New Books in Genocide Studies

Kim WünschmannView on AmazonIn Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press 2015), Kim Wünschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern European History and a Member of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, tells the relatively unknown story of the Nazi pre-war concentration camps.  From 1933 to 1939, these sites of terror isolated, ostracized, and excluded Jews from German society. Drawing on a range of unexplored archives, Wünschmann explores the evolution and systematization of the concentration camp system.

Nicholas StargardtView on AmazonIn all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it's easy to lose track of some basic questions.  What did Germans think they were fighting for?  Why did they support the war?  How did they (whether the they were soldiers fighting in France or Russia, women working to support the war effort, or mothers or fathers worrying about their children) experience the war? Nicholas Stargardt's new book The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 (Basic Books, 2015) sets out to answer these questions.  The book is a delight. Stargardt approaches his subject with a depth of feeling and of insight that all historians aspire to.  His analysis is careful, measured and nuanced, shedding new light on a variety of important questions.  But the book's strength lies in the way it immerses itself into the lives of ordinary Germans.  Stargardt's retelling of their stories is compassionate and empathetic.  It is the nature of the lives of his subjects that many of his stories end suddenly rather than happily.  Wisely, he allows us to mourn with his subjects, yet reminds us to remember the crimes many committed.  It's a terribly difficult balance to strike, and it's to  his credit that he does so consistently.

Today's podcast marks the beginning of what I hope might become a regular feature on the podcast. The session was recorded live on the campus of Bryant University at the end of weekend conference with the title Genocide in World History, sponsored by the New England region of the World History Association. I'm hoping that occasional reports from conferences will help shed light on new research and new directions in the field.  They will of necessity be a bit rawer than ordinary interviews. But I think the benefits far outweigh occasional blemishes. The conference at Bryant stressed the need to see genocide through the lens of the discipline of world history.  Individual panels tended to focus on specific cases.  But several papers took an explicitly comparative perspective.  And the capstone session looked carefully at what it might mean to study genocide from the perspective of a world historian. The podcast features four participants from the conference:  Jonathan Bush, Jon Cox, Tommy O'Connell and Michael Bryant. I hope you find their contributions interesting.

Adam RosenblattView on AmazonDo dead bodies have human rights? This is one of many fascinating questions Adam Rosenblatt asks in his compelling new book Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity (Stanford University Press, 2015) Rosenblatt, a faculty member at Haverford College, doesn't try to recount the emergence of forensic science  in investigating mass violence.  Instead, he's really interested in examining the political, ethical and philosophical questions that surround the study of dead bodies in the aftermath of atrocities.  His book is a thought examination of these questions.  He considers how the interests of the various constituents of forensic investigations often clash.  He thinks about the way in which dead bodies become political footballs.  He considers how to balance the sometime competing claims of religion, lawyers and politicians to human remains.  And he asks how best to recognize the rights of the dead. Digging for the Disappeared is a rich, introspective and thoughtful treatment of an increasingly important subject.

Leonard CassutoView on AmazonThe discontented graduate student is something of a cultural fixture in the U.S. Indeed theirs is a sorry lot. They work very hard, earn very little, and have very poor prospects. Nearly all of them want to become professors, but most of them won't. Indeed a disturbingly large minority of them won't even finish their degrees. It's little wonder graduate students are, as a group, somewhat depressed. In his thought-provoking book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015), Leonard Cassuto tries to figure out why graduate education in the U.S. is in such a sad state. More importantly, he offers a host of fascinating proposals to "fix" American graduate schools. Listen in.

Shelly ClineIs it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today's interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled.  Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museums's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah Helm about the women's camp of Ravensbruck, Nik Wachsmann about the evolution of the concentration camp system and Dan Stone about the liberation of the camps.  Today I'll conclude the series with an interview with Shelly Cline about female guards in the camps. This is something of a departure for the podcast, which usually focuses on the authors of published books.  But Shelly's dissertation "Women at Work: The SS Aufseherin and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust" (Ph. D. Diss, U of Kansas, 2014) is a perfect conclusion to the series.  It examines carefully and thoughtfully the women who served as guards in concentration camps across Germany and its territories.  In the manuscript, Shelly suggests that we will better understand the guards' experience and perspective if we look at them from the perspective of people working at a job, a job they applied for, trained for, and worked at, one they sometimes liked, but often found stressful and difficult. It's a fascinating notion, one that made me stop and think many times while reading.

