Holocaust/Shoah - recommended reading in history/theory

[ViolentPanda]

Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness emerged from extensive interviews with Treblinka Commander Franz Stangl charting his journey from junior administrator to mass murderer. The dispassionate nature of the interviews is all the more chilling and illuminating. Its a personal story that doesn't give much comfort to those that wished to see the Holocaust as an aberration perpetrated by wicked monsters. I first came across Sereny on a TV kangaroo court hosted by Robert Kilroy-Silk having to defend her Mary Bell book against a baying hate mob of tabloid reading morons. Lets just say they weren't people who wanted to acquire a deeper understanding of the banality of evil.

Sereny's The German Trauma is good on the post-war social effects of Nazism.

 

[butchersapron]

See also Tom Segev's very good The Seventh Million on the above.

 

[trabuquera]

I haven't read it, though I do know it's politically controversial, especially for those readers more sympathetic to the USSR - but Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands also does a lot of treatment of the geographically wider context -so, not so much 'how Nazis rose to power in Germany and how that related to the Holocaust", but more 'how the Holocaust was frighteningly not the only mass killing - or even the only genocide or targeted mass killing - going on in this part of Europe at the time'.

 

[Idris2002]

Where do you start with this? I'm surprised there isn't a thread already. The list of publications must be very voluminous by now. I've read Finkelstein and the critique of the "holocaust industry".

But what are the key texts - not only in establishing *that* it happened and *how*, but more importantly *why*, *why like this, at that time, in that way*? Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem"? There's a book by Arno Mayer (called something like "Why did the skies not darken" or some such on my list. Raul Hilberg worth reading? What else? Richard Evans panned two recent works in the LRB, but didn't really say what the key texts are.

There's apparently a book just out, or at least recently out, called Eichmann Before Jerusalem. It argues that Arendt got him badly wrong and rather than being a banal little bureaucrat who went along with being a cog in the machine, he was a committed and bitter antisemite from well before the war.

 

[Idris2002]

amazon are apolitical shits who would sell your mother if it turned a few quid, expect nothing from them wrt conscience

They even had a security firm with neo-Nazi links organize security at one of their German warehouses!

 

[Idris2002]

I haven't read it, though I do know it's politically controversial, especially for those readers more sympathetic to the USSR - but Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands also does a lot of treatment of the geographically wider context -so, not so much 'how Nazis rose to power in Germany and how that related to the Holocaust", but more 'how the Holocaust was frighteningly not the only mass killing - or even the only genocide or targeted mass killing - going on in this part of Europe at the time'.

I don't think you have to be sympathiser for the USSR to find him problematic (I've not read the book myself mind).

 

[Hollis]

Free showing of 'Shoah' at Birkbeck. Should be an, err, interesting way to spend a day.

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/about-us/events/shoah-a-landmark-of-twentieth-century-cinema

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Saul Friedlander has already been recommended.

A smaller book with a narrower focus:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13403926-the-night-of-broken-glass

 

[articul8]

Free showing of 'Shoah' at Birkbeck. Should be an, err, interesting way to spend a day.

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/about-us/events/shoah-a-landmark-of-twentieth-century-cinema

It's on bbc4 now - very harrowing

 

[Manter]

Has anyone read 'the third reich in history and memory' by Evans?

 

[butchersapron]

Not been published yet has it?

 

[articul8]

later this month I think - he had a longish piece in the Guardian Review at the weekend.

 

[Manter]

I read the review but didn't read the publication date. Sorry

 

[Pickman's model]

new from the wiener library Home - The Wiener Holocaust Library : Testifying to the truth : Eyewitnesses to the holocaust

 

[not-bono-ever]

Not by any means a academic time but just finishing lost cafe Schindler ( not him) - author tracking her family history back to Innsbruck- it’s interesting to see how the family assets were systematically stripped quasi legally by other Innsbruck residents who had known the family and had fought with them during the WW1 mountain campaign.