Germany is, for the first time, trying a non-citizen for crimes committed as part of the Holocaust. John Demjanjuk, originally from Ukraine, is an 89-year-old man, retired US auto factory worker, and former US citizen who has been deported and charged with 27,900 murders for the part he may have played in World War II. This is the second time Demjanjuk has been tried. [more inside]
posted by brina on Nov 30, 2009 - 109 comments

Fritz Darges died on Saturday aged 96. Darges was the last surviving member of Hitler's inner circle and was present for all major conferences and policy announcements for four years of the war. He reportedly left instructions that after his death his memoirs of his time with Hitler could be published. [more inside]
posted by MuffinMan on Oct 30, 2009 - 40 comments

Bradley R. Smith and Mark Weber are at the center of the U.S. Holocaust-revisionism movement. Now they’re feuding with each other. A sensitive and interesting investigative report by Mark Oppenheimer. Via the Daily Dish.
posted by shothotbot on Jul 27, 2009 - 39 comments

"What we are seeing in this project is that all of Europe was a camp." The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum just released the first volume of a projected seven-volume Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945. "They assumed the finished work would be massive, featuring a staggering 5,000 to 7,000 camps and ghettos. They underestimated by 15,000." [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha on Jun 3, 2009 - 23 comments

Wafa Younis is an Arab Israeli musician who organised a youth orchestra in the Jenin refugee camp. She recently brought her orchestra to play for Holocaust survivors at an Israeli old age home. The performance was strongly criticised by Palestinians as a hostile political act. Now the orchestra has been disbanded, its performance space sealed, and Ms Younis has been expelled from the West Bank. [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia on Apr 2, 2009 - 49 comments

Do you, or an older relative of yours, recognize any of these children? More than 70 children separated from their families during WWII, now all elderly men and women, are using the Internet to try to find some answers about their pasts, their families, and sometimes even their own names. They are soliciting help and suggestions in the comments sections on each story. [more inside]
posted by Asparagirl on Dec 19, 2008 - 21 comments

Menorahs glowed in almost every living room window during Hanukkah. Hasidic Jews streamed down the streets on Friday night and Saturday morning, walking to and from synagogue services. "There was total freedom," marvels Magda Brown, 81, who survived Auschwitz. But inside their homes, at night, the survivors—and their families—were roiled by their pasts. The rest of Skokie did not know the troubles that stirred behind the immaculate facades of the close-packed houses.

Imagine watching Schindler's List and knowing the sadistic Nazi camp commandant played by Ralph Fiennes was your father. Inheritance is the story of Monika Hertwig, the daughter of mass murderer Amon Goeth. Hertwig has spent her life in the shadow of her father's sins, trying to come to terms with her "inheritance." She seeks out Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, who was enslaved by Goeth and who is one of the few living eyewitnesses to his unspeakable brutality.

Trailer. | PBS P.O.V. - Inheritance home page. | Interview with the filmmaker. | Watch the full film online. (December 11, 2008 - January 4, 2009.)
posted by Fuzzy Skinner on Dec 10, 2008 - 14 comments

Pope Benedict XVI, speaking at the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Rome, which was badly damaged by Allied bombing in July 1943, again praised Pius XII, a pope seen by Jewish leaders and other critics as having turned a blind eye to the Holocaust, and who is nonetheless on his way towards beatification, a step towards sainthood. The Vatican contends that Pius XII worked behind the scenes to help many escape the Holocaust, although many Catholics question the beatification.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing on Dec 1, 2008 - 96 comments

Fewer than 100 survived Treblinka. I am the last one.
posted by allkindsoftime on Oct 31, 2008 - 30 comments

“I have seen many Anne Franks in Cambodia. ...Under Pol Pot, many children were separated from their families. They faced starvation and were sent to the front to fight and die,” she explains. “Like Anna, they never knew peace and the warmth of a home.” Translated by Sayana Ser with help from the Dutch embassy in Cambodia (Kampuchea, Khmer), The Diary of Anne Frank has now become one of the most popular and discussed books in this war-torn country.
posted by parmanparman on Oct 7, 2008 - 7 comments