Dan StoneView on AmazonEvery year I ask my students to tell me when the Holocaust ended.  Most of them are surprised to hear me say that it has not yet. Today's podcast is the fourth of a summer long series of podcasts about the system of camps and ghettos that pervaded Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled.  Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah Helm about the women's camp of Ravensbruck and Nik Wachsmann about the evolution of the concentration camp system.  I'll conclude the series in a few weeks with an interview with Shelly Cline about the female guards who staffed some of the camps. In this fourth episode, Dan Stone makes a convincing case that the Holocaust reverberated for years after the war came to a close. The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press,   is slender but packed with information and insights. It certainly provides a top-down discussion of the issues and challenges that accompanied the dissolution of the camp system.  He makes clear the various policies adopted by the liberating countries and how these were caught up in both domestic and international politics. But it goes beyond this to offer  a wide variety of anecdotes and perspectives of camps survivors and liberators demonstrating the long-lasting impact of their experiences.  It's a perfect example of the kind of integrated history of the Holocaust that Nik Wachsmann identified in his discussion.

Nikolaus WachsmannView on AmazonToday's podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany.  Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and Sarah Helm about her book on Ravensbruc.  Later, I'll talk with Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. Today I had the great pleasure to chat with Nikolaus Wachsmann about his new book titled KL:  A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015). Nik began his career interested in justice and prisons in Nazi Germany.  Having published a book on that subject, he made the natural jump to the concentration camp system.  After pushing the research further as editor of three compilations of essays, he has now published a comprehensive survey of the camp system.  The book is tremendous:  a well-conceived mixture of institutional history, narrative storytelling and careful analysis.  It's not always easy to read–I read it on my Kindle as I led students across Europe and occasionally found myself putting the Kindle down and staring out the window for several minutes as I contemplated the pain his subjects had endured.  But it's a wonderful treatment of a complicated subject.

Sarah HelmView on AmazonToday's podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany.  Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos.  Later, I'll talk with Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. Today, however, I got the chance to talk with Sarah Helm.  Sarah has written a tremendous book titled Ravensbruck:  Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (Nan A. Talese, 2015).  The books is at turns grim, touching and, just occasionally, inspiring.  It's one of the most accessible of the many books I've read about the concentration camp system.  And it focuses on on of the under-served groups of victims of the genocide:  women.

View on AmazonEvery semester when I get to the point in World Civ when we're talking about Nazi Germany, I ask my students to guess how many camps and ghettos there were.  I get guesses anywhere from a few, to a few dozen, to a couple thousand.  When I tell them that the true number is above 40,000, I get astonished stares and a barrage of 'your kidding' (and stronger words). The camps and ghettos were an essential part of the Nazi system.  So today we're beginning a five part series dedicated to the camps and ghettos in Germany, the areas Germany controlled and in Germany's allies.  Later this summer we'll hear from Sarah Helms, Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. The series starts, however, with an interview with Geoff Megargee.  Geoff is the general editor of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos (Indiana University Press 2009-). This is a monumental project.  Each of the first two volumes runs well over 1000 pages and includes an enormous amount of information.  Once the series is done, it will probably exceed 10,000 pages. The result will be an almost unprecedented addition to our understanding of the  Holocaust.  I'll talk with Geoff about the process of creating the Encyclopedia and about how the accumulation of knowledge about specific camps can reshape our understanding of the Holocaust as a whole.

