Bibliography of the Holocaust

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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.

Contents

Bibliography

Primary sources

"The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", a note issued by the Polish government-in-exile, 1942 The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied.pdf
"The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", a note issued by the Polish government-in-exile, 1942
Photos from The Black Book of Poland, published in 1942 by Polish government-in-exile in London and New York The Black Book of Poland (21-24).jpg
Photos from The Black Book of Poland , published in 1942 by Polish government-in-exile in London and New York

Early Reports

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]

During the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath, many of the documents listed in the "Primary Documents" section above existed alongside a scattering of reports from individual camps such as Bettleheim's "Individual & Mass-Behavior in Extreme Situations"(1943) which appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Early book-length works from survivors of the camps that became widely available immediately after the war include Kogon's Theory and Practice of Hell (1st published in 1946 as Der SS-Staat: Das System de Deutschen Konzentrationslager), and Rousset's Other Kingdom (1946).

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:

Historical studies

Selected accounts by survivors

Selected semi-autobiographical accounts by survivors

Other documents

Hypotheses and historiography

Selected filmography

General sites

Sites in languages other than English

Memorials

Particular groups which were involved in The Holocaust

Holocaust education

Victim information and databases

Documentation and evidence

Other topics

Other

See also

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Extermination camp</span> Nazi death camps established to systematically murder

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Belzec extermination camp</span> Nazi German death camp in occupied Poland

Belzec was a Nazi German extermination camp in occupied Poland. It was built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Polish Jews, a major part of the "Final Solution", the overall Nazi effort to complete the genocide of all European Jews. Before Germany's defeat put an end to this project more than six million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust. The camp operated from 17 March 1942 to the end of June 1943. It was situated about 500 m (1,600 ft) south of the local railroad station of Bełżec, in the new Lublin District of the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open-air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Romani Holocaust</span> Genocide against Romani in Europe

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operation Reinhard</span> Code name for the creation of German extermination camps in Poland in World War II

Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt was the codename of the secret German plan in World War II to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. The operation proceeded from March 1942 to November 1943; about 1.47 million or more Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early November 1942, a rate which is approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the kill rate in the Rwandan genocide. In the time frame of July to October 1942, the overall death toll, including all killings of Jews and not just Operation Reinhard, amounted to two million killed in those four months alone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chełmno extermination camp</span> German extermination camp in Poland during World War II

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Höfle Telegram</span> Communique detailing Holocaust deaths during 1942

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Sonderbehandlung is any sort of preferential treatment. However, the word Sonderbehandlung was used as a euphemism for mass murder by Nazi functionaries and the SS, who commonly used the abbreviation S.B. in documentation. It first came to prominence during Aktion T4, where SS doctors killed mentally ill and disabled patients between 1939 and 1941, and was one of a number of nonspecific words the Nazis used to document mass murder and genocide. Another notable example was Sonderbehandlung 14f13.

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<i>The Black Book of Polish Jewry</i> 1943 report on the Holocaust in Poland

The Black Book of Polish Jewry is a 400-page report about the progress of the Holocaust in Poland published in 1943 during World War II by the American Federation for Polish Jews in cooperation with the Association of Jewish Refugees and Immigrants from Poland. It was compiled by Jacob Apenszlak with Jacob Kenner, Isaac Lewin and Moses Polakiewicz, and released by Roy Publishers of New York with an introduction by Ignacy Schwarzbart from the National Council of the Polish Republic. The book was sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, US Senator Robert Wagner, and other high-ranking community leaders. Historian Michael Fleming suggests it downplayed the true scale and manner of the Holocaust in an effort to elicit the empathy of its readership.

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The question of how much Germans knew about the Holocaust whilst it was being executed is a matter of debate by historians. With regard to Nazi Germany, some historians argue that it was an open secret amongst the population, whilst others highlight a possibility that the German population were genuinely unaware of the Final Solution. Peter Longerich argues that the Holocaust was an open secret by early 1943, but some authors place it even earlier. However, after the war, many Germans claimed that they were ignorant of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime, a claim associated with the stereotypical phrase "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst".

References

  1. Dr. Hans Ehlich & Dr. Konrad Meyer under supervision of Heinrich Himmler (June 1942). Facsimile of Dossier for Generalplan Ost from the Bundesarchiv.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  2. "BBC: 700,000 Jews killed in Poland". www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Retrieved 2024-03-19.
  3. "TimesMachine: Saturday June 27, 1942 – NYTimes.com". The New York Times. Retrieved 2024-03-19.
  4. 1 2 MacDonald, James (24 November 1942). "Himmler Program Kills Jews". New York Times. p. 10.
  5. "Mass Extermination of Jews in Occupied Poland" (PDF). Republic of Poland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 10 December 1942.
  6. Bettelheim, Bruno (October 1943). "Individual and mass behavior in extreme situations". The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 38 (4): 417–452. doi:10.1037/h0061208. ISSN   0096-851X.
  7. Apenszlak Jacob (1943). Black Book Of Polish Jewry.
  8. 1 2 Fleming, Michael (2014). Auschwitz, the Allies and censorship of the Holocaust. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 190–194. ISBN   978-1-107-06279-5.
  9. 1 2 Leff, Laurel (2006). Buried by the Times: the Holocaust and America's most important newspaper. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-60782-7.
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