Constantine's Sword (google video) A former priest's personal journey through the tangled and sometimes violent history between Christians and Jews.
posted by empath on Oct 2, 2008 - 14 comments

On this day in 1941 a man named Witold Pilecki deliberately got himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Pilecki was a spy sent in to investigate the camp and establish underground resistance cells. He sent reports to Warsaw, which passed them to London. In 1942, his reports that prisoners were being gassed were not believed. [more inside]
posted by up in the old hotel on Sep 19, 2008 - 47 comments

"We're having him do what our 13-year-olds do. But Bernie was doing things the rest of us shudder to imagine when he was 13." Holocaust survivor Bernie Marks is preparing for his bar mitzvah, 65 years late.
posted by amyms on Sep 14, 2008 - 13 comments

Women and the Holocaust is a site about women's experiences in the Holocaust. It has poetry, testimonials, personal reflections, tributes, essays and more.
posted by Kattullus on Aug 5, 2008 - 10 comments

In March 1944, Nazi Germany occupied its ally Hungary and immediately began preparing the extermination of Hungary's Jews. A small band of diplomats from neutral countries and the Red Cross put their lives at risk to try to smuggle as many Jews as possible out of Hungary from under Adolf Eichmann's nose. While Raoul Wallenberg remains the best known of these "Righteous among the Nations", there's no doubt that the most intriguing character was Giorgio "Jorge" Perlasca. [more inside]
posted by Skeptic on Jun 29, 2008 - 4 comments

Canada has apologised for forcing more than 100,000 aboriginal children to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools aimed at assimilating them. Controversial former Minister Kevin Annett has written two books on the subject of residential school abuse in Canada [Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust and Love and Death in the Valley]. Unrepentant - Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide reveals Canada’s darkest secret - that the Canadian residential school system, the Christian churches along with state authorities implemented a policy of genocide against Canada's native population. Related: Deliver Us From Evil
posted by chuckdarwin on Jun 29, 2008 - 28 comments

"I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed." A Belgian writer has admitted that she made up her best-selling memoir and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during World War II. More at Slate. Here's an excellent portal about feral children. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu on Mar 2, 2008 - 63 comments

Rep. Tom Lantos, 80, passed away this morning. Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, he was the only Holocaust survivor to ever serve in the United States Congress.
posted by awesomebrad on Feb 11, 2008 - 30 comments

Should you be attending this year's carnival in Rio, you probably won't be seeing a huge float rolling down the parade route depicting an enormous pile of emaciated corpses and a samba-dancing Hitler. But that's only thanks to a Brazilian judge's decision.
posted by flapjax at midnite on Jan 31, 2008 - 53 comments

"By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black".
posted by nasreddin on Jan 11, 2008 - 74 comments

1945. As the new year breaks in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the months-long SS torture of four women -- Ala Gertner, Roza Robota, Regina Safirzstain and Ester Wajcblum -- draws to an end. The women were being interrogated about their role in the Sonderkommando revolt of October, 1944. [more inside]
posted by forrest on Jan 4, 2008 - 24 comments

Upon the Nazi invasion of Poland, pediatrician Eugeniusz Łazowski and his friend Stanisław Matulewicz fabricated a fake typhus epidemic to save Polish Jews from the Nazis. Knowing that typhus-infected Jews would be summarily executed, non-Jews were injected with the harmless Proteus OX19, which would generate false positives for typhus. [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Oct 19, 2007 - 23 comments

You know who else enjoyed Auschwitz? No, not them. That's right, them. [more inside]
posted by found missing on Sep 19, 2007 - 59 comments

Darwin's Deadly Legacy illustrates how Charles Darwin caused the Holocaust. This documentary, from the late Dr. James Kennedy and his Coral Ridge Ministries, features not only rare, Bigfoot-esque glimpses of the notoriously camera-shy Ann Coulter, but also Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project. Of course, Dr. Collins hates everything about the documentary and claims that his footage was simply spliced in under false pretenses, and even Michael Behe distances himself from the entire production, disagreeing as he does with its central tenets. Oh, and the ADL is pissed, but when aren't they? Anyway, not even arch-conservative websites with "We Need Alan Keyes For President" interstitial ads think the documentary is worth very much. And it seems that Hitler himself had a grand old time pimping out Christianity and denying that we came from apes. (More, more.) So watch the fucking trailer and learn yourself some history.
posted by Sticherbeast on Sep 10, 2007 - 69 comments

A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust - an overview of the people and events of the Holocaust through photographs, documents, art, music, and literature. It is designed to prepare K-12 teachers to approach this sensitive topic. The content is presented from three perspectives: Timeline, People, and The Arts. Produced by the University of South Florida.
posted by netbros on Aug 29, 2007 - 7 comments

"Before you kill me, can you give me a bit of bread?" How a Jew, orphaned by Nazi atrocity, became a mascot -- to the Schutzstaffel.
posted by orthogonality on Aug 22, 2007 - 33 comments

"So much for “never again.” So the problem has obviously not disappeared."
Raul Hilberg (1926-2007, NYT obit) explains why he added a chapter on Rwanda to the last edition of The destruction of the European Jews, a work that took him a lifetime and 3 editions to complete, meeting with indifference, then with criticism from those who didn't share his (at the beginning) functionalist view of the Holocaust. Hilberg became involved in other controversies about the Holocaust, but "The Destruction..." remains the "the closest of any work in print to being the Summa of Holocaust studies" (Christopher Browning). Also: Hilberg intervied by Claude Lanzmann in "Shoah" (YT) (previously).
posted by elgilito on Aug 7, 2007 - 41 comments

You've heard of Oskar Schindler. You've heard of Raoul Wallenberg. But you've probably never heard of Irena Sendler (or Sendlerowa). Sendler, who turned 97 in February, saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust. She doesn't think she's a hero, but she's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, largely due to the attention brought to her story by four girls from rural Kansas.
posted by cerebus19 on Jun 4, 2007 - 36 comments

This Sunday will be Yom HaShoah "Holocaust Martyrs' Remembrance Day" in Israel. A month ago Eric Muller, a law professor at UNC, went to Germany to find what he could about his great uncle Leopold Müller. Today he got something unexpected in the mail. (via)
posted by sotonohito on Apr 13, 2007 - 16 comments

Elie Wiesel was attacked in a San Francisco hotel today by a Holocaust denier, intenton forcing the Nobel Prize winner confess that his book Night was a fictionalized account of his survival of Dachau. Incredibly, someone is taking credit for the attack.
posted by mkb on Feb 9, 2007 - 124 comments

"To me, I've always looked upon the stage as a much-hallowed place, a place of worship for real artists, as I said just before. That doesn't just stem from rock n roll days; to me, Judy Garland was a real artist, Al Jolson was a real artist, people like that gave their all and everything for the stage and most of them finished up dying for it as well. In my view, nobody should be allowed to stand on a stage unless they can present the total professional thing, unless they really can sing and really can play. Punk was a total anti-attitude towards music."NWOBHM: How a now-little-known nostalgic reaction to punk called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal changed the world.[much, much more inside]
posted by koeselitz on Jan 10, 2007 - 40 comments

A multimedia exhibit on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, Wikipedia on gays under the Nazis, Paragraph 175 - a documentary profiling gay survivors of Nazi era policies, and memorials of the gay Holocaust. A few Nazi-era gay and lesbian figures of note:

- A Berlin intellectual and pioneer in sexuality research, and an early advocate for gay rights, (controversial in part for his early support of outing) Magnus Herschfeld died in exile after Nazis destroyed his Institute of Sexual Science.
- The butch orchestra conductor Frieda Belinfante and gay artist William Arondeus were part of the same resistance group that first falsified papers for Dutch Jews, and then when Nazi's began to compare these falsified papers with city records, set fire to the Amsterdam Registry building.
- Lily Wust, the wife of a German soldier, fell for a Jewish woman at the wrong time. Their story became the subject of a book and film.
posted by serazin on Dec 15, 2006 - 26 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