Anton Weiss-WendtView on AmazonNormally I don't try and talk about two books in the same interview.  But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 2013)  together.  His instinct was sound.   While they deal with different subjects, they share a common approach and structure that casts new light on each subject individually and on the war more generally. Often, works on the Holocaust focus on Germany, Poland and the USSR while marginalizing smaller and weaker countries.  The two books here certainly address these countries.  But they do the topic a great service by bringing other areas to the forefront.  Each book is structured geographically, with contributors examining the course of racial science or the genocide of the Roma in a specific country.   This allows the authors to look in depth at the historical context that led to different decisions and ideas.  And it allows them to honor the agency of Rumanians or Croations or Latvians rather than simply surveying German actions in specific regions. Such an approach might have led to a series of essays that ran parallel to each other without ever touching on common themes.  Fortunately, Weiss-Wendt (and his co-editor, Rory Yeomans) make sure that doesn't happen.  Instead, the careful construction of the essays and the thoughtful introductions shed light on patterns of behavior and the interactions that shaped genocide across Eastern Europe.   In doing so, they've added to our knowledge not just of the genocide of the Roma or of racial science, but of the role and actions of peoples heretofore largely ignored in the literature.

Scott StrausView on AmazonWho, in the field of genocide studies, hasn't at least once used the phrase "The century of genocide?"  Books carry the title, journalists quote it in interviews and undergrads adopt it. There's nothing wrong with the phrase, as far as it goes.  But, as Scott Straus points out, conceptualizing the century in that way masks a fundamental truth about the period–that there were many more crises that could have led to genocide but which stopped short than there were actual genocides. And this is a problem for the academic study of genocide.   For if that discipline is at least in part attempting to understand what causes genocides and how to prevent them, ignoring the dog that didn't bark is a serious challenge. This is the point Straus makes in his wonderful new book Making and Unmaking Nations:  War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell University Press, 2015).  A political scientist, Straus looks to address two methodological issues in understanding genocide.  The first is the problem of  the dog that didn't bark.  The second is the fact that genocide studies often compares genocides that occurs in dramatically different contexts and cultures. The result is a wonderfully rich and thought-provoking study.  It's one that all genocide scholars will need to wrestle with.  And, with Straus a former journalist, non-specialists will find it readable and interesting as well.

Emily KuriloffView on AmazonIn her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical developments on the field. Utilizing scholarly research, personal interviews and first-person accounts, Kuriloff contends in our interview that the events that analysts lived through in the years leading up to, and through World War II, led them to disavow the effects of trauma on their work. It has only been more recently, when later generations have reconsidered these events, and with the emergence of the relational paradigm, that analysts have been able to integrate concepts of trauma and dissociation into their analytic lives. Her book is essential reading not only for psychoanalysts and students of history but for anyone interested in the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust.

View on AmazonHistorians have spent the last two decades detailing and explaining the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union.  We now know much more than we used to about the escalation of violence in 1941 and the so-called "Holocaust by Bullets." The actions of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, in contrast, are less well known.  But they are crucial to understanding the evolution of violence against Jews and others.  Juergen Matthaus, Jochen Boehler, and Klaus-Michael Mallmann set out to fill this gap.  Their work War, Pacification and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)–part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's excellent Documenting Life and Destruction series–sets carefully chosen documents into a richly described military and institutional context. By doing so, they illustrate not just what the Einsatzgruppen did, but how their actions evolved over time, how they interacted with Wehrmacht and political leaders and how this violence impacted people on the ground. In the interview, I talked with Juergen Matthaus about the origin of the volume, the nature of violence in Poland and the way in which this violence set the stage for the escalation of persecution and destruction.

Fatma Muge GocekView on AmazonAdolf Hitler famously (and probably) said in a speech to his military leaders "Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?"  This remark is generally taken to suggest that future generations won't remember current atrocities, so there's no reason not to commit them.  The implication is that memory has something like an expiration date, that it fades, somewhat inevitably, of its own accord. At the heart of Fatma Muge Gocek's book is the claim that forgetting doesn't just happen.  Rather, forgetting (and remembering) happens in a context, with profound political and personal stakes for those involved.  And this forgetting has consequences. Denial of Violence:  Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians 1789-2009 (Oxford University Press, 2015) looks at how this process played out in Turkey in the past 200 years.  Gocek looks at both the mechanisms and the logic of forgetting.  In doing so she sets the Turkish decisions to reinterpret the Armenian genocide into a longer tale of modernization and collective violence.  And she illustrates the complicated ways in which remembering and forgetting collide.