Send us a Text Message. 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 pro…

Send us a Text Message. 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 engage…

Send us a Text Message. 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 …

Send us a Text Message. 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 Je…

Send us a Text Message. 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 his…

Send us a Text Message. 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 talk…

Send us a Text Message. 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 …

The historian Keith Lowe, author of the best-selling The Savage Continent, discusses what happened in the aftermath of the Second World War, which left a world in ruins, tens of millions of refugees, and a slide into anarchy and chaos. As the world was slowly rebuilt, this aspect of the war was forgotten - but it had a lasting impact. The music in …

Professor John Bodnar, author of The 'Good War' in American Memory, discusses America's World War Two. The United States came out of the conflict as a victorious superpower. But this has encouraged a narrative of American exceptionalism which has not lived up to critical scrutiny, with historians revealing a divided and often violent country during…

Professor Geoffrey Roberts explains why the Soviet-German conflict on the Eastern front was the decisive theatre of the Second World War: without it, Nazi Germany would certainly have taken much longer to defeat. Despite this, outside military accounts, the Red Army's struggle has been overshadowed in Western narratives by the Anglo-American war ef…

HALIK KOCHANSKI is the author of the award-winning Resistance, a sweeping account of the underground war across Nazi-occupied Europe. She tells a much more complex story than usual of subversion, SOE, partisans and civil war, as well as desperate Jewish defiance. The music in this episode is from Ida Pinkert's 'Four Songs', played by the Nimrod Ens…

PROFESSOR HANS VAN DE VEN reveals a WW2 narrative that will be unfamiliar to most of us - China's epic war of resistance against Japan in the years 1937-45 and how it created the Communist giant that has become the global superpower of today. The music in this episode is from Ida Pinkert's 'Four Songs', played by the Nimrod Ensemble of Berlin as pa…

PROFESSOR CHRISTIAN GERLACH, author of The Extermination of the European Jews, revises the dominant narrative of the Holocaust to explain a phenomenon that was far more complex and far-reaching than has been previously understood. The music in this episode is from Ida Pinkert's 'Four Songs', played by the Nimrod Ensemble of Berlin as part of the Le…

Social historian LIZZIE COLLINGHAM, author of the ground-breaking The Taste of War, explains how food and its delivery was critical to the conduct of WW2 - and could be a matter of life or death. The music in this episode is from Ida Pinkert's 'Four Songs', played by the Nimrod Ensemble of Berlin as part of the Lebensmelodien project, which seeks t…

The American historian IAN W. TOLL, author of the monumental Pacific War Trilogy, offers new insights into the conflict in the Pacific, which has too often been mis-remembered as an army-led narrative when the real victories were won at sea and in the air. The music in this episode is from Ida Pinkert's 'Four Songs', played by the Nimrod Ensemble o…

PROFESSOR RICHARD OVERY explores the global context of WW2 to show how it transforms our understanding of the conflict - in particular, how it was lost and won. The music in this episode is from Ida Pinkert's 'Four Songs', played by the Nimrod Ensemble of Berlin as part of the Lebensmelodien project, which seeks to rediscover the lost music of comp…

PROFESSOR DAVID EDGERTON shows how the traditional narrative of Britain's Second World War is seriously misleading. Britain was the richest nation in Europe in 1939 and lay at the centre of a huge global empire. It also, despite appeasement in the 1930s, maintained a thriving military-industrial-scientific complex throughout the inter-war period. T…

Send us a Text Message. 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…

Send us a Text Message. 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…

Send us a Text Message. 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 w…

Send us a Text Message. 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 …

Send us a Text Message. 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 …

Send us a Text Message. 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, a…

Send us a Text Message. 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 so…

Send us a Text Message. 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…

Send us a Text Message. 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 probl…

Send us a Text Message. 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…

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Send us a Text Message. 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 buil…

Send us a Text Message. 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…

Send us a Text Message. 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…

Send us a Text Message. 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 de…

Send us a Text Message. 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…

Send us a Text Message. 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 tur…

Send us a Text Message. 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.By Waitman Wade Beorn