New Books in Genocide Studies

Stephanie Wolfe, Matthew Kane and Tawia Ansah's In the Shadow of Genocide: Justice and Memory Within Rwanda (Routledge, 2023) brings together scholars and practitioners for a unique inter-disciplinary exploration of justice and memory within Rwanda. It explores the various strategies the state, civil society, and individuals have employed to come to terms with their past and shape their future. The main objective and focus is to explore broad and varied approaches to post-atrocity memory and justice through the work of those with direct experience with the genocide and its aftermath. This includes many Rwandan authors as well as scholars who have conducted fieldwork in Rwanda. By exploring the concepts of how justice and memory are understood the editors have compiled a book that combines disciplines, voices, and unique insights that are not generally found elsewhere.Including academics and practitioners of law, photographers, poets, members of Rwandan civil society, and Rwandan youth this book will appeal to scholars and students of political science, legal studies, French and francophone studies, African studies, genocide and post-conflict studies, development and healthcare, social work, education and library services. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Our People: Discovering Lithuania's Hidden Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) traces the quest for the truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania by two ostensible enemies: Rūta a descendant of the perpetrators, Efraim a descendant of the victims. Rūta Vanagaite, a successful Lithuanian writer, was motivated by her recent discoveries that some of her relatives had played a role in the mass murder of Jews and that Lithuanian officials had tried to hide the complicity of local collaborators. Efraim Zuroff, a noted Israeli Nazi hunter, had both professional and personal motivations. He had worked for years to bring Lithuanian war criminals to justice and to compel local authorities to tell the truth about the Holocaust in their country. The facts that his maternal grandparents were born in Lithuania and that he was named for a great-uncle who was murdered with his family in Vilnius with the active help of Lithuanians made his search personal as well. Our People exposes the significant role in implementing the Final Solution played by local political leaders and the prewar Lithuanian administration that remained in place during the Nazi occupation. It also tackles the sensitive issue of the motivation of thousands of ordinary Lithuanians who were complicit in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. At the heart of the book, these are the issues that Rūta and Efraim discuss, debate, and analyze as they crisscross the country to visit dozens of Holocaust mass murder sites in Lithuania and neighboring Belarus. This book follows them on their remarkable journey as they search for neglected graves, interview eyewitnesses, and uncover hints of the rich life that had existed in hundreds of Jewish communities throughout Lithuania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Mark Celinscak, the author of Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust published by the University of Toronto Press in 2022. Although liberated by British troops, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was observed by a large number of Canadians who left a sizeable written and photographic record. In addition, war artists such Alex Colville who would become known as Canada’s “painter laureate” sketched and painted the horrific conditions of the prisoners and dead bodies strewn about the camp. After years of research, Celinscak has assembled and organized these reports, letters and images into a compelling book. He is currently the Louis and Frances Blumkin Professor of Holocaust & Genocide Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Before this, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust (Lexington Books, 2021) collects narratives of Bulgarian Jews who survived the Holocaust. Through the analysis of eye-witness testimonies, archival documents, photographs, and researchers' investigations, the authors weave a complex tapestry of voices that were previously underrepresented, ignored, and denied. Taken together, the collected memories offer an alternative perspective that counters official accounts and corroborates war crimes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In the early days of World War II, as Nazi Germany brutally invaded and occupied neighboring countries around Europe, hundreds of Norwegian police officers were commanded to carry out the orders of the Nazi occupiers of their homeland - Norway. They refused. Even under threat of death, they refused. Their refusal led to their imprisonment and their removal from Norway, ultimately to KZ-Stutthof in eastern Poland, where an elaborate network of concentration and death camps had been created mainly for Jews and Poles. Author Tore Jørgensen's father was one of those police officers.Stutthof Diaries Collection: For Truth & Honor (FriesenPress, 2022) is a recounting of these heroes' experiences, both in trying to maintain national pride and order in Norway before their expulsion and in trying to stay alive and outlast mental and physical exhaustion while in detainment. Over the last 22 years, as a labor of love and duty to preserve, Jørgensen gathered a large number of diaries and memoirs in which the police, true to their training, recorded the details of their experiences. These articulate witness accounts have provided a record that is exceptional - a treasure trove of anecdotes describing how personal sacrifice can triumph over purposeless greed and violence.The story of these Norwegian police officers is a story that celebrates the redemptive force of conscious choice against evil, of how love and compassion can help people through some of the darkest periods of their lives. Through their stories, the Norwegian police officers, loyal to their country and each other while reaching out to aid their