Almost immediately upon my arrival in my first teaching job, I became the go-to guy for the Holocaust. Of course, this was partly due to my dissertation, but in larger part, I suspect, because of my Jewishness. This was fine with me for a number of reasons. First, as a junior faculty member, this identification, though merely professional, could only help in my quest for tenure. An expert on the Holocaust carried infinitely greater weight, I thought, than an expert on ministerial instability during the French Third Republic.
Dissolution: My life as an accidental Holocaust expert—and why I decided to quit
posted by timshel
on Feb 25, 2012 -
13 comments
802 Prisoners attempted escape from Auschwitz. 144 were successful. Kazimierz Piechowski, a Polish boy scout, was one of them. Today, at age 91,
he tells his story.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 13, 2011 -
30 comments
A large chunk of the
Yad Vashem Photo Archive has been made available online. The first batch consists of 130,000 photographs and more will follow. The photos and their keywords are indexed and searchable via Google. Readers can contribute to the archive project by adding stories, comments and further documents linked to the photos. Photos range from the
horrific to the
charmingly mundane.
[more inside]
posted by jonesor
on Jan 26, 2011 -
11 comments
Poetry in Hell contains a complete collection of poems recovered from the Warsaw Ghetto's
Ringelblum Archives. The project, which took ten years to complete, gives English translations of poems that are shown in their original Yiddish.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jul 23, 2010 -
9 comments
Fritz Haber's story is the story of the double edged sword of science. He
won the Nobel prize in 1918 for his groundbreaking work in
breaking the nitrogen cycle for Germany's WWI efforts, but it's been estimated that two out of every five people now living would not have been born if it
weren't for artificial fertilizers created using his process. He also spent much of the war developing poison gases; first chlorine (after watching its first use, Haber's wife committed suicide) and later Zyklon B (the cyanide insecticide later used against his fellow Jews in concentration camps). He died alone and in poverty in Switzerland. But the lessons of his life haven't
quite been forgotten.
posted by Plutor
on Nov 21, 2006 -
17 comments
In 1945-46, some of the (very few) Polish Jews who had survived the Final Solution returned -- sick, poor, wounded -- to Poland. In Elie Wiesel's words, "they had thought all too naively that antisemitism, discredited 6 million times over, had died at Auschwitz with its victims.
They were wrong." In 2001 Princeton professor
Jan T
Gross published
the story of the 1941 destruction of the Jewish community at
Jedwabne, Poland, and proved how Jews were rounded up, clubbed, drowned, gutted or burned to death not by German forces as previously believed
but by mobs of their own non-Jewish neighbors. Now professor Gross tells the story of the
Kielce pogrom in his new book, "
Fear". Of course, the Kielce butchery took place in 1946 -- more than a year
after the end of WWII and defeat of Nazism. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Jun 25, 2006 -
107 comments
[NewsFilter]
Lipstadt: Let Irving Go. Infamous "historian" David Irving was
arrested in mid-November in Austria for Holocaust denial, violating section 3g of the
Verbotsgesetz [in german].
Deborah Lipstadt, whom Irving once
sued for libel, argues,
"I don't find these laws efficacious. I think they turn Holocaust denial into forbidden fruit, and make it more attractive to people who want to toy with the system or challenge the system." Perhaps Irving hasn't had time to update his
dossier on Lipstadt -- who is, in turn, keeping up with events on her
blog.
posted by milquetoast
on Jan 4, 2006 -
74 comments
How bad was the bombing of Dresden? It seems there is a veritable industry dedicated to debunking the various and sundry historical accounts different groups hold sacred. I was raised by pacifists and was made very familiar with the stories of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden, in particular. According to this man's
new book, the firebombing of Dresden wasn't quite as bad as it has been made out to be. In fact, much of the evidence for the numbers of dead come from an historian who has since been discredited as a
holocaust denier. Others would argue that a
war crime is
a war crime is
a war crime.
In the end, do the specific numbers really matter? How less evil is 25,000 dead than 135,000?
posted by piedrasyluz
on Mar 2, 2004 -
21 comments
Who owns the products of slave labour? Or, more broadly, how do we remember the Holocaust?
A unique dispute over ownership rights to artwork in the case of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum vs. former camp prisoner Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt illuminates underlying moral questions about the Holocaust and post-Holocaust culture. Babbitt, now living in southern California, is a university-trained Czechoslovak artist who has been fighting to reclaim her art from the Auschwitz Museum since 1973... [She] was a Jewish prisoner there in 1944 when Josef Mengele learned of her artistic skills and forced her to make watercolor portraits of dying Gypsies in order to get the kind of documentation he wanted on exact skin color and ear shapes. Gottliebova Babbitt made a dozen such portraits, seven of which are now tucked away in Room No. 11 of the Auschwitz Museum. [...] "Mengele ordered me to do it as slave labor. But it was my work, my paintings."
posted by jokeefe
on Mar 28, 2002 -
20 comments
Armenian Holocaust - This was discussed
earlier this year. I ran across this very well done flash site and was amazed at how presentation can affect one's views on a subject. Although aware of the story, it seems more
real presented this way.
posted by revbrian
on Jun 4, 2001 -
4 comments
And you thought Microsoft was evil. There appears to be pretty significant evidence that
IBM was involved in automating the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. Read more about it
here,
here and
here.
And since we haven't even settled the question of when a nation has atoned for its sins, what exactly
is the statute of limitations for a company's sins?
posted by anildash
on Feb 11, 2001 -
20 comments
If
this doesn't get some arguments going, then I'd hate to think what would.
posted by Mocata
on Jul 12, 2000 -
8 comments
