign correspondent, and the author of ten non-fiction books of modern history and current affairs. THis latest book is The Holocaust Codes: Decrypting the Final Solution. He has lectured for Bletchley Park on German codebreaking, and from 1994-2012 he spent fifteen years reporting for newspapers and TV on international current affairs and complex war crimes investigations, including genocide and its aftermath, across twenty-three countries in the Western Balkans and Africa.

Jennings, Christian. The Holocaust Codes: The Untold Story of Decrypting the Final Solution (2024)

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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 of the eugenics movement. 

In this episode, I talked with Marius Turda about the role eugenics played in the Nazi state, its connections to the larger global eugenics movement, and the echoes of this history today.

Marius Turda is a professor and historian of eugenics and the Holocaust as well as the director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University.

Turda, Marius. Modernism and Eugenics (2010)

Turda, Marius. Eugenics and Nation in Early 20th Century Hungary (2014)

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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 about a remarkable group of socialists in Nazi Germany who made the difficult choice to stand up in ways both big and small.  We also talk about nature of resistance and what makes a resister or rescuer.

Mark Roseman is a distinguished professor of history and the Pat M Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University.

Roseman, Mark. Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany (2020)

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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 of the most pressing tasks after liberation was attempting to discover the fates of relatives and friends.  A variety of international organizations worked to help these people,  This also resulted in one of the most interesting archives: the archives of the International Tracing Service.

In this episode, I talk with Dan Stone about the search for the missing, the challenges of documenting the Holocaust, the secretive political history of the search for survivors.

 Dan Stone is a professor and director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway University in London.

Stone, Dan.  Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (2023)

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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.  Now, historians are finally able to access these documents.

In this episode, I talk with one of those who has access to those Vatican archives, David Kertzer, about the response of the Catholic Church to the rise of the Nazis and to the Holocaust.  

 
David Kertzer is a Pulitzer-prize-winning author and professor of social science at Brown University/

Kertzer, David, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (2022)

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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 Nazi state.

I am joined in this episode by David Marwell an historian who remarkably also worked with the US government to track down Dr. Mengele after the war.  We talk about Mengele’s origins, what made him who he was, and the hunt for him after the end of World War II.

David Marwell is an historian and the former director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.  As former Chief of Investigative Research for the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations, helped to hunt down Nazi war criminals.

Marwell, David. Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death" (2021)

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Was the Holocaust a unique event or did it have its roots in earlier historical events?  How do we put earlier colonial genocides in context and conversation with the Holocaust?  On this episode, we talk about the connections between the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia and its occupation of eastern Europe.

 On this episode I talked with Jürgen Zimmerer about this topic.  We also looked at the role that the colonial genocides play in German popular memory as well as the fierce current debate over German official apologies and reparations.

 
Jürgen Zimmerer is a Professor of History at the University of Hamburg.

Zimmerer, Jürgen. From Windhoek to Auschwitz?: Reflections on the colonial-Nationalsocialist nexus (2023)

 Zimmerer, Jürgen. German Rule, African Subjects: State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in Colonial Namibia (2022)

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 The story of Countess Janina (Mehlberg) Suchodolska is something that would be rejected by Hollywood as too far-fetched, but it is a true story.  Janina was a Jewish Pole hiding in plain sight as a Polish noblewoman who then went on to rescue prisoners from one of the deadliest concentration camps.

In this episode, I talk with historians Joanna Sliwa and Barry White about their incredible new book about Janina Mehlberg.  We talk about her incredible story, but also what it means for our understanding of rescue and Polish-Jewish relations.

Joanna Sliwa is an historian and Administrator of the Saul Kagan Fellowship for Advanced Shoah Studies and of the University Partnership Program in Holocaust Studies at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Elizabeth White is an historian who has worked as an historian in the US State Department’s Office of Special Investigations tracking down Nazi war criminals and also at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Sliwa, Joann and Elizabeth White. The Counterfeit Countes: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust(2024)

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The second largest Nazi victim group after the Jews was Soviet POWs.  The experience of these people has been documented in part by the latest volume of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos.