The largest archive of Nazi prison camp records, which has been closed for 50 years, is going public in May 2007. The International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany consists of 16 miles of files in six nondescript buildings in the German spa town and contains the fullest record of Nazi persecutions in existence. This past April Germany finally agreed to open access to the archive, ending a nasty diplomatic dispute between the United States and Germany.
posted by ericb on Nov 19, 2006 - 19 comments

The Holocaust Cartoon Contest results are in and the winner is Moroccan cartoonist Abdellah Derkaoui, who won $12 000 for his effort, "depicting an Israeli crane piling large cement blocks on Israel's security wall and gradually obscuring Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem." The contest was launched in response to the Danish cartoon controversy (previously discussed), with the intent of testing the limits of freedom of expression, so please resist the urge to riot - YHBT. 204 of the entries are now on display.
posted by mek on Nov 2, 2006 - 69 comments

Savitri Devi Mukherji. Born Maximiani Portas in 1905, this French woman of Greek and English extraction would, in pilgrimages to Palestine and India, experience a series of strange awakenings - that she was a National Socialist, that she was a Hindu, that the two were entwined in the struggle against the Judeo-Christian order, and that Hitler was the living incarnation of Kalki the Destroyer, the final avatar of Vishnu. Known to many as "Hitler's guru," she stood at the forefronts of Hindu nationalism, Nazi mysticism, Holocaust denial, animal rights, and the international Neo-Nazi movement. The Lightning And The Sun, her most famous work, most directly espouses her philosophy, but perhaps the best place to start would be Long-Whiskers And The Two-Legged Goddess, which is her autobiography as filtered through her many cats. Her nephews were Communists; her own mother was active in the French Resistance; and according to some, the daughter would have shot the mother dead for it. The world is not be a better place for the Savitri Devis of the world, but her presence made this world like none other.
posted by Sticherbeast on Sep 10, 2006 - 22 comments

"I would like to do better, to be better than I am". He's the French New Wave maverick and Academy Award winner (at 26, for his first short) who, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- with considerable personal pain and the admission that "no description, no picture can reveal the true dimension" of what happened in the camps -- made what François Truffaut called "the greatest film ever made", duly censored by French authorities. Four years later he baffled audiences with "the first modern film of sound cinema", shattering the rules of chronology to describe the “anguish of the future”: even if all he ever wanted was "to stop death in its tracks" (French language link), only for one minute. But he is also the unabashed lover of la bande dessinée who learnt English by reading comic books and in the Seventies dreamed (French language link) of making "Spider-Man" into a movie (the Hollywood studios were not convinced), the MGM old-school musical and operetta nut so in love with design that "half of the fashion photography of the past 40 years owes a debt" to him. Now, Alain Resnais' new work, just shown at the Venice Film Festival where his buddy David Lynch was awarded a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, is a French film inspired by an English play with 54 short scenes, music by the X-Files's Mark Snow. (more inside)
posted by matteo on Sep 8, 2006 - 20 comments

Furor over Fuhrer Food But it's not the only Hitler-themed restaurant. Taipei had the Prison restaurant with Concentration Camp murals, and Korea had the infamous 1939 Hitler Bar.

Not that the U.S. was spared. Colorado had a Mao-themed eatery.
posted by FeldBum on Aug 21, 2006 - 69 comments

"F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." The ugly truth about Mel Gibson's drunk-driving arrest oozes out, with exquisite timing. (Enter his name on linked form.) Apple/tree, etc. (via tmz)
posted by turducken on Jul 29, 2006 - 165 comments

The Ghetto Diary of Eli Lesky, The Fifth Horseman, the Buchewald Series, artwork by Joseph Bau; Paintings of the Hmong Migration; Visualizing Otherness - Nazi and other racist propaganda - all this and much, much more from the University of Minnesota's The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
posted by madamjujujive on Jul 27, 2006 - 18 comments

