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 s…

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 Sout…

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 memor…

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 ha…

People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and Out West: The Settler Colonial Environmental Imaginary (U Nebraska Press, 2022), emeritus professor of English at the University of Nebraska Thomas Lynch takes those stories from two places - Australi…

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 gat…

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…

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, gra…

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 appar…

Send us a text How did Jews in Germany resist the Nazis? What were the choices that they made to stand up against the regime where its authoritarian power was greatest? In this episode, I talk with Wolf Gruner about his research on this topic and his surprising discovery of the extent of resistance by Jewish Germans in the heart of the Nazi state. …

Send us a text The Holocaust in Poland left hundreds of towns and villages that had previously had large Jewish populations empty. However, important Jewish sites like synagogues and cemeteries remained. Polish communities were then confronted with what do with these places. In this fascinating conversation with Yechiel Weizman, we talk about his w…

Send us a text Ultimately, the story of the Holocaust is one centered in places: where something happened, where someone was from, where someone wanted to go. In this episode, I talked with two scholars about the role of geography in the Holocaust but also about how we use geographical approaches and methodologies to ask (and answer new important h…

After World War II, when a new German democracy was born in the western region of the vanquished Third Reich, tens of thousands of civil servants were hired to work for newly formed government agencies to get the new republic quickly on its feet. But there was an enormous flaw in the plan: no serious vetting system was put in place to keep war crim…

Send us a text How does one talk with a Holocaust survivor about their experiences? What is the role of survivor testimony in understanding the Holocaust? In this episode, I talk with psychologist, Holocaust scholar, and playwright Hank Greenspan about his lifetime of talking with survivors and what he has learned from that experience. Henry “Hank”…

Send us a text The Nazis first targeted mentally and physically disabled Germans for mass killing, before they targeted Jews. However, discrimination and ableist thought predated the Nazis and followed them into the postwar era. In this episode, I talk with Dagmar Herzog about both the Nazi “euthanasia” campaign, but also the larger context of disc…

In our conversation about Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), Dr. Jacob Flaws expands the spatial realities of the Treblinka death camp and what it means to be a witness of the Holocaust. Spaces of Treblinka utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesse…

Send us a text In this episode, I talked with Jacob Flaws about the spaces of Treblinka. His work analyses this extermination camp from a spatial perspective, focusing on the physical and ideological boundaries of the camp. His work shows that the fences of the camp did not contain the truth of its existence and he details the ways in which the loc…

Send us a text Philosopher Theodore W. Adorno famously said that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Here he gives an example of the way that many thinkers and philosophers struggled with the post-Holocaust world. In this episode, I talked with philosopher and Holocaust scholar John K. Roth about the ways that philosophy approaches the H…

Send us a text At least 2 million Jews were murdered by mass shooting in the Soviet Union. The perpetrators responsible for most of these killings were the men of the Einsatzgruppen. In this week’s episode, I talk with Jürgen Mathäus about the history of these units, their evolution from 1938 on, and the role they played in the Holocaust. Jürgen Ma…

Send us a text What was the relationship between Christianity? Could one be both a Nazi and a Christian? What was the relationship between religious antisemitism and other forms of Jew hatred? On today’s episode, I talked with Richard Steigmann-Gall about these difficult but important questions. Richard Steigmann-Gall is an associate professor of h…

Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (U Nebraska Press, 2024) utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Treblinka was an isolated Nazi extermina…

Send us a text What is it like to visit a Nazi extermination camp or even a Holocaust site in general? Last year, I was fortunate enough to travel to Poland with three friends to a number of camps and Holocaust-related sites and museums. I thought I would do something different in this episode and invite them to talk about their experiences. Stuart…

Send us a text The wife of Nazi camp commandant Karl Koch, Ilse, became a lasting symbol of the evil and depravity of the Nazi state. She was accused of a variety of crimes and underwent three trials, including one by the Nazis themselves. However, there is more to the story. In this episode, I talk with Tomaz Jardim about the real Ilse Koch and he…

Many myths have grown up around President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan. In destroying these myths, D. M. Giangreco’s Truman and the Bomb: The Untold Story (Potomac Books, 2023) will discomfort both Truman’s critics and his supporters, and force historians to reexamine what they think they know about the e…

Send us a text Historian Timothy Snyder wrote that, between 1941 and 1944, Belarus was the deadliest place on earth. And he was right. The population there, both Jewish and non-Jewish suffered under the full weight of the Nazi genocidal project from the Holocaust by Bullets to the Hunger Plan. In this episode, I talked with Franziska Exeler about t…

An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Ma…

Send us a text The Bełżec extermination camp was the first of the so-called Operation Reinhard camps to open. In some ways, it provided the model for the other Reinhard camps of Sobibor and Treblinka. In this episode, Chris Webb provides a detailed history of the camp and a detailed discussion of the important role that Bełżec played in the Final S…

Send us a text 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 impa…

In Search of the Romanovs: A Family's Quest to Solve One of History's Most Brutal Crimes (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is a thrilling, true-life detective story about the search for the missing members of the Romanov royal family, murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, and one family's involvement in the hundred-year-old forensic investigation into…

Send us a text 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 Chr…

Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel (U Nebraska Press, 2024) offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it’s typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. Bergholtz considers a s…

Send us a text 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 i…

Perhaps no American landscape is as iconic as the rainbow rocks of Arizona's Grand Canyon. Yet, as the geographer Yolonda Youngs argues, the Grand Canyon many people think they know is but one sliver of the story of the wider Grand Canyon as a historical and physical place. In Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon (U …

Send us a text 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 wa…

Send us a text 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 frien…

Waitman Wade Beorn's book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, Janowska remains one of the least-known sites of the Holocaust, despite bei…

Send us a text 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 w…

A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary.…

Send us a text 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 wit…

Send us a text 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 epi…

Send us a text 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 histori…

During Hawai‘i’s territorial period (1900–1959), Native Hawaiians resisted assimilation by refusing to replace Native culture, identity, and history with those of the United States. By actively participating in U.S. public schools, Hawaiians resisted the suppression of their language and culture, subjection to a foreign curriculum, and denial of th…

San Francisco began its American life as a city largely made up of transient men, arriving from afar to participate in the gold rush and various attendant enterprises. This large population of men on the move made the new and booming city a hub of what "respectable" easterners considered vice: drinking, gambling, and sex work, among other activitie…

Between the mid-19th century and the start of the twentieth century, the Northern Paiute people of the Great Basin went from a self-sufficient tribe well-adapted to living on the harsh desert homelands, to a people singled out by the Native activist Henry Roe Cloud for their dire social and economic position. The story of how this happened is told …

Send us a text 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 …

Send us a text 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? Wha…

Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorial…

Send us a text 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 T…

Send us a text 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 neig…

Send us a text 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 t…