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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Send us a text 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 …

Send us a text 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 Kindertra…

Send us a text 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, a…

Send us a text 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…

Send us a text 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 J…

Send us a text 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 que…

Send us a text 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 …

Send us a text 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…

Send us a text 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 …

Send us a text 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 loo…

Send us a text 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-solvin…

Send us a text 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 …

Send us a text 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. Ou…

Send us a text 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 be…

Send us a text 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 k…

Send us a text 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 …

Send us a text 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’…

Send us a text 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 wri…

Send us a text Welcome to the podcast! Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod. Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.Waitman Wade Beorn