Send us a text 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. The story of Franz Lucas is one such narrative. In this episode, I talk with Andrew Wisely about Lucas, an SS doctor at multiple concentration camps. We discuss his complicity in the Holocaust as well as his attempts to ...

Send us a text 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 guard at Auschwitz where he continued his scholarly activities. It's a really interesting examination of both individual choices during the Holocaust and the impossibility of remaining divorced from the reality of Nazi crimes. Nicholas Milt...

Send us a text 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 language itself. In this episode, I talk with Hannah Pollin-Galay about fascinating work on Yiddish during the Holocaust. We talked about the new words added as well as the attempts by Jewish linguists (and survivors) to capture and u...

Send us a text 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 episode, I talk with David Livingstone Smith about his fascinating, challenging, and insightful work on dehumanization, particularly in the context of the Holocaust. This is an episode that will definitely make you think. David Liv...

Send us a text 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 McGlothlin about how writers have dealt with perpetrators in both fiction and non-fiction and also about the ways in which fiction narratives influence how we tell non-fiction stories. Erin McGlothlin is Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Holoc...

Send us a text 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 today’s episode, I talked with Alette Smeulers about her work in studying perpetrators from a variety of perspectives across many different forms of mass violence. Alette Smeulers is a professor in the faculty of law at the University of...

Send us a text 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 create a number of texts that survived the Holocaust even if they did not. In this episode, I talk with Dominic Williams about the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, its place in the Holocaust, and the documents it left behind. Dominic Williams is an assist...

Send us a text 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 difficult to prosecute. In this episode, I talk with Benjamin Meiches about the evolution of the concept genocide, the role of the Holocaust in its creation, and the challenges the debate over definitions raise today. Benjamin Meiches...

Send us a text 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 provided treatment for LGBTQ Germans. In this episode, I talked with Brandy Schillace about Hirschfeld, the struggle for gay rights in Weimar Germany, and the Nazi assault on the gay community as well as the connections between this homophobia ...

Send us a text 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 Nadege Ragaru about the history of the complex Holocaust in Bulgaria and its attempts to come to terms with this past. Nadège Ragaru is a research professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po Paris. Ragaru, Nadége....

Send us a text 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, we explore what we can learn about the Holocaust from these photographs and, indeed, from photographs in general. I talk with Hillary Earl and Valerie Hébert who have written in depth about these images. Hilary Earl is a professor of history at N...

Send us a text 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 the wake of the Nazi rise to power in 1933. In his pathbreaking book, Hermann Beck has documented an explosion of serious violence including murders in the immediate wake of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933. &nbs...

Send us a text 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 us about the Holocaust? These are some of the questions we tackled in this episode with the editors of a new volume on the subject. In this episode, I talked with Michael S. Bryant and John J. Michalcayk about this important book and how to ...

Send us a text Many Nazis including Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and Klaus Barbie escaped Europe and fled to South America in an attempt to evade prosecution for their crimes. We know quite a bit about their lives and crimes during the Holocaust but much less about the network of people that supported them in their new lives in South America. I spoke with Betina Anton about her work researching the people who helped Josef Mengele and her personal connection to this case....

Send us a text Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, led a terrible and fascinating life, from Nazi torturer to advisor to brutal South American dictatorships. However, unlike many, he was eventually brought to justice for his crimes. In this episode, I talk with Richard J. Golsan about the sensational trial of Klaus Barbie and its effect on the memory of the Holocaust in France. Richard J. Golsan is University Distinguished Professor and Director of the French Institute at T...

Send us a text 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 computational methods can expand our understanding of the past often by showing us new questions that we hadn’t considered before. In this episode, I talk with Todd Presner about his fascinating and impressive work with the “big data” of rec...

Send us a text 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 about it? In this episode, I talked with Noah Shenker about how three different archives approached gathering testimony but also about what this means for our understanding of the Holocaust and the ways that survivors remember and ...

Send us a text 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 elsewhere. A large number of these Holocaust perpetrators arrived in Australia where they not only remained unrepentant but established new fascist networks. In this episode, I talk with Jayne Persian about these fascists in ex...

Send us a text 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 with their family history. I am very grateful to be joined on this week’s podcast by Kai Hoess, grandson of Rudolf Hoess, to talk about his family history and his own journey to coming to terms with his past. As always, this podcast does no...

Send us a text 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 were willing collaborators in the use of slave labor and, ultimately, in the construction of the apparatuses of genocide. In this episode, I talk with architecture and Holocaust historian Paul Jaskot about all these facets of archi...