This is a selected bibliography and other resources for
The Holocaust, including prominent
primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
Some of the information relayed in the
Grojanowski Report (from the
extermination center at Chelmno), including an estimate of 700 thousand murdered Jews, was broadcast by the BBC on June 2nd, 1942.[2] Mention of several details from this broadcast were recycled and reported on page 5 of the New York Times near the end of that month on June 27th, 1942.[3]
A
New York Times article reports on the existence and use of the gas-chambers on November 24th, 1942.[4] It significantly understates the scale of the mass-killing ongoing in the camps, though it does quote the number killed that year at 250,000 and suggests by implication that operations were continuous or otherwise had not concluded. The article appears on page 10 of that day's edition of the
New York Times next to an ad for Seagram's Gin much larger than the article itself.[4] This brief mention broadcasts certain basic elements of the
Racynski's note, which was not officially circulated as a brochure under the heading "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland" until several weeks later.[5]
The Bettleheim paper appearing in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology is a unique document, insofar as it was published while the concentration camps and extermination centers were still in operation and consisted of the testimony of a working psychiatric clinician in an attempt to report on the circumstances from the perspective of a survivor of the camps.[6] However "Individual & Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations"(1943) also represents the limitations of the early reports:
Dachau and
Buchenwald (where Bettleheim was imprisoned) were not, technically speaking, extermination centers (the gas-chambers were not used for mass-executions in those camps) and thus does not reflect the experience of prisoners in the death-camps in Eastern Europe but speaks to how the system operated within Germany.
Even reports that record massacres, camps and extermination centers in the East during the war such as
Raczyński's Note; the
Black Book of Polish Jewry (which confines its sample to Poland, and understates, for a variety of reasons, the full scope of ongoing mass-murder);[7][8] the
Black Book of Soviet Jewry (which was compiled and presented for publication during the war but not circulated until after the war); and the
Vrba–Wetzler report (which is contains the testimony of two prisoners escaped from
Auschwitz-Birkenau, published alongside the testimony of the
Jerzy Tabeau, the Polish Major in
Auschwitz Protocols) speak only to limited areas within the system of extermination, do not present a full picture of the killing, and were scarcely made available to the larger public due to an editorial policy that questioned the statistics at the time.[8] The Black Book of Soviet Jewry did not circulate during the war, while the Vrba–Wetzler report (April 1944) saw a limited and circumscribed distribution (though it convinced the regent of Hungary to halt transports in June of 1944, which had until then been proceeding at a rate of 12,000 deportees per day). The Black Book of Polish Jewry and even earlier reports in the Allied press presented details, but these documents significantly understate the scale of the killings – due in part to limited information, and in part to a (retrospectively) misplaced sense of discretion and sensitivity to the prevailing attitude of antisemitism amongst all Western powers, whether Allied or Axis: there was a desire to make the reports speak to an audience unconcerned about the fate of Jews.[9]
Articles such as the report on atrocities in the
May 7th, 1945 issue of Life Magazine (7 May 1945, 31–37) began the process of substantively documenting and revealing aspects of what had happened to the global public whereas before knowledge of the mass-killings and the gas-chambers – though alluded to, for example, in speeches by
Churchill (
24 August 1941 broadcast, re: 'Appeal to Roosevelt') – and reported by rumor or anecdote, remained hazy and fragmentary in public consciousness. Many of the earliest accounts came from individual camps and the documents listed above – most substantially the Nuremberg Trial documents – but these remained obscure apart from high-level (or generally vague) quotation in journalism.[9]
First Histories: Early Attempts at a Comprehensive Presentation
Early major attempts at systematic scholarship or overviews of the whole system and process of Nazi genocide include:
Peukert, Detlev (1994). "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science". In Thomas Childers; Jane Caplan (eds.). Reevaluating the Third Reich. New York: Holmes & Meier. pp. 234–252.
ISBN0-8419-1178-9.
Gradowski, Zalman (1943). From the Heart of Hell: A Diary of Auschwitz. Zalman was murdered in Auschwitz, but his diary survived buried next to a cresmstorium.
Vrba, Rudolf (1964) [1963].
I Cannot Forgive. Grove Press. Also published as: Factory of Death; Escape from Auschwitz: I Cannot Forgive; 44070: The Conspiracy of the Twentieth Century; I Escaped from Auschwitz
Katz, S. T. (1999). Gutman, Y., Arad, Y.,
Margaliot, A. (eds.). Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union. University of Nebraska Press.
ISBN978-0-8032-5937-9.