In this week’s episode, I talked with Dallas Michelbacher, one of the researchers on this project and a scholar of the Nazi genocide of Soviet POWs.

Dallas Michelbacher is an applied researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

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How did Holocaust perpetrators feel about what they did and how were they able to keep doing it?  The question of perpetrator motivation has been one that scholars of the Holocaust have been interested in from the beginning.

But what about the phenomenon of perpetrators who seem to have been disgusted by what they were engaged in?  What does this signify? Is it some deep moral objection or something else.

In this episode, I talked with Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic about her truly thought-provoking work on interpretating these expressions of disgust.

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic is a philosopher and teaching associate professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

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                  Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) is a haunting film focused on the domestic life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family.  The family lived in a villa directly next to the Auschwitz I camp.  

                  In this podcast, I talk with film scholar and screenwriter Barry Langford about the history of Holocaust film as well as The Zone of Interest.  We cover a lot of ground from technical choices to the nature of the so-called “banality of evil.”

                  The Zone of Interest is available for free on Amazon Prime UK and for purchase on Amazon US.

Barry Langford is a professor of film studies at Royal Holloway University.  He is also an award-winning professional screenwriter.

Langford, Barry and R. Eaglestone (eds). Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (2007)

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The story of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust is an incredibly complex and difficult one.  On the one hand, Poles and Jews both suffered horribly under the Nazis.  On the other, however, the general climate in Poland was inhospitable to Jews and many Poles took advantage of the Nazi occupation to victimize their Jewish neighbors for a variety of reasons.

In this episode, I talked with Jan Grabowski about the history of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust.  We talked about the role of the Blue Police in hunting down and killing the Jews and we also talked about the polarizing memory battles and weaponization of this history in Poland today.

Jan Grabowski is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa.  He is a renowned scholar of the Holocaust and author of several important books on the topic.

Grabowski, Jan. On Duty - The Polish Blue & Criminal Police in the Holocaust (2024)Grabowski, Jan. Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland (2022)Grabowski, Jan. Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland(2013)

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Somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 Jews, Roma, and ethnic Serbs were murdered in the Jasenovac concentration camp in what is now Croatian.  This camp was run by Croatians without Nazi involvement.  Yet few outside of the Balkans have heard of it.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Stipe Odak about the incredibly complex history of the camp as well as the Holocaust in region.  We also delve into the difficult memory politics of the camp and its use during the 1990s Balkan genocides.

Stipe Odak is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and, as of September 2024, an assistant professor in the field of applied ethics at the same university. He received his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from UC Louvain (Belgium) and a doctorate in Theology from KU Leuven (Belgium).

Odak, Stipe and Andriana Kuznar, Danijeila Lucic, eds. Jasenovac Concentration Camp: An Unfinished Past (2023)

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The Treblinka extermination center was responsible for the murder of approximately 925,000 Jews during the Holocaust.  It was the deadliest killing site after Auschwitz.  Yet few people know that it was also the scene of a successful uprising and mass escape by the prisoners there.

In this conversation with Chad Gibbs, we talked about the history of the camp as well as the work he has done in recreating the vital social networks among prisoners that enabled the prisoner revolt.

Chad Gibbs is an Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies and the Director of Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston.  His forthcoming book deals with the history of the prisoner uprising at Treblinka.

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From the earliest days of the Third Reich through the end of the war, there were organized efforts to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis.  Perhaps as many as 10,000 were rescued in this way, but without their parents.  They ended up in a variety of countries and had diverse set of experiences.  

In addition, the story of the Kindertransport has worked its way into the cultural memory of the Holocaust, particularly in the United Kingdom.  In this episode, I spoke with Amy Williams about the incredibly complex history of these operations and the ways in which they have been commemorated.

Dr. Amy Willams is currently a fellow at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School, New York. For the past two years she was the module leader of the undergraduate module “Holocaust and Genocide” at Nottingham Trent University. Her new co-authored book with Prof. Bill Niven “Memory of the Kindertransport in National and Transnational Memories: Exhibitions, Memorials, and Commemorations” has recently been published by Camden House. She is working on her next co-authored book with Bill for Yale University Press on the transnational history of the Kindertransport, due to be published in 2026. Her third book for Mitteldeutscher Verlag entitled “Kindertransport: Eine Spurensuche” or “In Search of the Kindertransport” is a testimony book based on 150 interviews.

Williams, Amy and William Niven. National and Transnational Memories of the Kindertransport: Exhibitions, Memorials, and Commemorations (2023)

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General Dwight Eisenhower’s visit to the Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945 fundamentally changed his outlook on the war and on his enemy, the Nazis.  It also changed the way he carried out his duties later as US Military Governor in charge of both caring for former concentration prisoners as well as dealing with former Nazis, and, later, as President of the United States.

In this conversation with Jason Lantzer, we talk about all of this and more.

You can see some wartime footage of Eisnehower’s visit to Ohrdruf here courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Jason Lantzer is an historian and also Assistant Director of the Honors Program at Butler University.

Lantzer, Jason. Dwight Eisenhower and the Holocaust: A History (2023)

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We talk a lot about learning from the Holocaust and lessons from the Holocaust, but we don’t talk nearly enough about HOW to TEACH the Holocaust.  Understanding how to present this complex and often difficult material to students at a variety of different grade levels (as well as to the public at heritage sites) is a critical task.

In this episode, Dr. Irene Ann Resenly talks about the pedagogy of teaching about the Holocaust, challenges of working with this material in the classroom, and the ways in which heritage sites engage with visitors.

Irene Ann Resenly has worked as a Holocaust educator and scholar for nearly two decades in diverse settings and is currently a middle school social studies teacher in suburban Wisconsin.

Resenly, I. A. (2022). Site Educators in Germany’s Perceptions of Practice: The Sense-Maker and the Storyteller. In Tour Guides at Memorial Sites and Holocaust Museums: Empirical Studies in Europe, Israel, North America and South Africa. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. pp. 33-45.

Schweber, S., & Resenly, I. A. (2018). Curricular Imprints or the Presence of Curricular Pasts: A Study of One Third Grader’s Holocaust Education 12 Years Later. Holocaust Education in Primary Schools in the Twenty-First Century: Current Practices, Potentials and Ways Forward. pp. 3-18.

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Some historians have argued that the experience of Romani people during the Holocaust most closely approximated that of the Jews in terms of policy and execution.  Of course, there were also important differences.  But, Jews and Romani also went through the Holocaust together.  In this, really fascinating discussion, I talked with Ari Joskowicz about the Nazi genocide of Romani, their interactions with Jews, and the difficult challenge of preserving these histories.

Ari Joskowciz is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University.

Joskowicz, Ari.  Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (2023)

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What motivated Nazi perpetrators?  How do we explain the apparent ease with which so many Germans carried out acts of extreme violence?  These are some of the most enduring questions raised by the Holocaust.

And they are questions that scholars still grapple with today.  In this episode, I talked with Prof. Ed Westermann about these questions including issues such as alcohol abuse, sexual violence, and the role of toxic masculinity.  Warning: this does contain some disturbing content.

Ed Westermann a Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M University- San Antonio.

Westermann, Edward. Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (2021) 

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This episode covers a lot of ground with my guests from the Auschwitz Jewish Center, Tomek Kuncewicz and Maciek Zabierowski.  We talk about the history of the Jewish community in Oświęcim, Poland as well as the challenges of educating the Polish non-Jewish community about the Holocaust.  We close with a discussion of the ways in which the Holocaust is used in Polish politics today.

To learn more about the valuable work of the Center, click here!

Tomek Kuncewicz is the director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oświęcim, Poland.

Maciek Zabierowski is head of the education department at Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oświęcim, Poland.

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The Nazis pursued a variety of strategies in their attempts to murder all the Jews of Europe.  One of these was starvation, particularly within ghettos where they could control the flow of food to captive populations.

In this episode, I talk with Professor Helene Sinnreich about the experience of hunger in the Warsaw, Łodz, and Krakow ghettos.  She tells us about the ways in which the Nazis used hunger as a weapon, the effects it had on ghetto populations, and the diverse ways in which different Jewish communities confronted this assault.

Helene J. Sinnreich is a professor and head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennesse-Knoxville.

Sinnreich, Helene J. The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II (2023)

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It’s been over 20 years since the HBO television series Band of Brothers appeared, but it continues to shape the popular understanding and conception of World War II.  The series is full of powerful episodes but one that viewers consistently single out as particularly moving is Episode 9: Why We Fight.  In this episode, the soldier of Easy Company stumble across a Nazi concentration camp.

Ever since I started this podcast, I have wanted to talk with those involved about the choices made in this episode and what it was like to be involved.  I am incredibly grateful to John Orloff who wrote the episode and Ross McCall the actor who played Jewish soldier Joe Liebgott for taking the time to chat with me about this.

For those interested in the camp depicted in the film was Kaufering IV, a subcamp of Dachau.  You can find a short film from the US National WWII Museum on the liberation of Kaufering here.  If you would like to see actual wartime photographs of the camp at liberation, you can find them here from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

John Orloff is a writer and producer.  He wrote two episodes of the Band Of Brothers series.  More recently, he is the creator, writer, and co-executive producer for Masters of the Air.

Ross McCall is an actor. Beyond playing CPL Joseph Liebgott in the Band of Brothers series, Ross has appeared in numerous feature films and television series.

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The Nazi state was built on persecution and multiple groups in addition to Jews were victimized and killed during the Holocaust.  Today’s podcast looks not only at Nazi persecution of gay and transgender people along with Nazi homophobic thought, but also explores the history of LGTBQ communities in Germany before the war.

We also look at the challenges to doing this historical work as well as the recent assaults on Holocaust history by those aiming to use that past to justify current intolerance.

Laurie Marhoefer is a history professor at the University of Washington.

Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (2015)

Marhoefer, Laurie. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love (2022)

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            The story of the Topf brothers is one of the most chilling examples of corporate complicity in the Holocaust.  Topf and Sons was the company who designed, built, and installed the ovens used to burn corpses in the concentration camps.  Far being disinterested bureaucrats, the company’s employees were actively involved in problem-solving and helping the Nazis to destroy the bodies of their victims.

            This really enlightening conversation with author Karen Bartlett lays bare the ways in which Topf engineers knowingly enabled Nazi mass murder.  It exp[lores the complexities of perpetrator choices as well as the ways in which their decendants approach the crimes of their family members.

              You can learn more about Topf & Sons as well at the Topf & Sons Memorial and Museum in Erfurt, Germany.

Karen Bartlett is a writer and journalist and the author of several books on the Holocaust. 

Her book on Topf & Sons is:
Bartlett, Karen.  Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Holocaust (2018)

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            Did you know that a Holocaust survivor who served in the US Army in the Korean War won the Congressional Medal Of Honor?  Did you know that there were thousands of Holocaust survivors who fought the Nazis during WWII or served in the US military afterward?

            Today’s discussion with Mike Rugel looks at the fascinating stories of some of these individuals but also explores issues such as the liberation of concentration camps by Jewish soldiers and the various ways in which Jews fought the Nazis as well as how their experiences in the Holocaust affected their own service.

Mike Rugel is the Director of Programs and Content for the National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington, DC. 

Cohen, Daniel. Single Handed: The Inspiring True Story of Tibor "Teddy" Rubin (2016)

Task and Purpose Article on Ted Rubin

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How do we uncover new evidence about the Holocaust?  In this podcast episode, we look at the fascinating topic of Holocaust archaeology.  Our guest, Professor Caroline Sturdy-Colls has investigated over 50 Holocaust sites including the Treblinka extermination camp where she first identified the location of the gas chamber buildings.

Our conversation ranges from the Soviet Union to the Channel Islands and also touches on issues of ethics, memory, and commemoration.

Professor Caroline Sturdy-Colls is a professor of Conflict Archaeology and Genocide Investigation and director of the Centre of Archaeology at Staffordshire University.

You can find out more about her Finding Treblinka project here.  To learn more about the camps she mentions on Alderney, visit the Occupied Alderney site.

Professor Colls is the author of several books on Holocaust archaeology including:

Sturdy Colls, C. Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions (2015)

Sturdy Colls, C. and Kevin Colls. 'Adolf Island': The Nazi occupation of Alderney (2022)

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            The Nazis murdered at least 167,000 Jews in the small extermination center of Sobibor located today in far-eastern Poland on the border with Ukraine.  In 2020, an album belonging to the Deputy Commandant, Johann Niemann, surfaced and was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by his family.

            This album contains never before seen images of Sobibor and the lives of its SS, but also its prisoners.  Martin Cüppers joins the podcast to talk about the history of the camp and what these photos tell us about its history.

            All of the photographs mentioned in the podcast can be found online here courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Martin Cüppers is Professor of history and director of the Ludwigsburg Research Center at the University of Stuttgart.

He is the co-author along with Ann Leppers and Jürgen Matthäus of From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor- An SS Officer's Photo Collection.

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                  What did the US do to rescue Jews from the clutches of the Nazis?  This week we talk with Rebecca Erbelding about the War Refugee Board and American efforts to help those targeted by the Nazis.

                  In this discussion, we touch on a lot of important topics including American immigration policy as well as what the US government and public knew about the Holocaust and when.  But, most importantly, we talk about the War Refugee Board and the remarkable ways in which it sought to fight for refugees and against the Nazis.]

Rebecca Erbelding is an historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  She can be found on Twitter @rerbelding and on BlueSky at @rerbelding.bsky.social.

Her award-winning book is Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe.

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How do you write the history of something that never happened?  What were the chances of Nazis creating a Fourth Reich?  And what do our fears of a Nazi resurgence tell us about the past and present.

In this wide-ranging conversation with Gavriel Rosenfeld, we talk about the history of the Fourth Reich, both as a rhetorical device but also as a very real political reality that former Nazis tried to engineer.  We also discuss the challenges postwar Germany faced in coming to terms with the very real Third Reich.  We also look at the uses and abuses of the Nazi past in the context of the rise of the modern political far-right.

Gavriel Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University.  He can be found on Twitter @gavrieldrosenfe

His book is The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present.

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Approximately 220,000 Romanian Jews died during the Holocaust, but their story is much less well-known.  In this conversation with Grant Harward, we talk about the history of the Holocaust in Romania.  He leads us through a really informative survey of both the history of Romania and the impact it had on the later unfolding of Romania’s attack on Jews in the region.

We look at the history of antisemitism and the rise of fascism there as well as the ways in which Romanian authorities Jews under their control.  The discussion also turns to comparisons between the Nazi and Romanian approaches to anti-Jewish policy.  

Grant Harward is an historian at the US Army Medical Center of History and Heritage.  He can be found on Twitter @GHarward.

His new book is Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust 

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In his latest book, Omer Bartov notes that “Indicating where the line between truth and fiction lies is difficult, if not impossible, because in certain cases there may be more truth in fiction that in the mere retelling of facts.” 

In this our first episode of the podcast, we take a look at what happens when an historian turns to writing fiction about the past.  This was a really great conversation with Omer Bartov about his new book, the Butterfly and the Axe which is a fictionalized account of two families seeking the truth about their Holocaust past in Ukraine.

It was great to talk about memory and the complexity of historical truth as well as how one combines personal histories with scholarly ones.

We end our discussion by thinking a bit about how the Holocaust is being used and abused in the context of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  It’s a really thoughtful conversation that I think is fascinating.

Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.  He can be found on Twitter @bartov_omer.

His most recent book discussed here is: The Butterfly and the Axe 

You should also check out: Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz 

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at [email protected]

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Send us a text

Welcome to the podcast!

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at [email protected]

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.