From cooperation to complicity. In 1988, the German chemical giant Degussa commissioned a study (by American historian Peter Hayes) on its collaboration with the National-Socialist regime. The corporation's involvement in the production of Zyklon B has been well publicised, due to the controversy over the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, but it's only one chapter of a larger story that, according to the author (PDF), "suggests that most people, when presented with opportunities or imperatives that they have every imminent or material reason to accept or accede to and only potential or moral grounds to reject, will choose the course of least resistance, internalize the arguments that legitimate it, and balk at admitting that one could or should have done otherwise."
posted by elgilito on Jul 11, 2006 - 18 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

A Story of Survival. The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous was established to fulfill the traditional Jewish commitment to hakarat hatov, the searching out and recognition of goodness .
posted by hortense on May 17, 2006 - 3 comments

Rudolf Vrba-RIP --he escaped from Auschwitz with another guy, Wetzler, in April 1944 and got to Slovakia and Hungary, telling the world of the atrocities in the Auschwitz Protocol. Some Hungarian community leaders, however (Hungary was the only country that hadn't had its Jewish population deported yet), were busy making deals with Eichmann for safe passage away. In any case, the result was that about 1,700 Hungarian Jewish leaders, with their families and friends, ended up in Switzerland, while almost half a million unsuspecting Hungarian Jews ended up dead in Auschwitz. Vrba's report first alerted the world (including the Vatican, Red Cross, and US and British authorities) to exactly what was going on, and helped prosecute some who were tried later. ...Knowing perfectly well that it was the secrecy surrounding their actions that allowed the Nazis to herd unsuspecting Jews and transport them like sheep to slaughter, Vrba and Wetzler — as soon as they got in touch with Jewish community representatives in their native Slovakia — compiled a detailed report. They wrote about Auschwitz and what awaited Hungarian Jews once they arrived: immediate death by gassing.
posted by amberglow on Apr 11, 2006 - 17 comments

Mahler performances were rare in Vienna in those days because Mahler's city had already been contaminated by the acolytes of Adolf Hitler. By their reckoning, Mahler's music was loathsome — a product of "Jewish decadence." To put Mahler's music on the program was therefore a political act. It was to protest and deny the hateful faith that blazed across the border from Germany. That much I understood quite clearly, even as a boy.
The New Yorker's Alex Ross reprints Hans Fantel's New York Times 1989 essay on Bruno Walter's 1938 performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony -- the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before Hitler invaded Austria.
posted by matteo on Apr 10, 2006 - 7 comments

Gas chamber art shut down. Santiago Sierra whose controversial work (some NSFW, auf Deutsch) had taken a turn toward the holocaust, has suspended his latest work in response to criticism.
posted by klangklangston on Mar 14, 2006 - 13 comments

Northwestern engineering professor Arthur R. Butz has over 6,000 signatures denouncing his commendation of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's assertion that the Holocaust is a myth. Rumor has it the university was going to stop hosting faculty sites instead of singling out Butz. His (lousy) university webpage is still up though. Prompted in part by prev discussion here
posted by Smedleyman on Mar 10, 2006 - 100 comments

When Iranian paper Hamshahri (in Persian) launched a contest for Holocaust cartoons, an Israeli group responded in turn with a contest of their own for cartoons that make fun of Jews. Too bad it closed yesterday, or the Dutch branch of the AEL could submit theirs. (WARNING: some of the linked content may be offensive to readers' ethnicities, cultures, religions, or tastes.)
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Mar 4, 2006 - 20 comments

The real Jewish Underground — During the Nazi occupation of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were killed or transported to Nazi concentration camps. In 1942 and 1943, thirty-eight men, women, and children aged 4 to 74 years survived by living underground in two caves for nearly two years (their 344 day stay in Priest's Grotto beat Michel Siffre's 1972 NASA research study.) Emerging at night to cut firewood and steal food, these unwilling troglodytes returned to the cave before dawn to avoid capture. Spelunker Chris Nicola first discovered their survival story (PDF, pp. 6-12) in 1993.
posted by cenoxo on Feb 22, 2006 - 23 comments