Mason, Timothy. "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism". In Marrus, Michael R. (ed.). The Nazi Holocaust Part 3, The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder. Vol. 1. Westpoint, CT: Mecler. pp. 3–20.
Niewyk, Donald L. (1992). Holocaust: Problems & Perspective of Interpretation.
Daring to Resist: Three Women Face the Holocaust is a 57-minute documentary from 1999 which tells the stories of three Jewish teenagers who resisted the Nazis:
Faye Schulman, a photographer and partisan fighter in the forests of Poland (now Belarus);
Barbara Rodbell, a ballerina in Amsterdam who delivered underground newspapers and secured food and transportation for Jews in hiding; and
Shulamit Lack, who acquired false papers and a safe house for Jews attempting to escape from Hungary.[10][11][12] The movie was produced and directed by Barbara Attie and Martha Goell Lubell, and narrated by
Janeane Garofalo.[11]
Genocide (1981 film) documents the history of the Holocaust and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Liebe Perla is a 53-minute documentary that documents Nazi Germany's brutality towards disabled people through the exploration of a friendship between two women with
dwarfism:
Hannelore Witkofski of Germany and
Perla Ovitz, who at the time of filming was living in Israel. Perla Ovitz was experimented on by
Joseph Mengele during the Nazi regime. The film was made by
Shahar Rozen in Israel and Germany in 1999, and it is in German and Hebrew with English subtitles.[13][14]
Paragraph 175 is an 81-minute documentary directed by
Rob Epstein and
Jeffrey Friedman that discusses the plight of gays and lesbians during the Nazi regime using interviews with all of the known gay and lesbian survivors of this era, five gay men and one lesbian.[16][17]
Shoah is a nine-hour documentary completed by
Claude Lanzmann in 1985. The film, unlike most historical documentaries, does not feature reenactments or historical photos; instead it consists of interviews with people who were involved in various ways in the Holocaust, and visits to different places they discuss.
Swimming in Auschwitz is a 2007 documentary which interweaves the stories of six Jewish women who were imprisoned inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. The women all survived and tell their stories in person in the documentary; at the time of its filming they were all living in Los Angeles.[18][19][20]
UK Holocaust Centre Owned and run by the
Aegis Trust, an independent international organisation dedicated to eliminating genocide
Resources > Holocaust. The Jewish History Resource Center, Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Includes the extensive Holocaust Encyclopedia and large collections of maps and photos, one of the most comprehensive sites.
"The Case of Archbishop Stepinac: How the Catholic Clergy Helped Run Ustashe (i.e., Nazi) Croatia"; Published by the Yugoslav Embassy, Washington, DC, 1947; reprinted at
http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/stepinac1.htm
An artistic portrayal of the Holocaust and its significance (Artist: Stan Lebovic) The artwork, developed for Black is a Color, is meant to depict the heroic posture humanity has assumed in this post-Holocaust world, and present it to both humanity and God. For humanity it should serve as a reminder of the worth of their actions, and for God a testament to the worth of God's creations.
The Holocaust Education Development Programme (HEDP). The Holocaust Education Development Programme (HEDP) is run by the Institute of Education (IOE), University of London and jointly funded by the Pears Foundation and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) with support from the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET). Its overarching aim is to help teachers teach about the Holocaust in effective and thought-provoking ways.
'You Have a Mother' (Jan. 2015), describing Holocaust survivor Lola Mozes' experiences as a child in Nazi camps. By
Chris Hedges in Truthdig.The GhettoArchived 2016-06-13 at the
Wayback Machine (June 2016), Hedges interviews Lola Mozes as she recounts her experience living in Nazi-occupied Poland, three-part video interview, The Real News
Writing as Resistance (July 2015), describing the writings of inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto who buried their accounts of the ghetto (in the hope it would be unearthed later) as German forces were liquidating the Jewish population of the ghetto. By
Chris Hedges in Truthdig
A Liberator, But Never Free (May 2015). "A US Army doctor helped free the Dachau concentration camp in 1945, meticulously documenting his experiences in letters home to his wife. Hidden for the remainder of his life, the letters have resurfaced, and with them, questions about the G.I.'s we know only as heroes." The New Republic
Máximo, João Carlos (2015), "Não Há Aves em Sobibor", Chiado Editora.
ISBN978-989-51-2276-9.
^
abFleming, Michael (2014). Auschwitz, the Allies and censorship of the Holocaust. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 190–194.
ISBN978-1-107-06279-5.
^
abLeff, Laurel (2006). Buried by the Times: the Holocaust and America's most important newspaper. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN978-0-521-60782-7.
This is a selected bibliography and other resources for
The Holocaust, including prominent
primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
Some of the information relayed in the
Grojanowski Report (from the
extermination center at Chelmno), including an estimate of 700 thousand murdered Jews, was broadcast by the BBC on June 2nd, 1942.[2] Mention of several details from this broadcast were recycled and reported on page 5 of the New York Times near the end of that month on June 27th, 1942.[3]
A
New York Times article reports on the existence and use of the gas-chambers on November 24th, 1942.[4] It significantly understates the scale of the mass-killing ongoing in the camps, though it does quote the number killed that year at 250,000 and suggests by implication that operations were continuous or otherwise had not concluded. The article appears on page 10 of that day's edition of the
New York Times next to an ad for Seagram's Gin much larger than the article itself.[4] This brief mention broadcasts certain basic elements of the
Racynski's note, which was not officially circulated as a brochure under the heading "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland" until several weeks later.[5]
The Bettleheim paper appearing in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology is a unique document, insofar as it was published while the concentration camps and extermination centers were still in operation and consisted of the testimony of a working psychiatric clinician in an attempt to report on the circumstances from the perspective of a survivor of the camps.[6] However "Individual & Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations"(1943) also represents the limitations of the early reports:
Dachau and
Buchenwald (where Bettleheim was imprisoned) were not, technically speaking, extermination centers (the gas-chambers were not used for mass-executions in those camps) and thus does not reflect the experience of prisoners in the death-camps in Eastern Europe but speaks to how the system operated within Germany.
Even reports that record massacres, camps and extermination centers in the East during the war such as
Raczyński's Note; the
Black Book of Polish Jewry (which confines its sample to Poland, and understates, for a variety of reasons, the full scope of ongoing mass-murder);[7][8] the
Black Book of Soviet Jewry (which was compiled and presented for publication during the war but not circulated until after the war); and the
Vrba–Wetzler report (which is contains the testimony of two prisoners escaped from
Auschwitz-Birkenau, published alongside the testimony of the
Jerzy Tabeau, the Polish Major in
Auschwitz Protocols) speak only to limited areas within the system of extermination, do not present a full picture of the killing, and were scarcely made available to the larger public due to an editorial policy that questioned the statistics at the time.[8] The Black Book of Soviet Jewry did not circulate during the war, while the Vrba–Wetzler report (April 1944) saw a limited and circumscribed distribution (though it convinced the regent of Hungary to halt transports in June of 1944, which had until then been proceeding at a rate of 12,000 deportees per day). The Black Book of Polish Jewry and even earlier reports in the Allied press presented details, but these documents significantly understate the scale of the killings – due in part to limited information, and in part to a (retrospectively) misplaced sense of discretion and sensitivity to the prevailing attitude of antisemitism amongst all Western powers, whether Allied or Axis: there was a desire to make the reports speak to an audience unconcerned about the fate of Jews.[9]
Articles such as the report on atrocities in the
May 7th, 1945 issue of Life Magazine (7 May 1945, 31–37) began the process of substantively documenting and revealing aspects of what had happened to the global public whereas before knowledge of the mass-killings and the gas-chambers – though alluded to, for example, in speeches by
Churchill (
24 August 1941 broadcast, re: 'Appeal to Roosevelt') – and reported by rumor or anecdote, remained hazy and fragmentary in public consciousness. Many of the earliest accounts came from individual camps and the documents listed above – most substantially the Nuremberg Trial documents – but these remained obscure apart from high-level (or generally vague) quotation in journalism.[9]
First Histories: Early Attempts at a Comprehensive Presentation
Early major attempts at systematic scholarship or overviews of the whole system and process of Nazi genocide include:
Peukert, Detlev (1994). "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science". In Thomas Childers; Jane Caplan (eds.). Reevaluating the Third Reich. New York: Holmes & Meier. pp. 234–252.
ISBN0-8419-1178-9.
Gradowski, Zalman (1943). From the Heart of Hell: A Diary of Auschwitz. Zalman was murdered in Auschwitz, but his diary survived buried next to a cresmstorium.
Vrba, Rudolf (1964) [1963].
I Cannot Forgive. Grove Press. Also published as: Factory of Death; Escape from Auschwitz: I Cannot Forgive; 44070: The Conspiracy of the Twentieth Century; I Escaped from Auschwitz
Katz, S. T. (1999). Gutman, Y., Arad, Y.,
Margaliot, A. (eds.). Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union. University of Nebraska Press.
ISBN978-0-8032-5937-9.
Mason, Timothy. "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism". In Marrus, Michael R. (ed.). The Nazi Holocaust Part 3, The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder. Vol. 1. Westpoint, CT: Mecler. pp. 3–20.
Niewyk, Donald L. (1992). Holocaust: Problems & Perspective of Interpretation.
Daring to Resist: Three Women Face the Holocaust is a 57-minute documentary from 1999 which tells the stories of three Jewish teenagers who resisted the Nazis:
Faye Schulman, a photographer and partisan fighter in the forests of Poland (now Belarus);
Barbara Rodbell, a ballerina in Amsterdam who delivered underground newspapers and secured food and transportation for Jews in hiding; and
Shulamit Lack, who acquired false papers and a safe house for Jews attempting to escape from Hungary.[10][11][12] The movie was produced and directed by Barbara Attie and Martha Goell Lubell, and narrated by
Janeane Garofalo.[11]
Genocide (1981 film) documents the history of the Holocaust and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Liebe Perla is a 53-minute documentary that documents Nazi Germany's brutality towards disabled people through the exploration of a friendship between two women with
dwarfism:
Hannelore Witkofski of Germany and
Perla Ovitz, who at the time of filming was living in Israel. Perla Ovitz was experimented on by
Joseph Mengele during the Nazi regime. The film was made by
Shahar Rozen in Israel and Germany in 1999, and it is in German and Hebrew with English subtitles.[13][14]
Paragraph 175 is an 81-minute documentary directed by
Rob Epstein and
Jeffrey Friedman that discusses the plight of gays and lesbians during the Nazi regime using interviews with all of the known gay and lesbian survivors of this era, five gay men and one lesbian.[16][17]
Shoah is a nine-hour documentary completed by
Claude Lanzmann in 1985. The film, unlike most historical documentaries, does not feature reenactments or historical photos; instead it consists of interviews with people who were involved in various ways in the Holocaust, and visits to different places they discuss.
Swimming in Auschwitz is a 2007 documentary which interweaves the stories of six Jewish women who were imprisoned inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. The women all survived and tell their stories in person in the documentary; at the time of its filming they were all living in Los Angeles.[18][19][20]
UK Holocaust Centre Owned and run by the
Aegis Trust, an independent international organisation dedicated to eliminating genocide
Resources > Holocaust. The Jewish History Resource Center, Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Includes the extensive Holocaust Encyclopedia and large collections of maps and photos, one of the most comprehensive sites.
"The Case of Archbishop Stepinac: How the Catholic Clergy Helped Run Ustashe (i.e., Nazi) Croatia"; Published by the Yugoslav Embassy, Washington, DC, 1947; reprinted at
http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/stepinac1.htm
An artistic portrayal of the Holocaust and its significance (Artist: Stan Lebovic) The artwork, developed for Black is a Color, is meant to depict the heroic posture humanity has assumed in this post-Holocaust world, and present it to both humanity and God. For humanity it should serve as a reminder of the worth of their actions, and for God a testament to the worth of God's creations.
The Holocaust Education Development Programme (HEDP). The Holocaust Education Development Programme (HEDP) is run by the Institute of Education (IOE), University of London and jointly funded by the Pears Foundation and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) with support from the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET). Its overarching aim is to help teachers teach about the Holocaust in effective and thought-provoking ways.
'You Have a Mother' (Jan. 2015), describing Holocaust survivor Lola Mozes' experiences as a child in Nazi camps. By
Chris Hedges in Truthdig.The GhettoArchived 2016-06-13 at the
Wayback Machine (June 2016), Hedges interviews Lola Mozes as she recounts her experience living in Nazi-occupied Poland, three-part video interview, The Real News
Writing as Resistance (July 2015), describing the writings of inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto who buried their accounts of the ghetto (in the hope it would be unearthed later) as German forces were liquidating the Jewish population of the ghetto. By
Chris Hedges in Truthdig
A Liberator, But Never Free (May 2015). "A US Army doctor helped free the Dachau concentration camp in 1945, meticulously documenting his experiences in letters home to his wife. Hidden for the remainder of his life, the letters have resurfaced, and with them, questions about the G.I.'s we know only as heroes." The New Republic
Máximo, João Carlos (2015), "Não Há Aves em Sobibor", Chiado Editora.
ISBN978-989-51-2276-9.
^
abFleming, Michael (2014). Auschwitz, the Allies and censorship of the Holocaust. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 190–194.
ISBN978-1-107-06279-5.
^
abLeff, Laurel (2006). Buried by the Times: the Holocaust and America's most important newspaper. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN978-0-521-60782-7.