fellow sufferers at the same time that they struggled for their own survival, urge readers to not repeat the history and the myth of racial superiority that led to the rise of Nazism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Monumental Names: Archival Aesthetics and the Conjuration of History in Moscow (Routledge, 2022) asks us to consider: what stands behind the propensity to remember victims of mass atrocities by their personal names? Grounded in ethnographic and archival research with Last Address and Memorial, one of the oldest independent archives of Soviet political repressions in Moscow and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic examines a version of archival activism that is centred on various practices of documentation and commemoration of many dead victims of historical violence in Russia to understand what kind of historicity is produced when a single name is added to an endless list.What do acts of accumulation of names of the dead affirm when they are concretised in monuments and performance events? The key premise is that multimodal inscriptions of names of the dead entail a political, aesthetic and conceptual movement between singularity and multitude that honours each dead name yet conveys the scale of a mass atrocity without reducing it to a number.Drawing on anthropology, history, philosophy, and aesthetic theory, the book yields a new perspective on the politics of archival and historical justice while it critically engages with the debates on relations and distinctions between names and numbers of the dead, monumental art and its political effects, law and history, image and text, the specific one and the infinite many.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Chris Webb's The Belzec Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem, 2016) is a comprehensive account of the Belzec death camp in Poland, which was the first death camp to use static gas chambers as part of the Aktion Reinhardt mass murder program. It covers the construction and the development of the mechanisms of mass murder. The story is painstakingly told from all sides—the Jewish inmates, the perpetrators, and the Polish inhabitants of the village of Belzec, who lived near the factory of death. A major part of this work is the Jewish Roll of Remembrance, which covers the few survivors and the lives of some of the Jews among the many hundreds of thousands who perished in Belzec. The book is richly illustrated with historical and modern photographs, some of which are previously unpublished, as well as documents and drawings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Roma Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Radu Ioanid explores in great detail the physical destruction of Romania's Jewish and Roma communities, including the pogroms of Bucharest and Iaşi as well as the deportations and the massacres from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. Based on thousands of archival documents and testimonies of survivors, The Holocaust in Romania sheds new light on Romania's prefascist and fascist antisemitic legislation and its implementation. New chapters consider the forced labor of the Jews, persecution by the Protestant churches, and the decision-making process of the Antonescu government in its treatment of Jews and Roma. With this book, the Romanian Holocaust will no longer be forgotten. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton UP, 2010) documents the process, and relative ease, with which institutions of higher learning and the religious establishment, can be corrupted by political ideology and power.In Germany of the 1930’s the thin cloak of religion covered and sanitized the murderous evil of Naziism.Was Jesus a Nazi?During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. In The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread influence and producing a nazified Christianity that placed anti-Semitism at its theological center.Based on years of archival research, The Aryan Jesus examines the membership and activities of this controversial theological organization. With headquarters in Eisenach, the Institute sponsored propaganda conferences throughout the Nazi Reich and published books defaming Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Institute members--professors of theology, bishops, and pastors--viewed their efforts as a vital support for Hitler's war against the Jews. Heschel looks in particular at Walter Grundmann, the Institute's director and a professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena. Grundmann and his colleagues formed a community of like-minded Nazi Christians who remained active and continued to support each other in Germany's postwar years.The Aryan Jesus raises vital questions about Christianity's recent past and the ambivalent place of Judaism in Christian thought.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In the midst of the Second World War, Central and East European governments-in-exile struggled to make their voices heard as they reported back to the Allies and sought to reach mass Allied publics with eyewitness testimony of German atrocities committed in their respective homelands. The most striking case is that of Poland, whose wartime exile government served as the principal conduit for first-hand testimony (much of which was initially ignored, questioned, or suppressed by the major Allies) of both the Holocaust and the German occupiers’ mass repression and killing of non-Jewish Poles. Historian Michael Fleming offers a rich and unprecedented take on the story of Poles’ contributions to the emergence of a global legal regime for prosecuting war crimes, by reconstructing the central contribution of the Polish War Crimes Office in London to the emergence, successful work, and postwar legacy of the UN War Crimes Commission. In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is a ground-breaking intervention in global legal history, in Polish history, and in the history of the transition from World War II to the Cold War.Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies