Book Burning, 1933

Kindertransport, 1938

SA Boycott, 1933 Kristallnacht, 1938 Buchenwald, 1938–1941

UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

Teaching about the Holocaust

A R ESOURCE B OOK FOR E DUCATORS
i

Teaching about the Holocaust

A R ESOURCE B OOK FOR E DUCATORS

VISITING THE MUSEUM

Introduction................................................................................................................. iii

Visiting the Museum’s Permanent Exhibition............................................................... iii

Group Visits to the Permanent Exhibition.................................................................... iv

Request Form: Group Visit to the Permanent Exhibition............................................. v

Other Exhibitions and Facilities ................................................................................... vi

TEACHING RESOURCES

Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust ............................................................... 1

Suggested Topic Areas for a Course of Study on the Holocaust .................................... 17

History of the Holocaust:An Overview....................................................................... 19

Chronology of the Holocaust ....................................................................................... 29

Museum Online • www.ushmm.org ............................................................................ 45

The Education Resource Center ................................................................................. 49

Request Form: Educational Resources......................................................................... 50

Teacher Professional Development ............................................................................... 53

Annotated Bibliography ............................................................................................... 55

Annotated Videography................................................................................................ 99

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,Washington, D.C., March 2001.
Two members of the SA encourage the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. (April 1, 1933) 

Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz
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V I S I T I N G T H E M U S E U M

Visiting the Museum

INTRODUCTION

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America’s national institution for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history, and serves as this country’s memorial to the

millions of people murdered during the Holocaust.

The Museum’s primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented

tragedy; to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon

the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.

Chartered by a unanimous Act of Congress in 1980, and located adjacent to the National Mall in

Washington, D.C., the Museum strives to broaden public understanding of the history of the

Holocaust through multifaceted programs that include exhibitions; research and publications;

the collection and preservation of material evidence, art, and artifacts relating to the Holocaust;

annual Holocaust commemorations known as Days of Remembrance; distribution of educational

materials and teacher resources; and a variety of public programming designed to enhance understanding of the Holocaust and related issues, including those of contemporary significance.

As mandated by Congress, the Museum has developed a number of resources, services, and

programs—including this resource book—to assist educators and students who want to teach 

and learn about the Holocaust.

VISITING THE MUSEUM’S PERMANENT EXHIBITION

The Museum’s Permanent Exhibition is recommended for visitors 11 years of age and older. The

self-guided, three-floor exhibition presents a comprehensive history of the Holocaust through artifacts, photographs, films, and eyewitness testimonies. Middle and high school students usually take

between one and a half to two hours to walk through the exhibition; adults often take longer.

Individual Reservations:Timed passes are required only for the Permanent Exhibition. Same-day

passes are distributed free of charge each day at the Museum beginning at 10 a.m. on a first-come,

first-served basis.There is a limit of four passes per person.Advance passes may be acquired through

tickets.com for a small service fee:

(800) 400-9373 www.tickets.com
Group Reservations: Groups of more than ten people must make group reservations;

see pages iv–v.

Orientation Film: The orientation film provides an overview of the Museum’s exhibitions and

memorials.The 14-minute film is presented throughout the day and visitors are encouraged to view

the film upon arrival.

GROUP VISITS TO THE PERMANENT EXHIBITION

■ The Group Scheduling Office only accepts reservation requests in writing. Reservations

cannot be made by telephone. Please complete the form on page v of this publication and

send it to the attention of the Coordinator of Scheduling.

■ A group is defined as more than ten people.

■ You may request a group reservation for any day of the week.Visits are scheduled on the half

hour beginning at 10 a.m. and ending at 4 p.m.

■ All requests must include your group’s size and a specific date. By providing alternative dates,

your chances of obtaining a reservation are greatly increased.

■ You should send your request several months in advance. Requests are gladly accepted and

processed 12 months ahead of the date requested.All requests are filed according to date of

receipt and are booked on a first-come, first-served basis.

■ Groups including children or students below college level must be accompanied by chaperons.We require a ratio of one adult to every seven children. Chaperons serve to provide

guidance through difficult subject matter and to preserve order among their group in the

event of an emergency.

■ As a Federal institution, the Museum has a special policy on accepting reservations from any

for-profit, third-party representatives (such as travel agents or tour operators). If you would

like to know more about this policy, please call (202) 488-0455 and leave your address.

Information outlining our policy will be sent to you.

■ Please note:Weekends and holidays, as well as March–June and September–November, are

extremely popular times to visit the Museum and Washington, D.C., in general. Because the

Permanent Exhibition has a prescribed sequential path, space constraints, the quality of the

individual visit,and the observance of fire and safety codes must be considered.Thus,we have

only a limited number of group spaces we may reserve at any given time. If your group plans

to visit during one of our busier periods, please include as many alternative dates as possible

and submit your request as early as you can.

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V I S I T I N G T H E M U S E U M

REQUEST FORM: GROUP VISIT TO THE 

PERMANENT EXHIBITION

Please read carefully and fill out completely. Submit this form at least three weeks prior to the date of your

request.

We will gladly accept and schedule requests up to one year in advance.

Group name:

Contact person:

Address:

Phone:

Fax:

E-mail:

Date requested: Time range:

Alternative date 1: Time range:

Alternative date 2: Time range:

Due to high demand, many dates/times may be unavailable. Please indicate alternative or flexible times and

dates, as they often significantly increase the likelihood of confirmation.

Number of adults: Number of children/students:

We require a ratio of at least one adult to every seven students below college level.

Please send this form to: Coordinator of Scheduling

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW

Washington, DC 20024-2126

FAX: (202) 488-2606

You may send the required information to the Group Scheduling Office by e-mail to group_visit@ushmm.org.

You also may make requests through the Museum’s website at www.ushmm.org.

This form represents a request for a group appointment; it does not guarantee a booking. Separate confirmation

packets and a teacher guide to the Permanent Exhibition The Holocaust are sent via U.S. mail.

UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
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OTHER EXHIBITIONS AND FACILITIES

On average, students spend between one and a half to two hours in the Permanent Exhibition. Keep

in mind that, in addition to the Permanent Exhibition, there are other on-site exhibitions and facilities from which students can learn about the Holocaust. Because a visit to the Permanent Exhibition

can be an overwhelming experience, we recommend that you choose only one or, at most, two additional exhibitions or facilities for your students to view on the day of your visit. Reservations are not

necessary for any of the following:

Orientation Film: Before entering the Permanent Exhibition, students can view an orientation film

that provides an introduction to the Museum. The 14-minute film is shown in a theater on the

Concourse at quarter after and quarter of the hour from 10:15 a.m. to 4:15 p.m.

Remember the Children: Daniel’s Story: For visitors age eight and older, this hands-on exhibition

recounts the history of the Holocaust from the perspective of a child growing up in Nazi Germany.

Special Exhibitions: The Museum regularly presents exhibitions on specific aspects of the

Holocaust and related issues. For information on current special exhibitions, consult the Museum’s

website at www.ushmm.org or call (202) 488-0400.

Wexner Learning Center: Touch-screen computer stations offer an opportunity to study specific

Holocaust-related topics through text, photographs, maps, films, eyewitness testimonies, and music.

Hall of Remembrance:The hexagonal Hall of Remembrance, with its eternal flame, is America’s

national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.Visitors are encouraged to light a candle in

memory of the victims.

Wall of Remembrance (Children’s Tile Wall): More than 3,000 tiles painted by American school

children form this memorial to the approximately 1.5 million children murdered during the

Holocaust.

Museum Shop: The Museum Shop offers students and teachers age-appropriate historical text,

memoirs, literature, and poetry in the section entitled “Young Readers.”The Shop has a “Teacher

Resource” section as well as a diverse selection of titles appropriate for adult and/or advanced student

reading. Videos, compact discs, posters, keepsakes, and postcards are also available for purchase.

A selection of these materials is available online at www.holocaustbooks.org.

Museum Café: The Museum has a small café in the Ross Administrative Center adjacent to the

Museum for visitors who wish to purchase lunch.The average price for lunch is under $10.00 per

person. Although the café is not kosher, kosher meals are available upon request. No food or drink

is allowed inside the Museum. Students who bring bag lunches may sit outside the Museum in 

designated areas.

A member of the SA throws confiscated books into a bonfire during the public burning of “un-German” books in Berlin, Germany. (May 10, 1933)

USHMM
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Teaching Resources

GUIDELINES FOR TEACHING ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST 

WHY TEACH HOLOCAUST HISTORY? 

The history of the Holocaust provides one of the most effective, and most extensively documented, subjects for a pedagogical examination of basic moral issues. A structured inquiry into

Holocaust history yields critical lessons for an investigation of human behavior. A study of the

Holocaust also addresses one of the central tenets of education in the United States, which is to

examine what it means to be a responsible citizen.Through a study of the Holocaust, students can

come to realize that

■ democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained, but need to be appreciated, nurtured, and protected;

■ silence and indifference to the suffering of others, or to the infringement of civil rights in

any society, can—however unintentionally—perpetuate the problems; and 

■ the Holocaust was not an accident in history—it occurred because individuals, organizations,

and governments made choices that not only legalized discrimination but also allowed 

prejudice, hatred, and ultimately, mass murder to occur.

QUESTIONS OF RATIONALE 

Because the objective of teaching any subject is to engage the intellectual curiosity of the student in

order to inspire critical thought and personal growth, it is helpful to structure your lesson plan on

the Holocaust by considering throughout questions of rationale. Before deciding what and how to

teach, we recommend that you contemplate the following:

■ Why should students learn this history? 

■ What are the most significant lessons students should learn from a study of the Holocaust? 

■ Why is a particular reading, image, document, or film an appropriate medium for conveying

the lessons about the Holocaust that you wish to teach?
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Among the various rationales offered by educators who have incorporated a study of the Holocaust

into their various courses and disciplines are

■ The Holocaust was a watershed event, not only in the twentieth century but also in the

entire history of humanity.

■ Study of the Holocaust assists students in developing an understanding of the ramifications

of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping in any society. It helps students develop an awareness

of the value of pluralism and encourages tolerance of diversity in a pluralistic society.

■ The Holocaust provides a context for exploring the dangers of remaining silent, apathetic,

and indifferent in the face of others’ oppression.

■ Holocaust history demonstrates how a modern nation can utilize its technological expertise

and bureaucratic infrastructure to implement destructive policies ranging from social engineering to genocide.

■ A study of the Holocaust helps students think about the use and abuse of power, and the

roles and responsibilities of individuals, organizations, and nations when confronted with

civil rights violations and/or policies of genocide.

■ As students gain insight into the many historical, social, religious, political, and economic

factors that cumulatively resulted in the Holocaust, they gain awareness of the complexity

of the subject and a perspective on how a convergence of factors can contribute to the

disintegration of democratic values. Students come to understand that it is the responsibility

of citizens in a democracy to learn to identify the danger signals, and to know when to react.

When you, as an educator, take the time to consider the rationale for your lesson on the Holocaust,

you will be more likely to select content that speaks to your students’ interests and that provides them

with a clearer understanding of a complex history. Most students demonstrate a high level of interest

in studying the Holocaust precisely because the subject raises questions of fairness, justice, individual

identity, peer pressure, conformity, indifference, and obedience—issues that adolescents confront in

their daily lives. Students are also affected by and challenged to comprehend the magnitude of the

Holocaust;they are particularly struck by the fact that so many people allowed this genocide to occur

by failing either to resist or to protest.

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AGE APPROPRIATENESS

Students in grades 7 and above demonstrate an ability to empathize with individual eyewitness

accounts and to attempt to understand the complexities of this history, including the scope and scale

of the events. While elementary students are able to empathize with individual survivor accounts,

they often have difficulty placing these personal stories in a larger historical context. Such demonstrable developmental differences have traditionally shaped social studies curricula throughout the

country; in most states, students are not introduced to European history and geography—the context

for the Holocaust—before grades 7 or 8.

METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 

The teaching of Holocaust history demands of educators a high level of sensitivity and a keen awareness of the complexity of the subject matter. The recommendations that follow, while reflecting

methodological approaches that would be appropriate to effective teaching in general, are particularly relevant in the context of Holocaust education.

1. Define the term “Holocaust.” 

The Holocaust refers to a specific genocidal event in twentieth-century history: the state-sponsored,

systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators

between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims—6 million were murdered; Gypsies, the

handicapped, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national

reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and

political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.

2. Avoid comparisons of pain. 

A study of the Holocaust should always highlight the different policies carried out by the Nazi

regime toward various groups of people;however,these distinctions should not be presented as a basis

for comparison of suffering between those groups. Similarly, one cannot presume that the horror of

an individual, family, or community destroyed by the Nazis was any greater than that experienced by

victims of other genocides.Avoid generalizations that suggest exclusivity such as “the victims of the

Holocaust suffered the most cruelty ever faced by a people in the history of humanity.”

3. Avoid simple answers to complex history. 

A study of the Holocaust raises difficult questions about human behavior, and it often involves

complicated answers as to why events occurred. Be wary of oversimplifications. Allow students to

contemplate the various factors that contributed to the Holocaust; do not attempt to reduce

Holocaust history to one or two catalysts in isolation from the other factors that came into play. For

example, the Holocaust was not simply the logical and inevitable consequence of unbridled racism.
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Rather, racism combined with centuries-old bigotry and antisemitism; renewed by a nationalistic

fervor that emerged in Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century; fueled by Germany’s

defeat in World War I and its national humiliation following the Treaty of Versailles; exacerbated by

worldwide economic hard times, the ineffectiveness of the Weimar Republic, and international indifference; and catalyzed by the political charisma and manipulative propaganda of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi

regime contributed to the occurrence of the Holocaust.

4. Just because it happened does not mean it was inevitable. 

Too often students have the simplistic impression that the Holocaust was inevitable. Just because a

historical event took place, and it was documented in textbooks and on film, does not mean that it

had to happen.This seemingly obvious concept is often overlooked by students and teachers alike.The

Holocaust took place because individuals, groups, and nations made decisions to act or not to act. By

focusing on those decisions, you gain insight into history and human nature and can better help your

students to become critical thinkers.

5. Strive for precision of language. 

Any study of the Holocaust touches upon nuances of human behavior. Because of the complexity

of the history, there is a temptation to overgeneralize and thus to distort the facts (e.g.,“all concentration camps were killing centers” or “all Germans were collaborators”). Rather, you must strive to

help your students clarify the information presented and encourage them to distinguish the differences between prejudice and discrimination, collaborators and bystanders, armed and spiritual

resistance, direct orders and assumed orders, concentration camps and killing centers, and guilt and

responsibility.

Words that describe human behavior often have multiple meanings. Resistance, for example, usually

refers to a physical act of armed revolt. During the Holocaust, it also encompassed partisan activity;

the smuggling of messages, food, and weapons; and actual military engagement. But resistance also

embraced willful disobedience such as continuing to practice religious and cultural traditions in

defiance of the rules or creating fine art, music, and poetry inside ghettos and concentration camps.

For many, simply maintaining the will to remain alive in the face of abject brutality was an act of

spiritual resistance.

6. Make careful distinctions about sources of information. 

Students need practice in distinguishing between fact, opinion, and fiction; between primary and

secondary sources; and between types of evidence such as court testimonies, oral histories, and other

written documents.Hermeneutics—the science of interpretation—should be called into play to help

guide your students in their analysis of sources. Students should be encouraged to consider why a

particular text was written, who wrote it, who the intended audience was, whether there were any

biases inherent in the information, whether any gaps occurred in discussion, whether omissions in

certain passages were inadvertent or not, and how the information has been used to interpret various

events.

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Because scholars often base their research on different bodies of information, varying interpretations

of history can emerge. Consequently, all interpretations are subject to analytical evaluation. Only by

refining their own “hermeneutic of suspicion” can students mature into readers who discern the

difference between legitimate scholars who present competing historical interpretations and those

who distort or deny historical fact for personal or political gain.

7. Try to avoid stereotypical descriptions. 

Though all Jews were targeted for destruction by the Nazis, the experiences of all Jews were not the

same. Simplistic views and stereotyping take place when groups of people are viewed as monolithic

in attitudes and actions. How ethnic groups or social clusters are labeled and portrayed in school

curricula has a direct impact on how students perceive groups in their daily lives. Remind your

students that,although members of a group may share common experiences and beliefs, generalizations about them, without benefit of modifying or qualifying terms (e.g.,“sometimes,”“usually,”“in

many cases but not all”) tend to stereotype group behavior and distort historical reality. Thus, all

Germans cannot be characterized as Nazis nor should any nationality be reduced to a singular or

one-dimensional description.

8. Do not romanticize history to engage students’ interest. 

People who risked their lives to rescue victims of Nazi oppression provide useful, important, and

compelling role models for students. However, given that only a small fraction of non-Jews under

Nazi occupation helped to rescue Jews, an overemphasis on heroic tales in a unit on the Holocaust

can result in an inaccurate and unbalanced account of the history. Similarly, in exposing students to

the worst aspects of human nature as revealed in the history of the Holocaust, you run the risk of

fostering cynicism in your students.Accuracy of fact along with a balanced perspective on the history

must be priorities for any teacher.

9. Contextualize the history you are teaching. 

Events of the Holocaust and, particularly, how individuals and organizations behaved at that time,

should be placed in historical context. The occurrence of the Holocaust must be studied in the

context of European history as a whole to give students a perspective on the precedents and circumstances that may have contributed to it.

Similarly, study of the Holocaust should be viewed within a contemporaneous context, so students

can begin to comprehend the circumstances that encouraged or discouraged particular actions or

events. Frame your approach to specific events and acts of complicity or defiance by considering

when and where an act took place; the immediate consequences to oneself and one’s family of one’s

actions; the impact of contemporaneous events; the degree of control the Nazis had on a country or

local population; the cultural attitudes of particular native populations historically toward different

victim groups; and the availability, effectiveness, and risk of potential hiding places.
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Students should be reminded that individuals and groups do not always fit neatly into categories of

behavior. The very same people did not always act consistently as “bystanders,” “collaborators,”

“perpetrators,” or “rescuers.” Individuals and groups often behaved differently depending upon

changing events and circumstances.The same person who in 1933 might have stood by and remained

uninvolved while witnessing social discrimination of Jews might later have joined up with the SA

and become a collaborator or have been moved to dissent vocally or act in defense of Jewish friends

and neighbors.

Encourage your students not to categorize groups of people only on the basis of their experiences

during the Holocaust: contextualization is critical so that victims are not perceived only as victims.

The fact that Jews were the central victims of the Nazi regime should not obscure the vibrant culture

and long history of Jews in Europe prior to the Nazi era. By exposing students to some of the

cultural contributions and achievements of 2,000 years of European Jewish life, you help them to

balance their perception of Jews as victims and to better appreciate the traumatic disruption in Jewish

history caused by the Holocaust.

Similarly, students may know very little about Gypsies (Roma and Sinti) except for the negative

images and derogatory descriptions promulgated by the Nazis.Students would benefit from a broader

viewpoint, learning something about Gypsy history and culture as well as understanding the diverse

ways of life among different Gypsy groups.

10. Translate statistics into people. 

In any study of the Holocaust, the sheer number of victims challenges easy comprehension.You need

to show that individual people—families of grandparents, parents, and children—are behind the

statistics and to emphasize that within the larger historical narrative is a diversity of personal

experience. Precisely because they portray people in the fullness of their lives and not just as victims,

first-person accounts and memoir literature provide students with a way of making meaning out

of collective numbers and give individual voices to a collective experience. Although students

should be careful about overgeneralizing from first-person accounts such as those from survivors,

journalists, relief workers, bystanders, and liberators, personal accounts help students get beyond

statistics and make historical events of the Holocaust more immediate and more personal.

11. Be sensitive to appropriate written and audiovisual content. 

One of the primary concerns of educators teaching the history of the Holocaust is how to present

horrific images in a sensitive and appropriate manner.Graphic material should be used judiciously and

only to the extent necessary to achieve the objective of the lesson.You should remind yourself that

each student and each class is different and that what seems appropriate for one may not be appropriate for all.

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Students are essentially a “captive audience.” When you assault them with images of horror for which

they are unprepared, you violate a basic trust: the obligation of a teacher to provide a “safe” learning

environment.The assumption that all students will seek to understand human behavior after being

exposed to horrible images is fallacious. Some students may be so appalled by images of brutality and

mass murder that they are discouraged from studying the subject further. Others may become fascinated in a more voyeuristic fashion, subordinating further critical analysis of the history to the

superficial titillation of looking at images of starvation, disfigurement, and death.Though they can be

powerful tools, shocking images of mass killings and barbarisms should not overwhelm a student’s

awareness of the broader scope of events within Holocaust history.Try to select images and texts that

do not exploit the students’ emotional vulnerability or that might be construed as disrespectful of

the victims themselves.

12. Strive for balance in establishing whose perspective informs your study of the Holocaust. 

Often, too great an emphasis is placed on the victims of Nazi aggression rather than on the victimizers who forced people to make impossible choices or simply left them with no choice to make.

Most students express empathy for victims of mass murder. But it is not uncommon for students to

assume that the victims may have done something to justify the actions against them and, thus, to

place inappropriate blame on the victims themselves.

There is also a tendency among students to glorify power, even when it is used to kill innocent

people. Many teachers indicate that their students are intrigued and, in some cases, intellectually

seduced by the symbols of power that pervaded Nazi propaganda (e.g., the swastika and/or Nazi

flags, regalia, slogans, rituals, and music). Rather than highlight the trappings of Nazi power, you

should ask your students to evaluate how such elements are used by governments (including our

own) to build, protect, and mobilize a society. Students should also be encouraged to contemplate

how such elements can be abused and manipulated by governments to implement and legitimize acts

of terror and even genocide.

In any review of the propaganda used to promote Nazi ideology—Nazi stereotypes of targeted

victim groups and the Hitler regime’s justifications for persecution and murder—you need to remind

your students that just because such policies and beliefs are under discussion in class does not mean

they are acceptable. Furthermore, any study of the Holocaust should attempt to portray all individuals, especially the victims and the perpetrators of violence, as human beings who are capable of

moral judgment and independent decision making.

13. Select appropriate learning activities. 

Word scrambles, crossword puzzles, and other gimmicky exercises tend not to encourage critical

analysis but lead instead to low-level types of thinking and, in the case of Holocaust curricula, trivialize the history.When the effects of a particular activity, even when popular with you and your

students, run counter to the rationale for studying the history, then that activity should not be used.
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Similarly, activities that encourage students to construct models of killing centers should also be

reconsidered because any assignment along this line will almost inevitably end up being simplistic,

time-consuming, and tangential to the educational objectives for studying the history of the

Holocaust.

Thought-provoking learning activities are preferred, but even here, there are pitfalls to avoid. In

studying complex human behavior, many teachers rely upon simulation exercises meant to help

students “experience” unfamiliar situations. Even when great care is taken to prepare a class for such

an activity, simulating experiences from the Holocaust remains pedagogically unsound.The activity

may engage students, but they often forget the purpose of the lesson and, even worse, they are left

with the impression at the conclusion of the activity that they now know what it was like during

the Holocaust. Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses are among the first to indicate the grave

difficulty of finding words to describe their experiences. It is virtually impossible to simulate

accurately what it was like to live on a daily basis with fear, hunger, disease, unfathomable loss, and

the unrelenting threat of abject brutality and death.

An additional problem with trying to simulate situations from the Holocaust is that complex events

and actions are oversimplified, and students are left with a skewed view of history. Because there are

numerous primary source accounts, both written and visual, as well as survivors and eyewitnesses

who can describe actual choices faced and made by individuals, groups, and nations during this

period, you should draw upon these resources and refrain from simulation games that lead to a

trivialization of the subject matter.

Rather than use simulation activities that attempt to re-create situations from the Holocaust, teachers

can,through the use of reflective writing assignments or in-class discussion, ask students to empathize

with the experiences of those who lived through the Holocaust era. Students can be encouraged to

explore varying aspects of human behavior such as fear, scapegoating, conflict resolution, and difficult

decision making or to consider various perspectives on a particular event or historical experience.

14. Reinforce the objectives of your lesson plan. 

As in all teaching situations, the opening and closing lessons are critically important. A strong

opening should serve to dispel misinformation students may have prior to studying the Holocaust.

It should set a reflective tone, move students from passive to active learning, indicate to students that

their ideas and opinions matter, and establish that this history has multiple ramifications for them as

individuals and as members of society as a whole.

Your closing lesson should encourage further examination of Holocaust history, literature, and art.

A strong closing should emphasize synthesis by encouraging students to connect this history to other

world events and to the world they live in today. Students should be encouraged to reflect on what

they have learned and to consider what this study means to them personally and as citizens of a

democracy.

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INCORPORATING A STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST 

INTO EXISTING COURSES 

The Holocaust can be effectively integrated into various existing courses within the school

curriculum. This section presents sample rationale statements and methodological approaches for

incorporating a study of the Holocaust in seven different courses. Each course synopsis constitutes a

mere fraction of the various rationales and approaches currently used by educators. Often, the rationales and methods listed under one course also can be applied to other courses.

UNITED STATES HISTORY 

Although the history of the United States is introduced at various grade levels throughout most school

curricula, all states require students to take a course in American history at the high-school level.

Incorporating a study of the Holocaust into American history courses can encourage students to

■ examine the dilemmas that arise when foreign policy goals are narrowly defined, as solely

in terms of the national interest, thus denying the validity of universal moral and human

principles;

■ recognize the fundamental fragility of democratic institutions and the need for citizens of a

democracy to be both well informed and vigilant about the preservation of democratic

ideals;

■ examine the responses of governmental and nongovernmental organizations in the United

States to the plight of Holocaust victims (e.g., the Evian Conference, the debate over the

Wagner-Rogers bill to assist refugee children, the ill-fated voyage of the St. Louis, the

Emergency Rescue Committee, the rallies and efforts of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the

decision by the United States not to bomb the railroad lines leading into Auschwitz);

■ explore the role of American and Allied soldiers in liberating victims from Nazi concentration camps and killing centers, using, for example, first-person accounts of liberators to

ascertain their initial responses to and subsequent reflections about what they witnessed; and 

■ examine the key role played by the United States in bringing Nazi perpetrators to trial at

Nuremberg and other war crimes trials.
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Since most history and social studies teachers in the United States rely upon standard textbooks, they

can incorporate the Holocaust into regular units of study such as the Great Depression,World War

II, and the Cold War. Questions that introduce Holocaust studies into these subject areas include

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

How were United States electoral politics influenced by the Depression? What were the immediate

consequences of the worldwide Depression on the European economic and political system established by the Versailles Treaty of 1919? What was the impact of the Depression upon the electoral

strength of the Nazi party in Germany? Was the Depression a contributing factor to the Nazis’ rise

to power? 

WORLD WAR II, ITS PRELUDE AND AFTERMATH

What was the relationship between the United States and Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939? How

did the actions of Nazi Germany influence American foreign policy? What was the response of the

United States government and nongovernmental organizations to the unfolding events of the

Holocaust? What was the role of the United States in the war crimes trials? 

THE COLD WAR

How did the rivalries between the United States and its former World War II ally, the Soviet Union,

influence American attitudes toward former Nazis? What was the position of America’s European

allies toward members of the former Nazi regime? 

WORLD HISTORY 

Although various aspects of world history are incorporated throughout school curricula, most

students are not required to take world history courses. It is in the context of world history courses,

however, that the Holocaust is usually taught. Inclusion of the Holocaust in a world history course

or unit helps students to

■ examine events, deeds, and ideas in European history that contributed to the Holocaust, such

as the history of antisemitism, the development of race science in the nineteenth century, the

rise of German nationalism, the defeat of Germany in World War I, and the failure of the

democratic Weimar Republic;

■ reflect upon the commonly held presumption that Western civilization has been progressing

in a positive direction since the Enlightenment;

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■ explore how the various policies of the Nazi regime were interrelated (e.g., the connections

between establishing a totalitarian government, carrying out racial policies, and waging

war); and 

■ reflect upon the moral and ethical implications of the genocide against the Jews as a watershed

in world history by examining the systematic planning and implementation of a government

policy to kill millions of people; the use of technological advances to carry out mass slaughter;

the role of Nazi collaborators; and the role of bystanders around the world who chose not to

intervene in the persecution and murder of Jews and other victims.

Since most teachers rely upon standard textbooks and a chronological approach to history,teachers may

wish to incorporate the Holocaust into the following standardized units of study in European history:

The Aftermath of World War I, The Rise of the Dictators, The World at War, 1939–1945, and The

Consequences of War. Questions that introduce Holocaust studies into these subject areas include

THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR I

What role did the Versailles Treaty play in the restructuring of European and world politics? How

did the reconfiguration of Europe following World War I influence German national politics in the

period 1919–1933? 

THE RISE OF THE DICTATORS

What factors led to the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the period between the two world

wars? How were long-established prejudices, including antisemitism, exploited by the Nazis and

other regimes (Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union) to justify dictatorial measures? 

THE WORLD AT WAR, 1939–1945

Why has the Holocaust often been called a “war within the war”? How did the Holocaust affect

Nazi military decisions? Why might it be “easier” to commit genocidal acts during wartime than

during a period of relative peace? 

THE CONSEQUENCES OF WAR

What was the connection between World War II and the formation of the State of Israel? Was a

new internationally recognized standard of legal accountability introduced with the convening of

the Nuremberg Tribunals? How did the Cold War affect the fate of former Nazis? 
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WORLD CULTURES 

A course on world cultures incorporates knowledge from both the humanities and the social sciences

into a study of cultural patterns and social institutions of various societies. A study of the Holocaust

in a world cultures course helps students

■ examine conflicts arising between majority and minority groups in a specific cultural sphere

(Europe between 1933–1945);

■ further their understanding of how a government can manipulate concepts such as ethnicity,

race, diversity, and nationality to justify persecution, murder, and annihilation;

■ analyze the extent to which cultures are able to survive and maintain their traditions and

institutions (e.g., retaining religious practices, recording eyewitness accounts, and hiding

cultural symbols and artifacts) when faced with threats to their very existence; and 

■ apply insights achieved through an examination of the Holocaust to gain an understanding

of other genocides.

GOVERNMENT 

Government courses at the high school level usually focus on understanding the U.S.political system,

comparative studies of various governments, and the international relationship of nations. The

Holocaust can be incorporated into a study of government in order to demonstrate how the development of public policy can be subverted toward destructive, even genocidal, ends when dissent and

debate are silenced. Inclusion of Holocaust studies in government courses helps students 

■ compare governmental systems (e.g., by investigating how the Weimar Constitution in

Germany prior to the Nazi seizure of power was similar to, or different from, the

Constitution of the United States; by comparing the Nazi system of governance with that of

the United States);

■ study the process of how a state can degenerate from a (parliamentary) democracy into a

totalitarian state (e.g., by examining the processes by which the Nazis gained absolute control

of the German government and how the Nazi government then controlled virtually all

segments of German society);

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■ examine how the development of public policy can lead to genocidal ends, especially when

people remain silent in the face of discriminatory practices (e.g., the development of Nazi

racial and genocide policies beginning with the philosophical platform elaborated in Hitler’s

Mein Kampf, continuing through the state-imposed Nuremberg Laws, and culminating with

governmental policies of murder and extermination after 1941);

■ examine the role of Nazi bureaucracy in implementing policies of murder and annihilation

(e.g., the development and maintenance of a system to identify, isolate, deport, enslave, and

kill targeted people) and in the exploitation of the victims and their property;

■ examine the role of various individuals in the rise and fall of a totalitarian government

(e.g., those who supported Nazi Germany, those who were passive, and those who resisted

internally such as partisans and others who carried out revolts, and externally, such as the

Allies); and 

■ recognize that among the legacies of the Holocaust have been the creation of the United

Nations in 1945 and its ongoing efforts to develop and adopt numerous, significant human

rights bills (e.g., the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations

Convention on Genocide).

CONTEMPORARY WORLD PROBLEMS 

Many schools include a contemporary world problems course at the senior high level, which allows

students to conduct an in-depth study of a topic such as genocide.The focus is usually on what

constitutes genocide, and areas of investigation include various preconditions, patterns, consequences,

and methods of intervention and prevention of genocide.A study of the Holocaust in contemporary

world problems curricula can help students to

■ comprehend the similarities and differences between governmental policies during the

Holocaust and contemporary policies that create the potential for “ethnic cleansing” or

genocide (e.g., comparing and contrasting the philosophy and policies of the Nazi regime

with that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia); and

■ compare and contrast the world response of governments and nongovernmental organizations to the Holocaust with the responses of governments and nongovernmental

organizations to mass killings today (e.g., comparing the decisions made at the Evian

Conference in 1938 to the U.S. response to the Cambodian genocide between 1974 and

1979, or the response of nongovernmental organizations like the International Red Cross to

the Nazi genocide of Jews during the Holocaust with that of Amnesty International to political killings in Argentina, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Cambodia; or the International Military

Tribunal’s prosecution of Nazi war criminals to the International Criminal Tribunal for the

Former Yugoslavia’s prosecution of individuals who committed war crimes in Bosnia).
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LITERATURE 

Literature is read in English classes across grade levels and also is used to enhance and strengthen social

studies and science courses.The literature curriculum is generally organized thematically or around

categories such as American, British, European, and world literature. Literature is capable of providing

thought-provoking perspectives on myriad subjects and concerns that can engage students in ways

that standard textbooks and essays do not.

Holocaust literature encompasses a variety of literary genres including novels, short stories, drama,

poetry, diaries, and memoirs.This broad spectrum gives teachers a wide range of curriculum choices.

Because Holocaust literature derives from a true-to-life epic in human history, its stories illuminate

human nature and provide adolescent readers with models of dignity and heroism.At the same time,

it compels them to confront the reality of the human capacity for evil.

Because so many of the stories are relevant to issues in students’ own lives, Holocaust literature can

inspire a commitment to reject indifference to human suffering and can teach students about the

potential effects of intolerance and elitism. Studying literary responses to the Holocaust helps

students

■ develop a deeper respect for the necessity of basic human decency by asking them to

confront the moral depravity and the extent of Nazi evil (e.g., the cruelty of the Nazi treatment of victims even prior to the roundups and deportations, the event of Kristallnacht, the

deportations in boxcars, the mass killings, and the so-called medical experiments of Nazi

doctors);

■ recognize the deeds of heroism in ghettos and concentration camps (e.g., the couriers who

smuggled messages, goods, and weapons in and out of the Warsaw ghetto, the partisans who

used arms to resist the Nazis, and the uprisings and revolts in various ghettos including

Warsaw and in killing centers such as Treblinka);

■ explore the idea of spiritual resistance manifest in clandestine writings, diaries, poetry, and

plays, which are emblematic of irrepressible human dignity and defiance, even in the face of

evil;

■ recognize the different roles assumed by, or thrust upon, people during the Holocaust such

as victim, oppressor, bystander, and rescuer;

■ examine the moral choices, or absence of choices, confronting young and old, victim and

perpetrator; and 

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■ analyze the manipulation of terminology used by the Nazis, particularly the euphemisms

employed to mask evil intent (e.g., their use of the terms “emigration” for expulsion,“evacuation” for deportation,“deportation” for transportation to concentration camps and killing

centers,“police actions” for roundups that typically led to mass murder, and “Final Solution”

for the planned annihilation of every Jew in Europe).

ART AND ART HISTORY 

One of the goals for studying art history is to enable students to understand the role of art in society.

The Holocaust can be incorporated into a study of art and art history to illuminate how the Nazis

used art for the purposes of propaganda, and how victims used artistic expression to communicate

their protest, despair, and/or hope.A study of art during the Holocaust helps students

■ analyze the motivations for and implications of the Nazis’ censorship activities in the fine and

literary arts, theater, and music (e.g., the banning of books and certain styles of painting as

well as the May 1933 book burnings);

■ examine the values and beliefs of the Nazis and how those beliefs were reinforced and inculcated through the use of symbols, propaganda posters, paintings, and drawings deemed by the

Nazi regime to be “acceptable” rather than “degenerate”;

■ study how people living under Nazi control used art as a form of resistance (e.g., examining

the extent to which the victims created art, the dangers they faced in doing so, the various

forms of art that were created as well as the settings in which they were created, and the

diversity of themes and content in this artistic expression);

■ examine art created by Holocaust victims and survivors and explore its capacity to document

diverse experiences, including life prior to the Holocaust, life inside the ghettos, the deportations, and the myriad of experiences in the concentration camp system; and 

■ examine interpretations of the Holocaust as expressed in contemporary art, art exhibitions,

and memorials.
These shops in Berlin were among more than 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses that were vandalized in anti-Jewish riots known as Kristallnacht

(“The Night of Broken Glass”). (November 10, 1938) 

Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz
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SUGGESTED TOPIC AREAS FOR A COURSE OF STUDY

ON THE HOLOCAUST

The Museum has identified topic areas for you to consider while planning a course of study on the

Holocaust.We recommend that you introduce your students to these topics even if you have limited

time to teach about the Holocaust. An introduction to the topic areas is essential for providing

students with a sense of the breadth of the history of the Holocaust.The essay that follows this page

provides an overview of these topics.

1933–1939

Dictatorship under the Third Reich

Early Stages of Persecution 

The First Concentration Camps

1939–1945

World War II in Europe

Murder of the Disabled (“Euthanasia” Program)

Persecution and Murder of Jews

Ghettos

Mobile Killing Squads (Einsatzgruppen)

Expansion of the Concentration Camp System

Killing Centers

Additional Victims of Nazi Persecution

Resistance

Rescue

United States/World Response

Death Marches

Liberation

POST 1945

Postwar Trials

Displaced Persons Camps and Emigration

In addition to these core topic areas, we recommend that, in your courses, you provide context for

the events of the Holocaust by including information about antisemitism, Jewish life in Europe

before the Holocaust, the aftermath of World War I, and the Nazi rise to power. Consult the 

annotated bibliography at the end of this publication for recommended readings.
Prisoners stand during a roll call at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. (ca. 1938–1941) 

USHMM 
H I S T O R Y O F T H E H O L O C A U S T : A N O V E R V I E W

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HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST: AN OVERVIEW

On January 20, 1942, an extraordinary 90-minute meeting took place in a lakeside villa in the

wealthy Wannsee district of Berlin. Fifteen high-ranking Nazi party and German government leaders

gathered to coordinate logistics for carrying out “the final solution of the Jewish question.” Chairing

the meeting was SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich, head of the powerful Reich Security

Main Office, a central police agency that included the Secret State Police (the Gestapo). Heydrich

convened the meeting on the basis of a memorandum he had received six months earlier from Adolf

Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Göring, confirming his authorization to implement the “Final Solution.”

The “Final Solution” was the Nazi regime’s code name for the deliberate, planned mass murder of

all European Jews. During the Wannsee meeting German government officials discussed “extermination” without hesitation or qualm. Heydrich calculated that 11 million European Jews from more

than 20 countries would be killed under this heinous plan.

During the months before the Wannsee Conference, special units made up of SS, the elite guard of

the Nazi state, and police personnel, known as Einsatzgruppen, slaughtered Jews in mass shootings on

the territory of the Soviet Union that the Germans had occupied. Six weeks before the Wannsee

meeting, the Nazis began to murder Jews at Chelmno, an agricultural estate located in that part of

Poland annexed to Germany.Here SS and police personnel used sealed vans into which they pumped

carbon monoxide gas to suffocate their victims.The Wannsee meeting served to sanction, coordinate,

and expand the implementation of the “Final Solution” as state policy.

During 1942, trainload after trainload of Jewish men, women, and children were transported from

countries all over Europe to Auschwitz,Treblinka, and four other major killing centers in Germanoccupied Poland. By year’s end, about 4 million Jews were dead. During World War II (1939–1945),

the Germans and their collaborators killed or caused the deaths of up to 6 million Jews. Hundreds

of Jewish communities in Europe, some centuries old, disappeared forever.To convey the unimaginable, devastating scale of destruction, postwar writers referred to the murder of the European Jews as

the “Holocaust.”

Centuries of religious prejudice against Jews in Christian Europe, reinforced by modern political

antisemitism developing from a complex mixture of extreme nationalism, financial insecurity, fear of

communism, and so-called race science, provide the backdrop for the Holocaust. Hitler and other

Nazi ideologues regarded Jews as a dangerous “race” whose very existence threatened the biological

purity and strength of the “superior Aryan race.”To secure the assistance of thousands of individuals

to implement the “Final Solution,” the Nazi regime could and did exploit existing prejudice against

Jews in Germany and the other countries that were conquered by or allied with Germany during

World War II.
20

“While not all victims were Jews, all Jews were victims,” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has written.

“Jews were destined for annihilation solely because they were born Jewish.They were doomed not

because of something they had done or proclaimed or acquired but because of who they were, sons

and daughters of Jewish people.As such they were sentenced to death collectively and individually....”

SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST 

IN TWO MAIN SECTIONS: 1933–1939 AND 1939–1945

1933–1939

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was named chancellor, the most powerful position in the German

government, by the aged President Hindenburg, who hoped Hitler could lead the nation out of its

grave political and economic crisis. Hitler was the leader of the right-wing National Socialist

German Workers Party (called the “Nazi party” for short). It was, by 1933, one of the strongest parties

in Germany, even though—reflecting the country’s multiparty system—the Nazis had won only a

plurality of 33 percent of the votes in the 1932 elections to the German parliament (Reichstag).

Once in power, Hitler moved quickly to end German democracy. He convinced his cabinet to

invoke emergency clauses of the constitution that permitted the suspension of individual freedoms

of press, speech,and assembly. Special security forces—the Gestapo, the Storm Troopers (SA), and the

SS—murdered or arrested leaders of opposition political parties (Communists, socialists, and liberals).

The Enabling Act of March 23, 1933—forced through a Reichstag already purged of many political

opponents—gave dictatorial powers to Hitler.

Also in 1933, the Nazis began to put into practice their racial ideology.The Nazis believed that the

Germans were “racially superior” and that there was a struggle for survival between them and “inferior races.” They saw Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and the handicapped as a serious biological threat to

the purity of the “German (Aryan1

) Race,” what they called the “master race.”

Jews, who numbered about 525,000 in Germany (less than one percent of the total population in

1933), were the principal target of Nazi hatred.The Nazis identified Jews as a race and defined this

race as “inferior.” They also spewed hate-mongering propaganda that unfairly blamed Jews for

Germany’s economic depression and the country’s defeat in World War I (1914–18).

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1 The term “Aryan” originally referred to peoples speaking Indo-European languages.The Nazis perverted its meaning to support racist ideas by

viewing those of Germanic background as prime examples of Aryan stock, which they considered racially superior. For the Nazis, the typical Aryan

was blond, blue-eyed, and tall.
H I S T O R Y O F T H E H O L O C A U S T : A N O V E R V I E W

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In 1933, new German laws forced Jews out of their civil service jobs, university and law court positions, and other areas of public life. In April 1933, a boycott of Jewish businesses was instituted. In

1935, laws proclaimed at Nuremberg made Jews second-class citizens. These Nuremberg Laws

defined Jews, not by their religion or by how they wanted to identify themselves, but by the religious affiliation of their grandparents. Between 1937 and 1939, new anti-Jewish regulations

segregated Jews further and made daily life very difficult for them: Jews could not attend public

schools; go to theaters, cinemas, or vacation resorts; or reside or even walk in certain sections of

German cities.

Also between 1937 and 1939, Jews increasingly were forced from Germany’s economic life: The

Nazis either seized Jewish businesses and properties outright or forced Jews to sell them at bargain

prices. In November 1938, the Nazis organized a riot (pogrom), known as Kristallnacht (the “Night

of Broken Glass”).This attack against German and Austrian Jews included the physical destruction

of synagogues and Jewish-owned stores, the arrest of Jewish men, the vandalization of homes, and

the murder of individuals.

Although Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, the Nazis persecuted other groups they viewed

as racially or genetically “inferior.” Nazi racial ideology was buttressed by scientists who advocated

“selective breeding” (eugenics) to “improve” the human race. Laws passed between 1933 and 1935

aimed to reduce the future number of genetic “inferiors” through involuntary sterilization programs:

320,000 to 350,000 individuals judged physically or mentally handicapped were subjected to surgical

or radiation procedures so they could not have children. Supporters of sterilization also argued that

the handicapped burdened the community with the costs of their care. Many of Germany’s 30,000

Roma (Gypsies) were also eventually sterilized and prohibited, along with Blacks, from intermarrying with Germans. About 500 children of mixed African-German backgrounds were also

sterilized.2 New laws combined traditional prejudices with the racism of the Nazis, which defined

Roma, by “race,” as “criminal and asocial.”

Another consequence of Hitler’s ruthless dictatorship in the 1930s was the arrest of political opponents and trade unionists and others the Nazis labeled “undesirables” and “enemies of the state.”

Some 5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals were imprisoned in concentration camps; under the 1935 Nazirevised criminal code, the mere denunciation of a man as “homosexual” could result in arrest, trial,

and conviction. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who numbered at least 25,000 in Germany, were banned as an

organization as early as April 1933, because the beliefs of this religious group prohibited them from

swearing any oath to the state or serving in the German military. Their literature was confiscated,

and they lost jobs, unemployment benefits, pensions, and all social welfare benefits. Many Witnesses

were sent to prisons and concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and their children were sent to juvenile detention homes and orphanages.

2 These children, called “the Rhineland bastards” by Germans, were the offspring of German women and African soldiers from French colonies 

who were stationed in the 1920s in the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone the Allies established after World War I as a buffer between Germany and

western Europe.
22

Between 1933 and 1936, thousands of people, mostly political prisoners, were imprisoned in concentration camps, while several thousand German Roma (Gypsies) were confined in special municipal

camps.The first systematic roundups of German and Austrian3 Jews occurred after Kristallnacht, when

approximately 30,000 Jewish men were deported to Dachau and other concentration camps, and

several hundred Jewish women were sent to local jails. The wave of arrests in 1938 also included

several thousand German and Austrian Roma (Gypsies).

Between 1933 and 1939, about half the German-Jewish population and more than two-thirds of

Austrian Jews (1938–39) fled Nazi persecution.They emigrated mainly to the United States, Palestine,

elsewhere in Europe (where many would be later trapped by Nazi conquests during the war), Latin

America, and Japanese-occupied Shanghai (which required no visas for entry). Jews who remained

under Nazi rule were either unwilling to uproot themselves or unable to obtain visas, sponsors in host

countries, or funds for emigration. Most foreign countries, including the United States, Canada,

Britain, and France, were unwilling to admit very large numbers of refugees.

1939–1945

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began.Within weeks, the Polish

army was defeated, and the Nazis began their campaign to destroy Polish culture and enslave the

Polish people, whom they viewed as “subhuman.” Killing Polish leaders was the first step: German

soldiers carried out massacres of university professors, artists, writers, politicians, and many Catholic

priests. To create new living space for the “superior Germanic race,” large segments of the Polish

population were resettled, and German families moved into the emptied lands. Other Poles,

including many Jews, were imprisoned in concentration camps.The Nazis also “kidnapped” as many

as 50,000 “Aryan-looking” Polish children from their parents and took them to Germany to be

adopted by German families. Many of these children were later rejected as not capable of

Germanization and were sent to special children’s camps where some died of starvation, lethal injection, and disease.

As the war began in 1939, Hitler initialed an order to kill institutionalized, handicapped patients

deemed “incurable.” Special commissions of physicians reviewed questionnaires filled out by all state

hospitals and then decided if a patient should be killed. The doomed were then transferred to six

institutions in Germany and Austria where specially constructed gas chambers were used to kill

them. After public protests in 1941, the Nazi leadership continued this “euthanasia” program in

secret. Babies, small children, and other victims were thereafter killed by lethal injection and pills and

by forced starvation.

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

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3 On March 11, 1938, Hitler sent his army into Austria, and on March 13, the incorporation (Anschluss) of Austria with the German empire (Reich)

was proclaimed in Vienna. Most of the population welcomed the Anschluss and expressed their fervor in widespread riots and attacks against the

Austrian Jews numbering 180,000 (90 percent of whom lived in Vienna).
H I S T O R Y O F T H E H O L O C A U S T : A N O V E R V I E W

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The “euthanasia” program contained all the elements later required for mass murder of European

Jews and Roma (Gypsies): a decision to kill, specially trained personnel, the apparatus for killing by

gas, and the use of euphemistic language like “euthanasia” that psychologically distanced the

murderers from their victims and hid the criminal character of the killings from the public.

In 1940 German forces continued their conquest of much of Europe, easily defeating Denmark,

Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France,Yugoslavia, and Greece. On June 22, 1941,

the German army invaded the Soviet Union and by late November was approaching Moscow. In the

meantime,Italy,Romania,and Hungary had joined the Axis powers led by Germany and were opposed

by the main Allied powers (British Commonwealth, Free France, the United States, and the 

Soviet Union).

In the months following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews, political leaders,

Communists, and many Roma (Gypsies) were killed in mass shootings. Most of those killed were

Jews.These murders were carried out at improvised sites throughout the Soviet Union by members

of mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) who followed in the wake of the invading German army.

The most famous of these sites was Babi Yar, near Kiev, where an estimated 33,000 persons, mostly

Jews, were murdered over two days. German terror extended to institutionalized handicapped and

psychiatric patients in the Soviet Union; it also resulted in the death of more than 3 million Soviet

prisoners of war.

World War II brought major changes to the concentration camp system. Large numbers of new prisoners, deported from all German-occupied countries, now flooded the camps. Often entire groups

were committed to the camps, such as members of underground resistance organizations who were

rounded up in a sweep across western Europe under the 1941 Night and Fog decree.To accommodate the massive increase in the number of prisoners, hundreds of new camps were established in

occupied territories of eastern and western Europe.

During the war, ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps, in addition to the concentration

camps, were created by the Germans and their collaborators to imprison Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and

other victims of racial and ethnic hatred as well as political opponents and resistance fighters.

Following the invasion of Poland, 3 million Polish Jews were forced into approximately 400 newly

established ghettos where they were segregated from the rest of the population. Large numbers of

Jews also were deported from other cities and countries, including Germany, to ghettos and camps

in Poland and German-occupied territories further east.

In Polish cities under Nazi occupation, like Warsaw and Lodz, Jews were confined in sealed ghettos

where starvation, overcrowding, exposure to cold, and contagious diseases killed tens of thousands of

people. In Warsaw and elsewhere, ghettoized Jews made every effort, often at great risk, to maintain

their cultural, communal, and religious lives.The ghettos also provided a forced-labor pool for the

Germans, and many forced laborers (who worked on road gangs, in construction, or at other hard

labor related to the German war effort) died from exhaustion or maltreatment.
24

Between 1942 and 1944, the Germans moved to eliminate the ghettos in occupied Poland and elsewhere, deporting ghetto residents to “extermination camps”—killing centers equipped with gassing

facilities—located in Poland.After the meeting of senior German government officials in late January

1942. After the meeting in late January 1942 at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee informing

senior German government officials of the decision to implement “the final solution of the Jewish

question,” Jews from western Europe also were sent to killing centers in the East.

The six killing sites, chosen because of their closeness to rail lines and their location in semirural areas,

were at Belzec, Sobibor,Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek,4 and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Chelmno was the

first camp in which mass executions were carried out by gas piped into mobile gas vans; at least

152,000 persons were killed there between December 1941 and March 1943, and between June and

July 1944.A killing center using gas chambers operated at Belzec, where about 600,000 persons were

killed between May 1942 and August 1943. Sobibor opened in May 1942 and closed following a

rebellion of the prisoners on October 14, 1943; about 250,000 persons had already been killed by

gassing at Sobibor.Treblinka opened in July 1942 and closed in November 1943; a revolt by the prisoners in early August 1943 destroyed much of that facility. At least 750,000 persons were killed at

Treblinka, physically the largest of the killing centers. Almost all of the victims at Chelmno, Belzec,

Sobibor, and Treblinka were Jews; a few were Roma (Gypsies), Poles, and Soviet POWs.Very few individuals survived these four killing centers where most victims were murdered immediately upon arrival.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, which also served as a concentration camp and slave labor camp, became the

killing center where the largest numbers of European Jews and Roma (Gypsies) were killed.After an

experimental gassing there in September 1941—of 250 malnourished and ill Polish prisoners and

600 Soviet POWs—mass murder became a daily routine; more than 1 million people were killed at

Auschwitz-Birkenau, 9 out of 10 of them Jews. In addition, Roma, Soviet POWs, and ill prisoners

of all nationalities died in the gas chambers there. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, nearly 440,000

Jews were deported from Hungary in more than 140 trains, overwhelmingly to Auschwitz.This was

probably the largest single mass deportation during the Holocaust. A similar system was implemented

at Majdanek, which also doubled as a concentration camp,and where between 170,000 and 235,000

persons were killed in the gas chambers or died from malnutrition, brutality, and disease.

The methods of murder were similar in the killing centers, which were operated by the SS. Jewish

victims arrived in railroad freight cars and passenger trains, mostly from ghettos and camps in occupied Poland, but also from almost every other eastern and western European country. On arrival,

men were separated from women and children. Prisoners were forced to undress and hand over all

valuables. They were then forced naked into the gas chambers, which were disguised as shower

rooms, and either carbon monoxide or Zyklon B (a form of crystalline prussic acid, also used as an

insecticide in some camps) was used to asphyxiate them.The minority selected for forced labor were,

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4 Despite concerns among some historians that, operationally, Majdanek resembled concentration camps more than it did killing centers, most

scholars include it among the killing centers because of the large number of prisoners who died there and the use of poison gas in the killing process.
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after initial quarantine, vulnerable to malnutrition, exposure, epidemics, medical experiments, and

brutality; many perished as a result.

The Germans carried out their systematic murderous activities with the active help of local collaborators in many countries and the acquiescence or indifference of millions of bystanders. However,

there were instances of organized resistance. For example, in the fall of 1943, the Danish resistance,

with the support of the local population, rescued nearly the entire Jewish community in Denmark

by smuggling them via a dramatic boatlift to safety in neutral Sweden. Individuals in many other

countries also risked their lives to save Jews and other individuals subject to Nazi persecution. One

of the most famous was Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who played a significant role in some

of the rescue efforts that saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944.

Resistance existed in almost every concentration camp and ghetto of Europe.In addition to the armed

revolts at Sobibor and Treblinka, Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto led to a courageous uprising

in April and May 1943, despite a predictable doomed outcome because of superior German force. In

general, rescue or aid to Holocaust victims was not a priority of resistance organizations, whose principal goal was to fight the war against the Germans. Nonetheless, such groups and Jewish partisans

(resistance fighters) sometimes cooperated with each other to save Jews. On April 19, 1943, for

instance, members of the National Committee for the Defense of Jews, in cooperation with Christian

railroad workers and the general underground in Belgium, attacked a train leaving the Belgian transit

camp of Malines headed for Auschwitz and succeeded in assisting Jewish deportees to escape.

The U.S. government did not pursue a policy of rescue for victims of Nazism during World War II.

Like their British counterparts, U.S. political and military leaders argued that winning the war was

the top priority and would bring an end to Nazi terror. Once the war began, security concerns,

reinforced in part by antisemitism, influenced the U.S. State Department (led by Secretary of State

Cordell Hull) and the U.S. government to do little to ease restrictions on entry visas. In January

1944, President Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board within the U.S.Treasury Department

to facilitate the rescue of imperiled refugees. Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York, began to serve as

an ostensibly free port for refugees from the territories liberated by the Allies.

After the war turned against Germany, and the Allied armies approached German soil in late 1944,

the SS decided to evacuate outlying concentration camps. The Germans tried to cover up the

evidence of genocide and deported prisoners to camps inside Germany to prevent their liberation.

Many inmates died during the long journeys on foot known as “death marches.” During the final

days, in the spring of 1945, conditions in the remaining concentration camps exacted a terrible toll

in human lives. Even concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen, never intended for extermination,

became death traps for thousands, including Anne Frank, who died there of typhus in March 1945.

In May 1945, Nazi Germany collapsed, the SS guards fled, and the camps ceased to exist.
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AFTERMATH OF THE HOLOCAUST

The Allied victors of World War II (Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union)

faced two immediate problems following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945: to bring

Nazi war criminals to justice and to provide for displaced persons (DPs) and refugees stranded in

Allied-occupied Germany and Austria.

Following the war, the best-known war crimes trial was the trial of “major” war criminals, held at

the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, between November 1945 and August 1946. Under the

auspices of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which consisted of prosecutors and judges

from the four occupying powers (Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States),

leading officials of the Nazi regime were prosecuted for war crimes.The IMT sentenced 13 of those

convicted to death. Seven more defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment or to prison terms

ranging from 10 to 20 years. One defendant committed suicide before the trial began.Three of the

defendants were acquitted. The judges also found three of six Nazi organizations (the SS, the

Gestapo-SD, and the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party) to be criminal organizations.

In the three years following this major trial, 12 subsequent trials were conducted under the auspices

of the IMT but before U.S. military tribunals.The proceedings were directed at the prosecution of

second- and third-ranking officials of the Nazi regime.They included concentration camp administrators; commanders of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units); physicians and public health

officials; the SS leadership; German army field commanders and staff officers; officials in the justice,

interior, and foreign ministries; and senior administrators of industrial concerns that used concentration camp laborers, including I. G. Farben and the Flick concern.

In addition, each occupying power (Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union)

conducted trials of Nazi offenders captured in its respective zone of occupation or accused of crimes

perpetrated in that zone of occupation. The U.S military authorities conducted the trials in the

American zone at the site of the Nazi concentration camp Dachau. In general, the defendants in

these trials were the staff and guard units at concentration camps and other camps located in the zone

and people accused of crimes against Allied military and civilian personnel.

Those German officials and collaborators who committed crimes within a specific location or

country were generally returned to the nation on whose territory the crimes were committed and

were tried by national tribunals. Perhaps the most famous of these cases was the trial in 1947, in

Cracow, Poland, of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz.Trials of German war criminals and

their collaborators were conducted during the late 1940s and early 1950s in Poland, Hungary,

Romania, Bulgaria,Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. After the establishment of West Germany in

1949, many former Nazis received relatively lenient treatment by the courts. Courts in West

Germany ruled the offenders were not guilty because they were obeying orders from their superior

officers. Some Nazi criminals were acquitted and returned to normal lives in German society, a

number of them taking jobs in the business world. Many war criminals, however, were never brought

to trial or punished. In 1958, the Federal Republic of Germany established a Central Agency for the

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Investigation of National Socialist Violent Crimes to streamline the investigation of Nazi offenders

living in West Germany.These efforts, which continue to this day, led to some significant proceedings

such as the Frankfurt Trial of Auschwitz camp personnel in the 1960s. The investigation of Nazi

offenders residing in the United States began in earnest during the late 1970s and continues to this day.

Even as the Allies moved to bring Nazi offenders to justice, the looming refugee crisis threatened to

overwhelm the resources of the Allied powers. During World War II, the Nazis uprooted millions of

people. Within months of Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the Allies repatriated more than 6

million (DPs) to their home countries.

Some 250,000 Jewish DPs, including most of the Jewish survivors of concentration camps, were

unable or unwilling to return to Eastern Europe because of postwar antisemitism and the destruction of their communities during the Holocaust. Many of those who did return feared for their lives.

Many Holocaust survivors found themselves in territory liberated by the Anglo-American armies

and were housed in DP camps that the Allies established in Germany,Austria, and Italy. They were

joined by a flow of refugees, including Holocaust survivors, migrating from points of liberation in

Eastern Europe and the Soviet-occupied zones of Germany and Austria.

Most Jewish DPs hoped to leave Europe for Palestine or the United States, but the United States was

still governed by severely restrictive immigration legislation, and the British, who administered

Palestine under a mandate from the defunct League of Nations, severely restricted Jewish immigration for fear of antagonizing the Arab residents of the Mandate. Other countries had closed their

borders to immigration during the Depression and during the war. Despite these obstacles, many

Jewish DPs were eager to leave Europe as soon as possible.

The Jewish Brigade Group, formed as a unit within the British army in late 1944, worked with

former partisans to help organize the Beriha (literally,“escape”), the exodus of Jewish refugees across

closed borders from inside Europe to the coast in an attempt to sail for Palestine.However,the British

intercepted most of the ships. In 1947, for example, the British stopped the Exodus 1947 at the port

of Haifa.The ship had 4,500 Holocaust survivors on board, who were forcibly returned on British

vessels to Germany.

In the following years, the postwar Jewish refugee crisis eased. In 1948, the U.S. Congress passed the

Displaced Persons Act, which provided up to 400,000 special visas for DPs uprooted by the Nazi or

Soviet regimes. Some 68,000 of these visas were issued to Jews under the DPA Act, as well as an additional 28,000 under the Truman Directive during the years 1946–48.When the DP Act expired in

1952, it was followed by a Refugee Relief Act that remained in force until the end of 1956.

Moreover, in May 1948, the State of Israel became an independent nation after the United Nations

voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Israel quickly moved to legalize the

flow of Jewish immigrants into the new state, passing legislation providing for unlimited Jewish

immigration to the Jewish homeland.The last DP camp closed in Germany in 1957.

Special thanks to Little, Brown and Company for permission to include excerpts from Tell Them We

Remember by Susan Bachrach, 1994.
A Jewish girl from Vienna sits on a staircase after her arrival in England. Nearly 10,000 children found

refuge in England in what was called the Kindertransport. (December 12, 1938)

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
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CHRONOLOGY OF THE HOLOCAUST

JANUARY 30, 1933

German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor.At the time, Hitler was

leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi party).

FEBRUARY 27–28, 1933

The German parliament (Reichstag) building burned down under mysterious circumstances. The

government treated it as an act of terrorism.

FEBRUARY 28, 1933

Hitler convinced President von Hindenburg to invoke an emergency clause in the Weimar

Constitution. The German parliament then passed the Decree of the Reich President for the

Protection of Nation (Volk) and State, popularly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree.The decree

suspended the civil rights provisions in the existing German constitution, including freedom of

speech, assembly, and press, and formed the basis for the incarceration of potential opponents of the

Nazis without benefit of trial or judicial proceeding.

MARCH 22, 1933

The SS (Schutzstaffel), Hitler’s “elite guard,” established a concentration camp outside the town of

Dachau, Germany, for political opponents of the regime. It was the only concentration camp to

remain in operation from 1933 until 1945. By 1934, the SS had taken over administration of the

entire Nazi concentration camp system.

MARCH 23, 1933

The German parliament passed the Enabling Act, which empowered Hitler to establish a dictatorship in Germany.

APRIL 1, 1933

The Nazis organized a nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned businesses in Germany. Many local

boycotts continued throughout much of the 1930s.

APRIL 7, 1933

The Nazi government passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which

excluded Jews and political opponents from university and governmental positions. Similar laws

enacted in the following weeks affected Jewish lawyers, judges, doctors, and teachers.
30

MAY 10, 1933

Nazi party members, students, teachers, and others burned books written by Jews, political opponents of Nazis, and the intellectual avant-garde during public rallies across Germany.

JULY 14, 1933

The Nazi government enacted the Law on the Revocation of Naturalization, which deprived

foreign and stateless Jews as well as Roma (Gypsies) of German citizenship.

The Nazi government enacted the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,

which mandated the forced sterilization of certain physically or mentally impaired individuals.

The law institutionalized the eugenic concept of “life undeserving of life” and provided the basis for

the involuntary sterilization of the disabled, Roma (Gypsies), “social misfits,” and black people

residing in Germany.

JUNE 30–JULY 1, 1934

In what came to be called “the Night of the Long Knives,” on Hitler’s orders members of the Nazi

party and police murdered members of the Nazi leadership, army, and others. Hitler declared the

killings legal and necessary to achieve the Nazi party’s aims.The murders were reported throughout

Germany and in other countries.

AUGUST 2, 1934

German President von Hindenburg died. Hitler became Führer in addition to his position as chancellor. Because there was no legal or constitutional limit to Hitler’s power as Führer, he became

absolute dictator of Germany.

OCTOBER 7, 1934

In standardized letters sent to the government, Jehovah’s Witness congregations from all over

Germany declared their political neutrality but also affirmed defiance of Nazi restrictions on the

practice of their religion.

APRIL 1, 1935

The Nazi government banned the Jehovah’s Witness organization. The Nazis persecuted Jehovah’s

Witnesses because of their religious refusal to swear allegiance to the state.

JUNE 28, 1935

The German Ministry of Justice revised Paragraphs 175 and 175a of the criminal code to criminalize

all homosexual acts between men.The revision provided the police broader means for prosecuting

homosexual men.

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SEPTEMBER 15, 1935

The Nazi government decreed the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of the

German Blood and Honor. These Nuremberg “racial laws” made Jews second-class citizens. They

prohibited sexual relations and intermarriage between Jews and “persons of German or related

blood.”The Nazi government later applied the laws to Roma (Gypsies) and to black people residing

in Germany.

JULY 12, 1936

Prisoners and civilian workers began construction of the concentration camp Sachsenhausen at

Oranienburg near Berlin. By September, German authorities had imprisoned about 1,000 people in

the camp.

AUGUST 1–16, 1936

Athletes and spectators from countries around the world attended the Summer Olympic Games in

Berlin, Germany.The Olympic Games were a propaganda success for the Nazi state.The Nazis made

every effort to portray Germany as a respectable member of the international community and softpedaled their persecution of the Jews. They removed anti-Jewish signs from public display and

restrained anti-Jewish activities. In response to pressure from foreign Olympic delegations, Germany

also included Jews or part-Jews on its Olympic team.

MARCH 12–13, 1938

German troops invaded Austria, and Germany incorporated Austria into the German Reich in what

was called the Anschluss.

JULY 6–15, 1938

Delegates from 32 countries and representatives from refugee aid organizations attended the Evian

Conference at Evian, France, to discuss immigration quotas for refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.

However, the United States and most other countries were unwilling to ease their immigration

restrictions.

SEPTEMBER 30, 1938

Britain, France, Italy, and Germany signed the Munich Pact, forcing Czechoslovakia to cede its

border areas to the German Reich.

OCTOBER 1–10, 1938

German troops occupied the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia under the stipulations of the

Munich Pact.
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NOVEMBER 9–10, 1938

In a nationwide pogrom called Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), the Nazis and their collaborators burned synagogues, looted Jewish homes and businesses, and killed at least 91 Jews. The

Gestapo, supported by local uniformed police, arrested approximately 30,000 Jewish men and

imprisoned them in the Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration

camps. Several hundred Jewish women also were imprisoned in local jails.

MARCH 14, 1939

Slovakia declared itself an independent state under protection of Nazi Germany.

MARCH 15, 1939

German troops occupied the Czech lands and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

MAY 13–JUNE 17, 1939

Cuba and the United States refused to accept more than 900 refugees—almost all of whom were

Jewish—aboard the ocean liner St. Louis, forcing its return to Europe.

AUGUST 23, 1939

The Soviet and German governments signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact in

which they agreed to divide up eastern Europe, including Poland; the Baltic states of Lithuania,

Estonia, and Latvia; and parts of Romania.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

German troops invaded Poland, marking the beginning of World War II.

SEPTEMBER 3, 1939

Britain and France fulfilled their promise to protect Poland’s border and declared war on Germany.

SEPTEMBER 28, 1939

In a secret amendment to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the German and Soviet governments

outlined their plans to partition Poland.

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OCTOBER 1939

Hitler initialed an order to kill those Germans whom the Nazis deemed “incurable” and hence

“unworthy of life.” Health care professionals sent tens of thousands of institutionalized mentally and

physically disabled people to central “euthanasia” killing centers where they killed them by lethal

injection or in gas chambers.

OCTOBER 26, 1939

Germany annexed the former Polish regions of Upper Silesia, Pomerania,West Prussia, Poznan, and

the independent city of Danzig.Those areas of occupied Poland not annexed by Germany or the

Soviet Union were placed under a German civilian administration and were called the General

Government (Generalgouvernement).

NOVEMBER 12, 1939

German authorities began the forced deportation of Jews from West Prussia, Poznan, Danzig, and

Lodz (also in annexed Poland) to locations in the General Government.

NOVEMBER 23, 1939

German authorities required that, by December 1, 1939, all Jews residing in the General Government

wear white badges with a blue Star of David.

APRIL 9–JUNE 10, 1940

German troops invaded, defeated, and occupied Denmark and Norway.

JUNE 30, 1940

German authorities ordered the first major Jewish ghetto, in Lodz, to be sealed off, confining at least

160,000 people in the ghetto. Henceforth, all Jews living in Lodz had to reside in the ghetto and

could not leave without German authorization.

MAY 10, 1940

German troops invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. By June 22, Germany

occupied all of these regions except for southern (Vichy) France.

MAY 20, 1940

SS authorities established the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz I) outside the Polish city 

of Oswiecim.
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NOVEMBER 15, 1940

German authorities ordered the Warsaw ghetto in the General Government sealed off. It was the

largest ghetto in both area and population.The Germans confined more than 350,000 Jews—about

30 percent of the city’s population—in about 2.4 percent of the city’s total area.

APRIL 6, 1941

German and other Axis forces (Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary) invaded Yugoslavia and Greece.

JUNE 22, 1941

Germany and its Axis forces invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. German mobile

killing squads called Einsatzgruppen were assigned to identify, concentrate, and kill Jews behind the

front lines. By the spring of 1943, the Einsatzgruppen had killed more than a million Jews and an

undetermined number of partisans, Roma (Gypsies), and officials of the Soviet state and the Soviet

Communist party. In 1941–42, some 70,000–80,000 Jews fled eastward, evading the first wave of

murder perpetrated by the German invaders.

JULY 20, 1941

German authorities established a ghetto in Minsk in the German-occupied Soviet territories and,

by July 25, concentrated all Jews from the area in the ghetto.

JULY 31, 1941

Reich Marshal Hermann Göring charged SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the

Security Police and the SD (Security Service), to take measures for the implementation of the “final

solution of the Jewish question.” The “Final Solution” was a euphemism for the mass murder of the

Jewish population of Europe.

AUGUST 15, 1941

By order of German authorities, the Kovno ghetto, with approximately 30,000 Jewish inhabitants,

was sealed off.

SEPTEMBER 3, 1941 

At the Auschwitz concentration camp, SS functionaries performed their first gassing experiments

using Zyklon B.The victims were Soviet prisoners of war and non-Jewish Polish inmates.

SEPTEMBER 6, 1941

German authorities established two ghettos in Vilna in German-occupied Lithuania. German and

Lithuanian units killed tens of thousands of Jews in the nearby Ponary woods.

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SEPTEMBER 15, 1941

The Nazi government decreed that Jews over the age of six who resided in Germany had to wear a

yellow Star of David on their outer clothing in public at all times.

SEPTEMBER 29–30, 1941

German SS, police, and military units shot an estimated 33,000 persons, mostly Jews, at Babi Yar, a

ravine on the outskirts of Kiev (in Ukraine). In the following months, German units shot thousands

of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and Soviet prisoners of war at Babi Yar.

OCTOBER 15, 1941

German authorities began the deportation of Jews from the German Reich to the ghettos of Lodz,

Riga, and Minsk.

OCTOBER 28, 1941

After requiring all Kovno ghetto inhabitants to assemble at Demokratu Square, German and

Lithuanian units took more than one-third of the ghetto’s population—some 9,200 people—to Fort

IX and shot them in what was called the “Great Action.”

OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1941 

SS functionaries began preparations for Einsatz Reinhard (Operation Reinhard; often referred to as

Aktion Reinhard), with the goal of murdering the Jews in the General Government. Preparations

included construction of the killing centers Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka in the territory of the

General Government.

NOVEMBER 24, 1941

German authorities established the Theresienstadt (also known as Terezin) ghetto, in the Germancontrolled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

NOVEMBER 26, 1941

SS authorities established a second camp at Auschwitz, called Auschwitz-Birkenau or Auschwitz II.

The camp was originally designated for the incarceration of large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war

but later was used as a killing center.

DECEMBER 1, 1941

Einsatzkommando 3, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe A that operated in Lithuania, reported that its

members had killed 136,442 Jews since June 1941.
36

DECEMBER 7, 1941

Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.The next morning, the United States declared war on Japan.

DECEMBER 8, 1941

Gassing operations began at Chelmno, one of six Nazi killing centers. Situated in the Polish territory annexed by Germany, Chelmno closed in March 1943 and resumed its killing operations during

two months in the early summer of 1944. SS and German civilian officials killed at least 152,000

Jews and an undetermined number of Roma (Gypsies) and Poles at Chelmno using special mobile

gas vans.

DECEMBER 11, 1941

Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

JANUARY 16, 1942

German authorities began the deportation of Jews from the Lodz ghetto to Chelmno.

JANUARY 20, 1942

Senior Nazi officials met at a villa in the outskirts of Berlin at the Wannsee Conference to discuss

and coordinate implementation of the “Final Solution.”

MARCH 17, 1942

At the Belzec killing center, an SS special detachment began using gas chambers to kill people.

Between March 17 and December 1942, approximately 600,000 people, mostly Jews but also an

undetermined number of Roma (Gypsies), were killed at Belzec.

MARCH 27, 1942

German authorities began systematic deportations of Jews from France. By the end of August 1944,

the Germans had deported more than 75,000 Jews from France to camps in the East, above all, to

the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in occupied Poland, where most of them perished.

MARCH–APRIL 1942

German SS and police units deported Jews from Lublin, in the General Government, to Belzec,

where they were killed.The Lublin deportations were the first major deportations carried out under

Operation Reinhard, the code name for the German plan to kill more than 2 million Jews living in

the General Government of occupied Poland.

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MAY 1942

After trial gassings in April, an SS special detachment began gassing operations at the Sobibor killing

center in early May. By November 1943, the special detachment had killed approximately 250,000

Jews at Sobibor.

MAY 4, 1942

SS officials performed the first selection of victims for gassing at the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing

center.Weak, sick, and “unfit” prisoners were selected and housed in an isolation ward prior to being

killed in the gas chambers. Between May 1940 and January 1945, more than one million people were

killed or died at the Auschwitz camp complex. Close to 865,000 were never registered and most

likely were selected for gassing immediately upon arrival. Nine out of ten of those who died at the

Auschwitz complex were Jewish.

MAY 31, 1942

German authorities opened the I.G. Farben labor camp at Auschwitz III (also known as Monowitz

or Buna), situated near the main camp complex at Auschwitz.

JULY 15, 1942

German authorities began deportations of Dutch Jews from the Westerbork transit camp in the

Netherlands to Auschwitz. By September 13, 1944, over 100 trains had carried more than 100,000

people to killing centers and concentration camps in the German Reich and the General

Government.

JULY 22, 1942

Between July 22 and September 12, German SS and police authorities, assisted by auxiliaries,

deported approximately 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to killing centers and concentration

camps.Of that number,about 265,000 Jews were sent to the Treblinka killing center where they were

murdered.

JULY 23, 1942

Gassing operations began at the Treblinka killing center. Between July 1942 and November 1943, SS

special detachments at Treblinka murdered an estimated 750,000 Jews and at least 2,000 Roma

(Gypsies).
38

AUGUST 4, 1942

German authorities began systematic deportations of Jews from Belgium. The deportations

continued until the end of July 1944.The Germans deported more than 25,000 Jews, about half of

Belgium’s Jewish population, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in occupied Poland, where

most of them perished.

JANUARY 18–22, 1943

SS and police units deported more than 5,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing

center. Members of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB)

fought against the Germans in armed revolt as Jews were rounded up for deportation.

MARCH 15, 1943

German SS, police, and military units began the deportation of Jews from Salonika, Greece, to

Auschwitz. Between March 20 and August 18, more than 50,000 Greek Jews arrived at the

Auschwitz camp complex. SS staff killed most of the deportees in the gas chambers at Birkenau.

APRIL 19–MAY 16, 1943

In what is called the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Jewish fighters resisted the German attempt to liquidate the ghetto. German SS and police units deported many of those who survived the armed revolt

to Treblinka, and sent others to Majdanek and forced labor camps at Trawniki and Poniatowa in 

the General Government. Some resistance fighters escaped from the ghetto and joined partisan

groups in the forests around Warsaw.The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first mass revolt in Nazioccupied Europe.

JUNE 21, 1943

Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, ordered the liquidation of all ghettos in the Baltic states and

Belorussia (Reich Commissariat Ostland) and the deportation of all Jews to concentration camps.

AUGUST 2, 1943

Jewish prisoners revolted at the Treblinka killing center. Although more than 300 prisoners

escaped, most were caught and killed by German SS and police units assisted by army troops.The

SS special detachment forced surviving prisoners to remove all remaining traces of the camp’s existence.After the killing center was dismantled in November 1943, the special detachment shot the

remaining prisoners.

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SEPTEMBER 15, 1943

SS authorities converted the Kovno ghetto into a concentration camp (Concentration Camp Kauen)

under the direction of SS Captain Wilhelm Goecke.

SEPTEMBER 23, 1943

SS authorities ordered the final deportation of Jews from the Vilna ghetto. SS and police units in Vilna

deported 4,000 Jews to the Sobibor killing center and evacuated approximately 3,700 to labor camps

in German-occupied Estonia.

OCTOBER 14, 1943

Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor killing center began an armed revolt. Approximately 300 escaped.

German SS and police units, with assistance from German military units, recaptured more than 100

and killed them.After the revolt, SS special detachments closed and dismantled the killing center.

OCTOBER 21, 1943

German authorities declared the Minsk ghetto officially liquidated after they murdered the

remaining 2,000 Jews.

NOVEMBER 3–4, 1943

German SS and police units implemented Operation Harvest Festival. The purpose of Harvest

Festival was to liquidate several labor camps in the Lublin area. During Harvest Festival, German SS

and police units killed at least 42,000 Jews at Majdanek,Trawniki, and Poniatowa.

MARCH 19, 1944

German military units occupied Hungary.

MAY 15–JULY 9, 1944

Hungarian gendarmerie (rural police units), under the guidance of German SS officials, deported

nearly 430,000 Jews from Hungary. Most were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau where SS staff

immediately killed about half of them in gas chambers.

JUNE 6, 1944

D Day. British and American troops launched an invasion of France.
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JUNE 22, 1944

A massive Soviet offensive destroyed the German front in Belorussia.

JULY 8–12, 1944

As the Soviet army neared, SS authorities liquidated the Kauen concentration camp, transferring

6,000 Jews to the Stutthof and Dachau concentration camps in the German Reich.

JULY 22, 1944

SS authorities evacuated most of the remaining prisoners from Majdanek westward to evade the

advancing Soviet army.

JULY 23, 1944

Soviet troops liberated Majdanek. Surprised by the rapid Soviet advance, the Germans failed to

destroy the camp and the evidence of mass murder.

AUGUST 7–30, 1944

SS and police officials liquidated the Lodz ghetto and deported approximately 60,000 Jews and an

undetermined number of Roma (Gypsies) to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

AUGUST 28/29–OCTOBER 27, 1944

Members of the Slovak resistance revolted against the German-supported Slovakian government.

Between September and October, German SS and police officials, assisted by German military units

and Slovak fascist paramilitary units, deported approximately 10,000 Slovak Jews to AuschwitzBirkenau.

OCTOBER 6, 1944

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Sonderkommando (special detachment of Jewish prisoners deployed to

remove corpses from the gas chambers and burn them) blew up Crematorium IV and killed the guards.

About 250 participants of the revolt died in battle with SS and police units.The SS and police units

shot 200 more members of the Sonderkommando after the battle was over.

OCTOBER 30, 1944

The last transport of Jews from Theresienstadt (Terezin) arrived at Auschwitz. During October, SS

officials deported approximately 18,000 Jews to the Auschwitz camp complex. Most of them were

killed in the gas chambers at Birkenau.

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NOVEMBER 1944

The word “genocide” first appeared in a book by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who had

moved to Washington, D.C., in 1942 and worked with the U.S.War Department. In the book Axis

Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin coined the term by combining the Greek for race or tribe, genos,

with the Latin for killing, cide. He employed it to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder of an

entire group—the destruction of European Jewry.

NOVEMBER 25, 1944

The SS began to demolish the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

JANUARY 17, 1945

As Soviet troops approached, SS units evacuated prisoners in the Auschwitz camp complex, marching

them on foot toward the interior of the German Reich.The forced evacuations came to be called

“death marches.”

JANUARY 27, 1945

Soviet troops liberated about 8,000 prisoners left behind at the Auschwitz camp complex.

APRIL 11, 1945

U.S. troops liberated more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald.

APRIL 29, 1945

U.S. troops liberated approximately 32,000 prisoners at Dachau.

APRIL 30, 1945

Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin.

MAY 2, 1945

German units in Berlin surrendered to Soviet forces.

MAY 5, 1945

U.S. troops liberated more than 17,000 prisoners at Mauthausen concentration camp and more than

20,000 prisoners at the Gusen concentration camps in the annexed Austrian territory of the

German Reich.
42

MAY 7–9, 1945

German armed forces surrendered unconditionally in the West on May 7 and in the East on May 9.

Allied and Soviet forces proclaimed May 8, 1945, to be Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day).

AUGUST 3, 1945

United States special envoy Earl Harrison made public a report to President Truman on the treatment

of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) in Germany. Following World War II, several hundred thousand

Jewish survivors were unable or unwilling to return to their home countries. Harrison’s report

contained a strong indictment of Allied military policies, underscored the plight of Jewish DPs, and

led eventually to improved conditions for them in the American zone of occupied Germany.

SEPTEMBER 2, 1945

Japan surrendered.World War II officially ended.

NOVEMBER 20, 1945

The International Military Tribunal (IMT), made up of United States, British, French, and Soviet

judges, began a trial of 21 major Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, Germany.

DECEMBER 22, 1945

President Truman issued a directive giving DPs preference in receiving visas under the existing quota

restrictions on immigration to the United States.

JULY 4, 1946

Mob attack against Jewish survivors in Kielce, Poland. Following a ritual murder accusation, a Polish

mob killed more than 40 Jews and wounded dozens of others. This attack sparked a second mass

migration of Jews from Poland and Eastern Europe to DP camps in Germany,Austria, and Italy.

AUGUST 1, 1946

The IMT passed judgment on the major Nazi war criminals on trial in Nuremberg, Germany.

Eighteen were convicted, and three were acquitted. Eleven of the defendants were sentenced 

to death.

OCTOBER 16, 1946

In accordance with the sentences handed down after the convictions, ten defendants were executed

by hanging. One defendant, Hermann Göring, escaped the hangman by committing suicide in 

his cell.

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JULY 11, 1947

The Exodus 1947 ship carrying 4,500 Jewish refugees sailed for British-administered Palestine from

southern France, despite British restrictions on Jewish immigration.The British intercepted the ship

and forced it to proceed to Haifa in Palestine and then to the French port of Port-de-Bouc, where

it lay at anchor from more than a month.

SEPTEMBER 8, 1947

Ultimately, the British took the Jewish refugees from the Exodus 1947 to Hamburg, Germany, and

forcibly returned them to DP camps.The fate of the Exodus 1947 dramatized the plight of Holocaust

survivors in the DP camps and increased international pressure on Great Britain to allow free Jewish

immigration to Palestine.

NOVEMBER 29, 1947

As the postwar Jewish refugee crisis escalated and relations between Jews and Arabs deteriorated,

the British government decided to submit the status of Palestine to the United Nations. In a

special session on this date, the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into

two new states, one Jewish and the other Arab. The decision was accepted by the Jewish and

rejected by the Arab leadership.

MAY 14, 1948

David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Jews of Palestine, announced the establishment of the State of Israel

in Tel Aviv and declared that Jewish immigration into the new state would be unrestricted. Between

1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, including more than two-thirds of the

Jewish DPs in Europe.

JUNE 1948

Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, authorizing 200,000 DPs to enter the United States in

1949 and 1950.Though at first the law’s stipulations made it unfavorable to Jewish DPs, Congress

amended the bill, and by 1952, thousands of Jewish DPs entered the United States. An estimated

80,000 Jewish DPs immigrated to the United States with the aid of American Jewish agencies

between 1945 and 1952.

JANUARY 12, 1952

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide entered into force

after more than 20 countries ratified it. But the convention faced strong opposition in the United

States over concerns about the infringement of U.S. national sovereignty. The United States only

ratified the convention more than 30 years later, on November 5, 1988.
Jews cross a pedestrian bridge from one section of the Lodz ghetto (in Poland) to another. German guards control access to the ghetto from the street below—

a main thoroughfare that is not part of the ghetto. (1941) 

USHMM 

Under SS guard, prisoners perform forced labor in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. (1942)

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Prisoners perform forced labor in the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland. (ca. 1943–44)

Leopold Page Photographic Collection, courtesy of USHMM
Members of the SS separate Hungarian Jewish men from women and children upon arrival at the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in Poland. After separating the victims by gender, the SS selected individuals for either forced labor or murder in gas chambers. (spring 1944) 

Yad Vashem 
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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The purpose of this annotated bibliography is to help teachers choose from the vast array of

Holocaust publications that might be useful to them and to their students.This bibliography is not

meant to indicate that these are the best examples of Holocaust literature, although they are all excellent books. The works cited here were chosen both because of individual merit and specifically

because they address particular aspects of Holocaust experience.

We have tried, for the most part, to include books that are readily available and, where possible, available in paperback. A few books that were out of print at the time this bibliography was compiled

have nevertheless been included simply because they are too important to be omitted. Books

published under the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Library imprint are

available through the Museum Shop.

The difficulty in compiling a selective list of Holocaust literature is complicated not only by the great

amount of material available but also by the subject matter itself.The Holocaust was a monumental

event in history. It involved millions of people in dozens of nations, and its effects were felt in every

aspect of their lives.There is, therefore, no simple answer to the questions,What’s the best book for

me to read about the Holocaust? or If I can only read one or two books, which ones should they

be? Any one book can present only a partial perspective.Where a good general history of the period

can provide historical background, a personal narrative will translate that history into human terms,

and a more specialized history will examine a particular aspect of that history in greater depth.

Which book or books you should read will depend both on how much time you are able to commit

and on the aspect of the Holocaust upon which you are focusing. No one can learn, or teach, everything about the Holocaust. First, determine your goals, and then select the most appropriate

materials.A broad range of materials have been included on these lists to represent the scope of the

Holocaust and to enable teachers to choose the materials best suited to their individual approaches

to the subject.

The lists are presented in three sections organized by reading level: middle school, high school, and

adult.Almost without exception, the titles on the middle school lists are books that were originally

published by the children’s book divisions of publishing houses, indicating that the intended audience was young people aged 14 or under. In many cases, however, that range can be expanded

upward. Although a few of the books on the high school list were published with a “young adult”

audience in mind, most of them are adult books that are particularly well suited to high school

students. (At the end of this bibliography is an alphabetized index by author to all the volumes

included in this list.)

In choosing books for student use, it is as important to determine when a book should be assigned

as it is to decide which book to use. Most students have little prior knowledge of the history of this

period and, therefore, need some historical background to be able to put the book they are reading

into perspective.This is especially true of the fiction and personal narratives on the middle school
56

list. Many of these books were written from a child’s perspective; the child in the book frequently

does not really understand the events he or she is caught up in and neither will the reader without

some historical background.

As new Holocaust literature is constantly appearing, it is also important to establish criteria for examining these materials. In addition to the usual standards of literary quality and historical accuracy, two

phrases from Lawrence L. Langer’s The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature set the parameters

in this arena.At one end of the scale, the book should be one that actually confronts the horrors of

the Holocaust; it should not “circumspectly [skirt] the horror implicit in the theme but [leave] the

reader with the mournful if psychologically unburdened feeling that he has had a genuine encounter

with inappropriate death.”At the other extreme, too great a concentration on the horrors, especially

if presented with graphic details, tends to overwhelm the reader and numb the senses; Langer refers

to these works as “mere catalogues of atrocities.” Between these two extremes, there is a wealth of

material, only a fraction of which is listed here, that will enable students and teachers to confront the

Holocaust and the issues that it raises.

MIDDLE SCHOOL

1. HISTORY, GENERAL

Adler, David A. We Remember the Holocaust. New York: Henry Holt and

Company, 1989.

Adler uses first-person narratives and original photographs to chronicle the history of the Holocaust.

The narratives describe Jewish life in Europe in the 1930s, Hitler’s rise to power, and the Jews’ fight

for survival under Nazi rule.

Bachrach, Susan D. Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust.

Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.

Bachrach tells the story of the Holocaust as presented in the United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum in brief, thematic segments illustrated by artifacts and historical photographs. Sidebars tell

the personal stories of more than 20 young people of various social and religious backgrounds and

nationalities who suffered or died during the Holocaust.

Chaikin, Miriam. A Nightmare in History: The Holocaust, 1933–1945. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

The author effectively weaves personal narratives into this concise, readable history. She presents the

facts clearly and succinctly but never allows the reader to forget the faces behind the facts.

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Meltzer, Milton. Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust. New York: Dell

Publishing Company, 1977.

Meltzer’s history focuses on the Jewish perspective on the Holocaust, including brief histories of

antisemitism and of Jewish resistance. One of the first books on the Holocaust written for young

people, this is still one of the most useful.

Rogasky, Barbara. Smoke and Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust. New York:

Holiday House, 1988.

Blending a narrative of historical events with personal testimonies, Rogasky poses these questions:

How did the Holocaust happen and why? Couldn’t anyone stop it? How could the Jews let it

happen? She also includes a chapter on non-Jewish victims.

2. HISTORY, SPECIALIZED

Bachrach, Susan D. The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936. Boston: Little, Brown,

2000.

Bachrach traces the troubled history of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, examining the Nazi

dictatorship, the escalating persecution of German Jews, and the abortive movement in the United

States to boycott the games. She tells the complete story of the Games, focusing not only on the

athletes who competed but also on those who were banned from competition.

Friedman, Ina R. The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by

the Nazis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Friedman focuses on non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. She interviews Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah’s

Witnesses and other religious figures, the disabled, and members of other victim groups. Information

is included on blacks and homosexuals, although she was unable to provide interviews.

Landau, Elaine. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. New York: Macmillan, 1992.

After briefly describing the creation of the Warsaw ghetto, the author concentrates on the 28 days of

the uprising. Both text and photographs are graphic at times but only to the extent necessary to

describe the events accurately.

Meltzer, Milton. Rescue: The Story of How Gentiles Saved Jews in the Holocaust.

New York: Har perCollins Children’s Books, 1991.

This work focuses on the non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews throughout Nazi-occupied

Europe.The author uses material excerpted from diaries and letters, personal interviews, and eyewitness accounts.
58

Stadtler, Bea. The Holocaust: A History of Courage and Resistance. West Orange,

N.J.: Behrman House, 1994.

One of the first Holocaust books written for young people, this work focuses on Jewish resistance.

This is a good companion to Meltzer’s Rescue; together the two books present an excellent picture

of both Jewish and non-Jewish resistance.

Volavkova, Hana, ed. I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and

Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942–1944. New York: Schocken, 1993.

A poignant memorial to the children of Terezin, the collages, paintings, drawings, and poems

published in this selection are impressive for their artistic merit and their value in documenting the

feelings and lives of children in the camp. Some prior knowledge of what life in the camps was like

will make these pieces more meaningful to students.

3. BIOGRAPHY

Atkinson, Linda. In Kindling Flame: The Story of Hannah Senesh 1921–1944. New

York: William Morrow, 1992.

Atkinson combines history and biography in this story of the noted Jewish-Hungarian resistance

fighter. Because the author includes an account of Senesh’s capture and execution as well as the

historical background essential for full understanding of her story, this book can either complement

Senesh’s diary or serve as an alternative for younger readers.

Friedman, Ina R. Flying against the Wind: The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied

the Nazis. Brookline, Mass.: Lodgepole Press, 1995.

This biography tells the little-known but compelling story of Cato Bjontes van Beek, a non-Jewish

German executed at the age of 22 for writing and circulating anti-Nazi flyers. Before her arrest, Cato

also had aided Jews in hiding, smuggled refugees over the Alps, and helped starving French prisoners

of war.This biography is one of the few books on German resistance for younger readers.

Marrin, Albert. Hitler: A Portrait of a Tyrant. New York: Viking, 1987.

Much more than a biography, Marrin provides a detailed look at both the man himself and the war

he orchestrated.While he makes no effort to be objective in his portrayal of Hitler, the author gives

the most detailed account of Hitler and Nazism available in books for young people.

Nicholson, Michael, and David Winner. Raoul Wallenberg. Ridgefield, Conn.:

Morehouse, 1990.

This concise, well-illustrated biography contains considerable information about one of the best

known of those individuals who helped rescue Jews during the Holocaust.

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Pettit, Jane. A Place to Hide: True Stories of Holocaust Rescues. New York:

Scholastic, 1993.

One of the most readable books for younger students, this collection includes the stories of Miep

Gies, the Schindlers, and Denmark’s rescue of its Jews.

Van der Rol, Ruud, and Rian Verhoeven. Anne Frank beyond the Diary:

A Photographic Remembrance. New York: Viking Press, 1993.

Compelling photographs from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and private collections provide

a moving portrait of Anne Frank. Facts about Anne’s life before and after her stay in the annex and

the larger historical context constitute the text.

4. FICTION

Kerr, Judith. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. New York: Dell Yearling, 1987.

Nine-year-old Anna and her family are forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933. Anna’s father is a

prominent German journalist who does not agree with the Nazi party or Hitler. For the next four

years, Anna and her family move from Switzerland to France and finally to England, experiencing

life as Jewish refugees, while her father tries to find work.

Laird, Christa. Shadow of the Wall. New York: Greenwillow, 1990.

Set in 1942 in the Warsaw ghetto, this novel features a boy living with his two younger sisters in an

orphanage run by Janusz Korczak, a distinguished physician, writer, and educator.This work is short

and much easier to read than Korczak’s biography and could either complement it or serve as an

alternative to it.

Lowry, Lois. Number the Stars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

Annemarie Johansen is ten years old in 1943 when the Nazis plan to round up all the Jews in

Denmark.This is the story of the Danish resistance as seen through her eyes and of the Danish people

who helped to rescue almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark.

Orgel, Doris. The Devil in Vienna. New York: Puffin, 1988.

Based partly on the author’s own experiences, this story is set in Vienna in the months leading up to

the Nazi annexation of Austria in March 1938.Through her diary entries, a 13-year-old Jewish girl

recounts the difficulties of maintaining her close friendship with the daughter of a Nazi.
60

Orlev, Uri. The Island on Bird Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

After his mother disappears and the German army takes his father, a young Jewish boy is forced to

make his own way in the Warsaw ghetto.Alex takes refuge in an abandoned building to wait out the

winter and hopes for his father’s return.

Orlev, Uri. The Man from the Other Side. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

This is the story of a non-Jewish boy living outside the Warsaw ghetto who joined his stepfather in

smuggling goods into and people out of the ghetto.The author himself was a child in the ghetto and

based his novel on the actual experiences of a childhood acquaintance.

Richter, Hans P. Friedrich. New York: Puffin Books, 1987.

Told in the first person, this autobiographical novel describes the friendship between two German

boys, one Jewish and one not, and what happens to that relationship after the Nazis come to power

and the non-Jewish boy’s father joins the Nazi party. The story is simple and easy to read, but a

dramatic and powerful account, told from a child’s perspective.

5. MEMOIRS

Auerbacher, Inge. I Am a Star: Child of the Holocaust. New York: Prentice Hall,

1987.

History, poetry, and personal narrative accompanied by drawings and photographs combine in this

slim volume to present a concise, child’s eye view of the Holocaust. From 1942 to 1945, Auerbacher

was incarcerated in the Terezin ghetto in Czechoslovakia.This is an excellent personalized introduction to the Holocaust for younger readers.

Ayer, Eleanor H. Parallel Journeys. New York: Atheneum, 1995.

Alternating chapters contrast the wartime experiences of two young Germans—Helen Waterford,

who was interned in a Nazi concentration camp, and Alfons Heck, a member of the Hitler Youth.

The volume is composed mainly of excerpts from their published autobiographies, connected by

Ayer’s overview of the era. Teachers may want to accompany this book with the film, Heil Hitler:

Confessions of a Hilter Youth (p. 105).

Boas, Jacob. We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the

Holocaust. New York: Henr y Holt, 1995.

Boas, a Holocaust survivor, recounts the stories of five young Jews, including Anne Frank, whose

diaries describe their observations and feelings during the Holocaust.These are their stories, in their

own words.

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Drucker, Olga Levy. Kindertransport. New York: Holt, 1992.

Born in Germany in 1927, Olga Levy was one of the many Jewish children evacuated from Germany

to England during 1938 and 1939. She was separated from her parents for six years, until they were

reunited in the United States in 1945. She tells her story in a simple and moving way, adding historical facts of which she was unaware at the time, but that put her story into perspective.The book

concludes with the reunion of former Kindertransport children in London in 1989.

Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.

One of the most read works in Holocaust literature, this classic account presents an eloquent picture

of adolescence for a Jewish girl growing up during the Holocaust years.The focus is more personal

than historic, so accompanying background material is recommended to put it into historical

perspective.

Grossman, Mendel. My Secret Camera: Life in the Lodz Ghetto. San Diego:

Gulliver Books, 2000.

Mendel Grossman was a Jewish photographer who depicted life in the Lodz ghetto in 1941 and

1942.This is an excellent companion to the Lodz ghetto film and Adelson book. It can also supplement the book if the film is not available.

Holliday, Laurel. Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries.

New York: Pocket Books, 1995.

Holliday provides an anthology of diaries written by children in Nazi-occupied Europe. She includes

the writings of 23 boys and girls ages ten through 18.Their diaries illustrate the diverse experiences

of children during World War II and the Holocaust.

Isaacman, Clara, and Joan A. Grossman. Clara’s Story. Philadelphia: Jewish

Publication Society, 1984.

Clara and her family fled antisemitism in Romania to Belgium in 1940. Like so many others, they

were then threatened a second time by the Nazi invasion of Belgium. By constantly moving from

one hiding place to another, everyone but Clara’s father survived.Although her story parallels Anne

Frank’s in a number of ways, she adds more historical background to her personal narrative.

Koehn, Ilse. Mischling, Second Degree: My Childhood in Nazi Germany. New York:

Puffin Books, 1990.

Unaware of her Jewish heritage, Ilse was six years old when the Nuremberg “racial laws” declared her

a “Mischling, second degree,” a person with one Jewish grandparent. Her story is that of a little girl

whose comfortable world has been turned upside down for no apparent reason.
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Leitner, Isabella. Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom. New York:

Anchor Books, 1994.

Leitner, a survivor of Auschwitz, recounts the ordeal of holding her family together after her mother

was killed. Leitner describes her deportation from Hungary in the summer of 1944, her experiences

in Auschwitz, and her evacuation to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near the end of the war.

Reiss, Johanna. The Upstairs Room. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Reiss, from a Dutch Jewish family, tells the story of the years she spent hiding with her sister in the

farmhouse of a Dutch family who protected them. She relates her experiences after the war in a

sequel, The Journey Back.

Sender, Ruth M. The Cage. New York: Macmillan, 1986.

Sender’s account of her experiences is one of the most graphic and dramatic in young people’s literature. Her story begins just before the Nazi invasion of Poland and continues through life in the Lodz

ghetto and finally, at Auschwitz. A sequel, To Life, continues her narrative from liberation to her

arrival in the United States in 1950.

Siegal,Aranka. Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungar y, 1939–1944.

London: Dent, 1982.

A nine-year-old girl named Piri describes the bewilderment of being a Jewish child during the

German occupation of her hometown (then in Hungary and now in Ukraine) and relates the ordeal

of trying to survive in the ghetto.

TenBoom, Corrie. The Hiding Place. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.

Written in the first person, this memoir reads like an adventure book as it tells the story of a

Christian woman and her sister who were arrested for helping Jews and were subsequently sent to a

concentration camp.

Toll, Nelly S. Behind the Secret Window: A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood during

World War II. New York: Dial Books, 1993.

Toll recounts the details of her family life in Lwów (Lvov), Poland, before World War II and her

experiences, told from a child’s perspective, of her 18 months in hiding with her mother.The narrative is accompanied by 29 reproductions of watercolor paintings that Toll created during those

difficult months.

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Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Wiesel is one of the most eloquent writers of the Holocaust, and this book is his best-known work.

The compelling narrative describes his experience in Auschwitz. This narrative is often considered

required reading for students of the Holocaust.

Zar, Rose. In the Mouth of the Wolf. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society,

1983.

Zar’s story is unusual because she is one of the few Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust years in

Poland. She fled the Piotrkow ghetto and lived under false papers as a Christian Pole. She survived

the war working in the household of a German officer and his wife.

HIGH SCHOOL

1. HISTORY, GENERAL

Bauer, Yehuda, and Nili Keren. A History of the Holocaust. New York: Franklin

Watts, 1982.

Broader in scope than the title indicates, this work examines the origins of antisemitism and Nazism

as well as the history of Jewish-German relationships. Bauer also arranges material on the Holocaust

by individual country; this is useful for following events in each nation and for demonstrating the

scope of the Holocaust. One of the most readable general histories for high school students.

Hilberg, Raul. The Destr uction of the European Jews [student text]. New York:

Holmes and Meier, 1985.

This edition of Hilberg’s classic work is an abridgment of the original, three-volume edition.The

focus here is on the Nazis and their destruction process, from the concentration of the Jews in

ghettos to the killing operations of the mobile units and the death camps.This essential history is

recommended for more advanced students.

Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe,

1933–1945. New York: Har perCollins, 1992.

In his most recent work, Hilberg expands his focus from the study of the perpetrator alone to

include, as the title indicates, victims and bystanders. He also includes rescuers and Jewish resisters,

groups that he ignored in his earlier work; however, the attention he gives to these groups is minimal.

His main focus continues to be on the destruction and those responsible for it. Hitler’s role is more

central here than in the earlier work.This is Hilberg’s most accessible book.
64

2. HISTORY, SPECIALIZED

Abzug, Robert H. Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi

Concentration Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Using the diaries, letters, photographs, and oral testimonies of American GIs and journalists, Abzug

analyzes the reactions of the first eyewitnesses who entered the concentration camps in Germany and

Austria during the spring of 1945.This highly readable account is liberally illustrated with photographs.

Adelson, Alan, and Robert Lapides, eds. Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community under

Siege. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991.

As the source book for the film Lodz Ghetto (see p. 110), this work is an excellent supplement to the

documentary, but it also stands on its own. It contains both German and ghetto documents as well

as the personal expressions of ghetto residents in a variety of forms, including diaries, speeches, paintings, photographs, essays, and poems.

Allen, William S. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German

Town, 1922–1945. Revised edition. New York: Franklin Watts, 1984.

Northeim, a small town of medieval origins in the center of prewar Germany, is the setting for this

absorbing study of the impact of Nazism on a single community. As one of the few detailed local

studies of Nazi Germany available in English, this book is an invaluable complement to histories of

Nazism from the national perspective.

Arad, Yitzhak. Ghetto in Flames. New York: Holocaust Publications, 1982.

For centuries, its large number of rabbinic scholars ensured Vilna a central place in the cultural life

of Lithuanian Jewry. Arad’s scholarly and groundbreaking study focuses on the life, struggle, and annihilation of the Jews of Vilna in the period between 1941 and 1944.

Bachrach, Susan D. The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936. Boston: Little, Brown,

2000.

Bachrach traces the troubled history of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, examining the Nazi

dictatorship, the escalating persecution of German Jews, and the abortive movement in the United

States to boycott the games. She tells the complete story of the Games, focusing not only on the

athletes who competed but also on those who were banned from competition.

Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told

in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

As indicated by the title, the book tells the story of the Holocaust as presented in the Museum.

It includes more than 200 photos from the Museum’s archives and artifact collection and many

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eyewitness accounts from the Museum’s oral and video history collections. The three parts of the

book, which correspond to the three main exhibition floors, cover the rise of the Nazis to power;

the ghettos and camps; and rescue, resistance, and the postwar period.

Block, Gay, and Malka Drucker. Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the

Holocaust. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992.

Interviews and full-size color portraits of 49 ordinary individuals from ten countries who risked their

lives to help Jews by hiding them,sharing their food rations,forging passports and baptismal certificates,

and raising Jewish children as their own.The rescuers’ portraits are presented by country of origin, and

a brief historical overview of rescue efforts in each country precedes their personal stories.

Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. Atlas of Jewish History. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Cohn-Sherbok traces the development of Jewish history from ancient times to the present day,

placing the Holocaust within the larger context of almost 5,000 years of Jewish history. He includes

more than 100 maps and 24 black-and-white illustrations.

Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984.

Conot provides a detailed history of the Nuremberg Trials. He covers the preparations for the trials,

the interrogation and indictment of the major Nazi war criminals, the prosecution of the trial, strategies used by the defense, and the verdict and execution of the sentences handed down by the

International Military Tribunal in 1946. Conot also includes a brief discussion of the difficulties

involved in organizing the Nuremberg Trials, which involved representatives from the United States,

Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.

Des Pres, Terrence. The Sur viv or: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Des Pres studies survivors of the death camps in an attempt to determine what enabled people to

survive; his conclusions are controversial and are unlike those of Bettelheim (The Informed Heart),

Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning), and other Holocaust survivors.

Flender, Harold. Rescue in Denmar k. New York: Anti-Def amation League, 1963.

The exceptional, honorable character of the Danes’ successful operation to rescue most of its Jewish

residents has aroused profound admiration. Individual stories of rescue are cited here as well as more

general historical background and a look at the reasons for the Nazis’ failure to implement the “Final

Solution” in Denmark.
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Grossman, Mendel. My Secret Camera: Life in the Lodz Ghetto. San Diego:

Gulliver Books, 2000.

Mendel Grossman was a Jewish photographer who depicted life in the Lodz ghetto in 1941 and

1942. This is an excellent companion to the Lodz Ghetto film (see p. 110) and the Adelson book.

It can also supplement the book if the film is not available.

Hayes, Peter, ed. Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a

Changing World. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991.

In this useful collection, thoughtfully introduced by Hayes, various aspects of the Holocaust are

examined by 16 leading scholars, including Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer,Yehuda Bauer, Michael

Marrus, Christopher Browning, and Lawrence Langer. Also included is a critical essay by Alvin

Rosenfeld on the popularization of Anne Frank.

Hayes, Peter, ed. Lessons and Legacies, Volume III: Memory, Memorialization, and

Denial. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999.

A collection of essays by noted scholars (Christopher Browning, John Roth, Michael Marrus, and

Debórah Dwork, among others).The essays deal with integrating the Holocaust into several disciplinary fields (history, Jewish studies, sociology, philosophy, and literary studies), the German context

of the Holocaust, issues of memorialization, and combating Holocaust denial.

Marrus, Michael, and Robert O. Paxton. Vichy France and the Jews. New York:

Basic Books, 1981.

Marrus and Paxton examine the fate of the Jews inVichy, France.They outline the antisemitic policy

of the Vichy regime and its collaboration with the Nazis.

Mayer, Milton. The y Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1966.

After the war, Mayer, an American journalist, interviewed ten men of different backgrounds but from

the same German town in an effort to determine, through their eyes, what had happened in Germany

and what had made it possible.This is an excellent companion to Allen’s Nazi Seizure of Power.

Mendelsohn, Ezra. The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

Mendelsohn focuses on the Jewish communities of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania,

Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia with particular attention to the relationship between Jews and

Gentiles in the highly nationalist environment of the volatile period between the world wars, from

1918 to 1939.

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Patterson, Charles. Anti-Semitism: The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond.

New York: Walker and Company, 1988.

As the title implies, this history of antisemitism includes the years both before and after the

Holocaust. Patterson begins with ancient and medieval times and concludes with a discussion of

modern antisemitism in various parts of the world.

Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals.

New York: Henry Holt, 1986.

The Nazis condemned homosexuals as “socially aberrant.” Soon after Hitler came to power in

1933, Storm Troopers raided nightclubs and other places where homosexuals met. Plant argues that

about 10,000 people were imprisoned as homosexuals and many of them perished in concentration camps. In this volume, the first comprehensive study available in English, Plant examines the

ideological motivations for the Nazi persecution of homosexuals and the history of the implementation of Nazi policies.

Read, Anthony, and David Fisher. Kristallnacht: The Tragedy of the Nazi Night of

Terror. New York: Random House, 1989.

Beginning with a brief background and ending with the Evian conference, the focus of this work

is the events of Kristallnacht itself and its immediate aftermath, including the response of ordinary

Germans, the Nazi follow-up, and the international response. Both the prologue and epilogue deal

with Herschel Grynszpan, the young man who triggered Kristallnacht by shooting a German official in Paris.

Schilling, Donald G. Lessons and Legacies II: Teaching the Holocaust in a Changing

World. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

This volume of Lessons and Legacies includes a collection of essays written by noted scholars on recent

developments in Holocaust history, methodology for teaching the Holocaust, and strategies for integrating the study of the Holocaust into an interdisciplinary environment.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.

New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1995.

The atlas presents the story of the Holocaust in detail—country by country, ghetto by ghetto, and

camp by camp. It includes more than 230 full-color maps and accompanying text, from the location

of Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) communities in 1933 to the makeup of postwar Europe in

1949–1950.
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Zuccotti, Susan. The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Zuccotti examines the Holocaust in Italy. She notes the generous acts toward Jews that characterized

the behavior of many Italians during the Holocaust but also notes the fact that antisemitic legislation was passed in Italy almost without dissent. Some Italians collaborated with the Germans in the

deportation of Jews from Italy.

Zuccotti, Susan. The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1999.

Zuccotti examines the response to the Holocaust of ordinary French people. She draws on memoirs,

government documents, and personal interviews with survivors to tell the story of French men and

women, Jews and non-Jews, during the Holocaust.

3. BIOGRAPHY

Bierman, John. Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of

the Holocaust. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1981.

The first half of the book is a biography of the well-known figure who helped save at least 30,000

Jews in Hungary.The second part of the book describes the circumstances surrounding Wallenberg’s

disappearance and subsequent attempts to locate him or at least find out what happened to him.

Breitman, Richard, and Walter Laqueur. Breaking the Silence: The Man Who

Exposed the Final Solution. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England,

1986.

Eduard Schulte was a major German industrialist who abhorred Hitler and Nazism. He is the man

credited with passing on to the Allies news not only of troop movements and weapon programs but

of the Nazi plans for genocide. This biography relates Schulte’s story from his childhood to his

postwar years.The authors also describe the responses of Allied governments to the information he

passed on to them.

Lifton, Betty Jean. The King of Children: A Portrait of Janusz Korczak.

New York: Schocken, 1989.

Much of the material in this biography is taken from Korczak’s diaries, but Lifton also interviewed

many of his former charges and people who worked with him. In addition to the personal portrait

of Korczak,a distinguished physician, writer,and educator, she includes background material on the

Warsaw ghetto based on Korczak’s diary and diaries of other ghetto victims.

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Scholl, Inge. The White Rose: Munich, 1942–43. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan,

1983.

Inge Scholl was the sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl, founders of the famous “White Rose” resistance movement in Germany. Originally written in 1952, this is the story of the Scholls and of the

White Rose movement. It also includes original documents concerning their indictments and

sentences.This book was previously published under the title Students against Tyranny.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus [vols. I–II]. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

Spiegelman presents his parents’ experiences during the Holocaust in a unique way; here cartoon

characters represent people, with the Jews portrayed as mice and the Nazis as cats. In the first volume,

the author relates the real-life trials of his parents at Auschwitz. The second volume continues 

their story from Auschwitz to America.The cartoon format will appeal to reluctant readers, and the

satirical irony of these works make them appropriate for a wide audience.

4. FICTION

Appelfeld, Aharon. To the Land of the Cattails. New York: Weidenfeld and

Nicolson, 1986.

A young man and his mother living in Austria travel eastward across the heart of Europe to the

distant land of the mother’s childhood.The year is 1938, and the two arrive just as the Jews of the

village are being shipped off on a mysterious train to an unspecified destination. Appelfeld is a master

storyteller, and this haunting narrative of an ironic pilgrimage will not easily be forgotten.

Fink, Ida. A Scrap of Time. New York: Schocken, 1989.

The title story in this collection of short stories concerns the way time was measured by Holocaust

victims. Other stories describe people in a variety of human situations distorted by the circumstances

of the times. Many of these stories can be effectively used with students.

Friedlander, Albert. Out of the Whirlwind. New York: Schocken, 1989.

Not all of the entries included in this anthology are fiction. Excerpts are also included from historical works and personal narratives.The book is arranged thematically, making it especially helpful for

a teacher looking for material to support specific aspects of a curriculum.

Glatstein, Jacob. Antholo gy of Holocaust Litera ture. New York: Macmillan, 1973.

Chapters in this collection cover life in the ghettos, children, the camps, resistance, and non-Jewish

victims. Excerpts are included from both works of fiction and primary source materials such as

diaries, memoirs, and ghetto documents. Many of these pieces can be especially useful if teachers

provide additional background information on the authors and context of the writings.
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Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. New York: Random House, 1990.

Originally published as two separate stories in The New Yorker, the title story tells of a mother

witnessing her baby’s death at the hands of camp guards.Another story,“Rose,” describes that same

mother 30 years later, still haunted by the event.

Uhlman, Fred. Reunion. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

More a novella than a novel, this brief but moving story told in retrospect by a Jewish German youth

describes his friendship with a non-Jewish German youth during the 1930s. Its brevity and readability make it especially suitable for reluctant readers.

5. MEMOIRS

Ayer, Eleanor H. Parallel Journeys. New York: Atheneum, 1995.

Alternating chapters contrast the wartime experiences of two young Germans—Helen Waterford,

who was interned in a Nazi concentration camp, and Alfons Heck, a member of the Hitler Youth.

The volume is composed mainly of excerpts from their published autobiographies, connected by

Ayer’s overview of the era. Teachers may want to accompany this book with the film, Heil Hitler:

Confessions of a Hilter Youth (see p. 105).

Boas, Jacob. We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the

Holocaust. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.

Boas, a Holocaust survivor, recounts the stories of five young Jews, including Anne Frank, whose

diaries describe their observations and feelings during the Holocaust.These are their stories, in their

own words.

Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984.

Conot provides a detailed history of the Nuremberg Trials. He covers the preparations for the trials,

the interrogation and indictment of the major Nazi war criminals, the prosecution of the trial, strategies used by the defense, and the verdict and execution of the sentences handed down by the

International Military Tribunal in 1946. Conot also includes a brief discussion of the difficulties

involved in organizing the Nuremberg Trials, which involved representatives from the United States,

Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.

Eliach, Yaff a. Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.

Through interviews and oral histories, Eliach garnered 89 tales, both true stories and fanciful legends.

This compelling collection bears witness, in a traditional idiom, to the victims’ suffering, dying,

and surviving.

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Fenelon, Fania. Playing for Time. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press,

1997.

Fenelon recounts her experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis transported her

from the Drancy camp in Paris to the Auschwitz killing center. Although her descriptions reveal

the horrors of the camps, the book’s primary focus is on her experiences in the AuschwitzBirkenau women’s orchestra.

Gies, Miep, and Alison L. Gold. Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman

Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Miep Gies, along with her husband, was among the people who helped the Frank family while they

were in hiding. Her story is an important supplement to Anne Frank’s diary as it adds historical background and an outside perspective to Anne’s story. Gies enables the reader to understand what was

happening both inside and outside the annex.

Leitner, Isabella. Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom. New York: Anchor Books,

1994.

Leitner, a survivor of Auschwitz, recounts the ordeal of holding her family together after her mother

was killed. Leitner describes her deportation from Hungary in the summer of 1944, her experiences

in Auschwitz, and her evacuation to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near the end of the war.

Levi, Primo. Moments of Reprieve. New York: Summit Books, 1986.

Levi was deported from Turin, Italy, to the Auschwitz camp in German-occupied Poland in 1943.

He presents a collection of short stories that celebrate his survival of Auschwitz.

Levi, Primo. Sur vival in Auschwitz. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Levi was an Italian Jew captured in 1943 who was still at Auschwitz at the time of the liberation. He

not only chronicles the daily activities in the camp but also his inner reactions to it and the destruction of the inner as well as the outer self.

Meed, Vladka. On Both Sides of the Wall. Washington, D.C.: Holocaust Library,

1993.

This is an informative memoir of the Warsaw ghetto by one of the young smugglers who maintained

contact between the ghetto and the “Aryan” side of the city. Working for the Jewish Fighting

Organization (ZOB),Vladka Meed helped smuggle weapons and ammunition into the ghetto.
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Nir, Yehuda. The Lost Childhood. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991.

This compelling memoir chronicles six extraordinary years in the life of a Polish Jewish boy, his

mother, and his sister, who all survived the Holocaust by obtaining false papers and posing as

Catholics.Yehuda Nir lost almost everything,including his father,his possessions,his youth and innocence, and his identity, but he managed to live with the help of chance, personal resourcefulness, and

the support of his family.

Sierakowiak, Dawid, Alan Adelson, and Kamil Turowski. The Diary of Dawid

Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1996.

Dawid Sierakowiak was a 15-year-old boy in the Lodz ghetto in German-occupied Poland when he

began writing this diary. Edited and annotated by Alan Adelson and Kamil Turowski, Dawid provides

a vivid account of daily life in the Lodz ghetto.

Tec, Nechama. Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1984.

The author and her family were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust on the “Aryan” side of the

ghetto. Although she escaped the worst horrors of the Holocaust, her story adds another dimension

to Holocaust literature. She describes her childhood experiences as seen through the child’s eyes, but

with the added perspective of her adult perception.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Wiesel is one of the most eloquent writers of the Holocaust, and this book is his best-known work.

The compelling narrative describes his experience in Auschwitz.This narrative is often considered

required reading for students of the Holocaust.

Yoors, Jan. Crossing: A Journal of Survival and Resistance in World War II. New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.

Every summer during his teen years,Yoors left his comfortable, upper-middle-class family life in

Belgium to travel around Europe with a Romani (Gypsy) family. This beautifully written journal

focuses on the participation of Yoors and his fondly remembered Romani friends in resistance activities during World War II.

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ADULT

1. GENERAL HISTORY

Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: A History of the Holocaust as Told in

the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

As indicated by the title, the book tells the story of the Holocaust as presented in the Museum. It

includes more than 200 photos from the Museum’s archives and artifact collection and many eyewitness accounts from the Museum’s oral and video history collections. The three parts of the book,

which correspond to the three main exhibition floors, cover the rise of the Nazis to power; the

ghettos and camps; and rescue, resistance, and the postwar period.

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. A Holocaust Reader. West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House,

1976.

A companion to the historical work cited below, here Dawidowicz presents documentation to

support the history. Both German and Jewish documents are provided, including reports, letters, and

diaries. The general introduction to studying Holocaust documents and the introductions to each

section of documents are extremely helpful.

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War against the Jews, 1933–1945. New York: Bantam,

1986.

Dawidowicz raises three questions: How was it possible for a modern state to carry out the systematic murder of a people for no reason other than that they were Jewish? How did European Jewry

allow itself to be destroyed? How could the world stand by without halting this destruction? In

Dawidowicz’s view,World War II was the direct result of Hitler’s antisemitism; she believes the war

was waged to allow the Nazis to implement the “Final Solution.”

Friedlander, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution

1933–1939. New York: Harper Collins, 1997.

Friedlander recounts the step-by-step process by which the Nazi regime increased its repression

against the Jews of Germany in the years between 1933 and 1939. His account includes a description of the responses of Jews at all levels of society.
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Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews in Europe during the Second

World War. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1986.

Gilbert effectively combines the results of historical research with personal narratives of survivors.

Although the book is long, it is readable and extremely well-indexed, making it an invaluable tool

for providing supplementary material on almost any aspect of the Holocaust.

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews [3 vols.]. New York: Holmes

and Meier, 1985.

This authoritative reconstruction of the Holocaust remains the standard text to which all others are

compared. Hilberg’s primary focus is on the methods of the Nazi murder process, including the organizational and bureaucratic machinery of destruction. Hilberg’s explanation of the role of Jews

themselves in their destruction and of the lack of resistance has been criticized.

Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe,

1933–1945. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Hilberg expands his focus from the study of the perpetrator alone to include, as the title indicates,

victims and bystanders. He also includes rescuers and Jewish resisters, groups that he ignored in his

earlier work; however, the attention he gives to these groups is minimal. His main focus continues

to be on the destruction and those responsible for it. Hitler’s role is more central here than in his

book The Destruction of the European Jews.

Levin, Nora. The Holocaust: The Nazi Destr uction of European Jewr y, 1933–1945.

Melbour ne, Fla.: Krieger Publishing Company, 1990.

Levin was one of the first writers to use the term Holocaust for the destruction of the Jews of Europe

during World War II. The first part of this historical account, arranged chronologically, details the

Nazi plan and implementation of the “Final Solution.” The second half, arranged geographically,

shows how the Nazi program was affected by individual governments and by degrees of antisemitism. Levin emphasizes the resistance of the Jews and rejects the notion that they went to their

deaths “like sheep to the slaughter.”

Niewyk, Donald L., ed. The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation.

Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1992.

This series of essays by well-known historians offers distinct perspectives on five different themes of

the Holocaust.The topics include the development of the Nazi plan to solve the “Jewish Question,”

experiences of victims, viewpoints on Jewish resistance, reactions of Christians to the “Final

Solution,” and finally, perspectives on rescue.

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Schleunes, Karl A. The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German

Jews, 1933–1939. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Schleunes’s groundbreaking work examines the organization and operations of the Nazi government

between 1933 and 1939, in order to understand how German antisemitism evolved into a program of

mass murder.Through his interpretation of the public record, the author presents an image of Hitler as

a leader who provided no cohesive set of objectives or plans for dealing with the “Jewish Question”

during this period. In this power vacuum, Schleunes argues that a policy evolved in a series of “jumps

and starts”as the party and government agencies acted on their own initiative to curry favor with Hitler.

The work offers an interesting contrast to Dawidowicz’s The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (see p. 73).

Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1991.

Yahil demonstrates how the Nazis used the anti-Jewish program from the beginning to reinforce

their power. Before the war, their deliberate violence against the Jews of Germany helped to terrorize

the rest of the country, and during the war, their anti-Jewish policies were used as an excuse for

taking control of the governments of satellites and occupied countries.

2. HISTORY, SPECIALIZED

Allen, William S. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German

Town, 1922–1945. Revised edition. New York: Franklin Watts, 1984.

Northeim, a small town of medieval origins in the center of prewar Germany, is the setting for this

absorbing study of the impact of Nazism on a single community.As one of the only detailed local

studies of Nazi Germany available in English, this book is an invaluable complement to histories of

Nazism from the national perspective.

Aly, Götz. “Final Solution”: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European

Jews. New York: Arnold, 1999.

Aly reconstructs the events and decisions leading to the Holocaust. He examines the failures of Nazi

resettlement plans and the growing ideological imperative for the Nazis to find a solution to the socalled “Jewish Question” during the war.

Bartoszewski, Wladyslaw T. The Warsaw Ghetto: A Christian’s Testimony. Boston:

Beacon Press, 1988.

The author is a Polish historian and journalist, born in Warsaw in 1922, now a retired professor of

Catholic University in Lublin. He returned to Warsaw in 1941 and was one of the founders of

Zegota, the council for aid to Jews. He served as liaison between the Polish underground and Jewish

ghetto leadership. In this work, he intermingles his personal story with primary source material from

Nazi, resistance, and ghetto documents.
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Bauer, Yehuda, and Nathan Rotenstreich, eds. The Holocaust as Historical

Experience. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981.

This is a collection of essays by noted scholars in the field (Saul Friedlander, Jacob Katz, Raul

Hilberg, Henry Feingold, Isaiah Trunk, and Randolph Braham, among others). It is organized into

three sections: the Holocaust as historical phenomenon (the possibility and predictability of the

Holocaust); case studies (Vilna,Warsaw, Hungary, and Romania); and the contentious issue of Jewish

leadership in Nazi-dominated Europe. Material for the book originated at a conference titled “The

Holocaust:A Generation After” held in New York in March 1975.

Berenbaum, Michael, ed. A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered

by the Nazis. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

This collection of essays includes entries by a number of noted Holocaust scholars, including

Berenbaum himself. The subjects of the essays include non-Jewish victims such as homosexuals,

Gypsies, Serbs, Slavs, and pacifists.

Berenbaum, Michael, and Abraham J. Peck, eds. The Holocaust and History: The

Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1998.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this book of essays

by noted scholars in the field defines the state of knowledge about the Holocaust today.The book

probes topics such as Nazi politics, racial ideology, stages of the Holocaust, Jewish leadership and

resistance, the Allies and Axis powers, the rescuers, and the impact of the Holocaust on survivors.

Bridenthal, Renate, et al. When Biolo gy Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and

Nazi Ger many. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984.

Claudia Koonz and Sybil Milton are among the scholars included in this collection of essays dealing

with issues relating to women and families in Germany in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Politics, feminism, and antisemitism are some of the subjects addressed.

Browning, Christopher R. Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final

Solution. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1991.

Browning renders a short review of the historiography of the Holocaust and offers an interpretation

of the Nazi decision-making process that led to the “Final Solution.”The work focuses on the critical period between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1942.The author presents evidence that

growing persecution of minorities and target groups, brutal wartime reprisal measures, and the mass

starvation and maltreatment of Soviet prisoners of war were components of a brutalization process

that culminated in genocide.The work discusses the development of the gas van and explores how

the German response to partisan warfare in Yugoslavia developed into a “Final Solution” for the local

Jewish community in Serbia.

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Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the

Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

In this compelling, pioneering social history, Browning attempts to explain how “ordinary,” middleaged men became mass murderers, personally shooting thousands of men, women, and children in

occupied Poland where the reservists served as members of the German Order Police.The author

draws on the interrogations of 210 men who provided testimony in war crimes trials in the 1960s

regarding their participation in the massacres and roundups of Jews in 1942 and 1943.

Browning, Christopher R. Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers.

New York: Cambr idge University Press, 2000.

Browning focuses on the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy during the first years of the war—the

movement from expulsion of Jews to systematic extermination—in an effort to illuminate the mindset and behavior of local perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany, 1900–1945.

New York: Cambr idge University Press, 1995.

This well-documented study moves beyond Burleigh’s earlier work, The Racial State (described

below), and examines three principal themes: the origins and evolution of Germany’s “euthanasia”

program, the involvement of personnel from various levels of the bureaucracy, and the advancements

they received for participation.

Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Ger many,

1933–1945. New York: Cambr idge University Press, 1991.

Between 1933 and 1945 the Nazi regime tried to restructure German society along racial lines.This

study shows how the Nazis’ plan to annihilate European Jewry derived from racial and population

policies that also targeted the Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), the mentally and physically handicapped,

the “asocial,” and homosexuals.

Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. Atlas of Jewish History. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Cohn-Sherbok traces the development of Jewish history from ancient times to the present day,

placing the Holocaust within the larger context of almost 5,000 years of Jewish history. He includes

more than 100 maps and 24 black-and-white illustrations.
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Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984.

Conot provides a detailed history of the Nuremberg Trials. He covers the preparations for the trials,

the interrogation and indictment of the major Nazi war criminals, the prosecution of the trial, strategies used by the defense, and the verdict and execution of the sentences handed down by the

International Military Tribunal in 1946. Conot also includes a brief discussion of the difficulties

involved in organizing the Nuremberg Trials, which involved representatives from the United States,

Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.

Delbo, Charlotte. None of Us Will Return. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

Delbo joined the resistance movement in France in 1940 and was arrested together with her husband

by the Germans in March 1942. The Germans executed her husband but imprisoned and, later,

deported Delbo to Auschwitz in occupied Poland.The book is a series of memories about the camp

written in free verse and rhythmic prose in an attempt to symbolize time for prisoners in a death camp.

Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Des Pres studies survivors of the death camps in an attempt to determine what enabled people to

survive. His conclusions are controversial and are unlike those of Bettelheim (The Informed Heart),

Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning), and other Holocaust scholars.

Dobroszycki, Lucjan, ed. The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944.

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987.

Himself a survivor of the Lodz ghetto, Dobroszycki introduces and analyzes the detailed records kept

by Lodz archivists. He includes material about the ghetto’s controversial leader, Mordecai Chaim

Rumkowski.

Dwork, Debórah. Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe. New Haven,

Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991.

This detailed study of Jewish children during the Holocaust is based on archival material and survivor

interviews. The book focuses on the daily life of children in hiding and in transit camps, ghettos,

forced labor camps, and killing centers.

Engelmann, Bernt. In Hitler’s Germany. New York: Schocken, 1988.

Engelmann,a German raised in an anti-Nazi home,tells his own story here along with those of other

Germans both for and against the Nazis. He also includes stories of those who actively resisted the

Nazis and those who were indifferent to the events around them.This is a social history, focusing on

everyday life.

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Feingold, Henry. The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the

Holocaust, 1938–1945. New York: Schocken, 1980.

This study examines the reaction of the Roosevelt administration to the Holocaust. Feingold

attempts to move beyond a moral condemnation of American inaction to examine the political

context that shaped the American response.The main focus is on American and international refugee

policy from the Evian Conference in 1938 to the creation of the War Refugee Board in 1944.

Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final

Solution. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Friedlander traces the Nazi “euthanasia” program in Germany from its development and inception

in the 1930s until 1945. Beginning with the murder of children and expanding into a more inclusive operation, the author details the evolution of the Nazis’ eugenics policy designed to rid society

of the “incurable,” institutionalized, mentally and physically handicapped, and others whom the Nazis

termed “useless eaters.” One of the work’s important contributions in understanding the Holocaust

is its study of the program’s bureaucratic structure and how it functioned as a precursor to the “Final

Solution.”

Gallagher, Hugh Gregory. By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License

to Kill in the Thir d Reich. Arlington, Va.: Vandemeer Press, 1995.

A paraplegic, Gallagher provides a compelling account of Nazi Germany’s so-called “euthanasia”

program that gave license to German physicians to kill mentally and physically handicapped people

deemed “unworthy of life.”

Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

In this study of the Nazi secret police, Gellately combines administrative and social history. He draws

extensively on Gestapo case files to show that the key factor in the enforcement of Nazi racial policy

designed to isolate Jews was the willingness of German citizens to provide the authorities with information about suspected “criminality.” The author includes a chapter on racial policy aimed at Polish

foreign workers.

Gutman, Israel, and Shmuel Krakowski. Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews during

World War Two. New York: Holocaust Library, 1986.

Gutman and Krakowski examine in-depth the story of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust.

They analyze Polish attitudes toward Jews by region and by social class, concluding that the majority

of Poles were either indifferent or actively hostile toward Jews during the Holocaust.
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Gutman, Israel, and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death

Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Twenty-nine essays by scholars on all aspects of Auschwitz, including its construction, operations,

perpetrators, and victims, compose this comprehensive volume published in association with the

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Hayes, Peter, ed. Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a

Changing World. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991.

In this useful collection thoughtfully introduced by Hayes, various aspects of the Holocaust are

examined by 16 leading scholars including Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer,Yehuda Bauer, Michael

Marrus, Christopher Browning, and Lawrence Langer. Also included is a critical essay by Alvin

Rosenfeld on the popularization of Anne Frank.

Hayes, Peter, ed. Lessons and Legacies, Volume III: Memory, Memorialization, and

Denial. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999.

A collection of essays by noted scholars (Christopher Browning, John Roth, Michael Marrus, and

Debórah Dwork, among others).The essays deal with integrating the Holocaust into several disciplinary fields (history, Jewish studies, sociology, philosophy, and literary studies), the German context

of the Holocaust, issues of memorialization, and combating Holocaust denial.

Herzstein, Robert E. The War that Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media

Campaign. New York: Paragon House, 1978.

The author illustrates the power of propaganda and the effective manipulation of mass media by

focusing on the work of Goebbels and the impact of Nazi propaganda on the German people.

Horwitz, Gordon. In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of

Mauthausen. New York: The Free Press, 1990.

How much did people living near the camps know about what was going on? How did they cope

with this knowledge? How did they find out? These and similar questions are raised in this very readable book on the complicity of bystanders in the Holocaust.

Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Kaplan draws on memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters to paint a portrait of Jewish life in Nazi

Germany. This is the story of the Holocaust told from the perspective of individuals living in an

increasingly hostile world.

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Klee, Ernst, et al., eds. The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its

Perpetrators and Bystanders. New York: Free Press, 1991.

Originally published in Germany in 1988, this work is made up of letters, diaries, reports, photographs, and other documents, some of which were kept in scrapbooks and albums by concentration

camp guards, SS officers, and other perpetrators and “sympathetic observers” of the Holocaust.

Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics.

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

A history of the women’s movement in Germany from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi era, this

work emphasizes the role of women in Nazi Germany and the impact of Nazism on the family unit.

Koonz also includes material on the influence of the church in defining women’s roles, on female

members of the resistance, and on Jewish women.

Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. New York:

Pantheon, 1987.

This work consists of the text of Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour film of the same name (see 

p. 102).The film’s length makes the text extremely useful to the teacher, facilitating the process of

selecting excerpts for classroom use.The text can also be used alone if the film is unavailable.

Laska, Vera. Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of

Eyewitnesses. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1983.

Laska has collected more than two dozen accounts of women during the Holocaust, stressing

women’s resistance activities.The material is divided into three sections: resistance, hiding, and the

camps.These are all first-person accounts, many of them excerpts from diaries and memoirs, and they

represent a number of different countries.

Lifton, Robert. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killings and the Psychology of Genocide.

New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Based on German records as well as on interviews with Nazi doctors, prison doctors, and survivors

of the camps, Lifton’s book not only documents the role doctors played but also suggests ways they

were able to rationalize their role.

Lipstadt, Deborah. Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the

Holocaust, 1933–1945. New York: The Free Press, 1986.

Why did one of every three Americans polled in 1943 dismiss as propaganda the reports of atrocities against European Jews? Why were reports given by Auschwitz escapees in 1944 viewed with

skepticism by major newspapers? Lipstadt raises these questions and others in this book on how the

American news media reported (or ignored) the Nazi persecution and genocide of European Jewry.
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Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and

Memory. New York: The Free Press, 1993.

Lipstadt does not refute the deniers of the Holocaust point by point (although she offers a useful

appendix addressing some of their specific charges). Instead, she provides an overview of the main

figures promoting denial in the United States and abroad, their motives, their methods, and an assessment of their impact on college campuses and wider public opinion.

Marrus, Michael. The Holocaust in History. New York: New Amer ican

Library/Dutton, 1989.

In this succinct evaluation of historical accounts of the Holocaust, Marrus looks at a variety of issues:

antisemitism, collaboration, resistance, and others. He presents the interpretations of leading historians in these areas and points out the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments.

Marrus, Michael, and Robert O. Paxton. Vichy France and the Jews. New York:

Basic Books, 1981.

Marrus and Paxton examine the fate of the Jews in Vichy France.They outline the antisemitic policy

of the Vichy regime and its collaboration with the Nazis.

Mendelsohn, Ezra. The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

Mendelsohn focuses on the Jewish communities of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania,

Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia with particular attention to the relationship between Jews and

Gentiles in the highly nationalist environment of the volatile period between the world wars, from

1918 to 1939.

Mosse, George. Nazi Culture: A Documentary History. New York: Schocken,

1981.

While primarily an anthology of original source material, Mosse includes a lengthy personal introduction as well as introductions to each section and selection. Selections include material taken from

speeches, newspapers, contemporary literature, and diaries.

Noakes, Jeremy, and Geoffrey Pridham, eds. Nazism, 1919–1945: A Documentar y

Reader [2 vols.]. Exeter, United Kingdom: University of Exeter Press, 1998.

This comprehensive work includes a wide range of official, government,and party documents; newspapers; speeches; memoirs; letters; and diaries.The first volume covers the Nazis’ rise to power and

the domestic aspects of their regime from 1933 to 1939.Volume two examines foreign policy in the

prewar and war periods, the occupation of Poland, the “euthanasia” program, and the implementation of the genocidal policies.

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Phayer, Michael. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Phayer examines the response of the Catholic Church as a whole to the Holocaust. He shows that

without effective church leadership under Pius XII, Catholics reacted in different ways to the

Holocaust. Some Catholics saved Jews, others collaborated with the Nazis, while most became

bystanders to genocide.

Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals. New York:

Henry Holt, 1986.

The Nazis condemned homosexuals as “socially aberrant.” Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933,

Storm Troopers raided nightclubs and other places where homosexuals met. Plant argues that about

10,000 people were imprisoned as homosexuals, and many of them perished in concentration camps.

In this volume, the first comprehensive study available in English, Plant examines the ideological

motivations for the Nazi persecution of homosexuals and the history of the implementation of 

Nazi policies.

Rubenstein, Richard L. The Cunning of History. New York: HarperCollins, 1987.

This slim volume is less a history of the Holocaust than an extended essay that attempts to put the

Holocaust into historical perspective. Rubenstein’s original but controversial tenet essentially

describes the Holocaust as the culmination of twentieth-century technology and bureaucracy.

Rubenstein, Richard L., and John K. Roth. Approaches to Auschwitz: The

Holocaust and Its Legacy. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987.

Rubenstein and Roth explore the historical development that led to the Holocaust from both a

Christian and Jewish perspective.They develop an analysis of the historical roots of the Holocaust

and explore the implications of the Holocaust for the future.

Schilling, Donald G. Lessons and Legacies II: Teaching the Holocaust in a Changing

World. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

This volume of Lessons and Legacies includes a collection of essays written by noted scholars on recent

developments in Holocaust history, methodology for teaching the Holocaust, and strategies for integrating the study of the Holocaust into an interdisciplinary environment.

Tec, Nechama. When Light Pierced the Dar kness: Christian Rescue of Jews in NaziOccupied Poland. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Tec studies those who risked their lives to save Jews in an attempt to find a sociological pattern, to

determine what characteristics these people had in common, and whether they were related by class,

religion, or other factors.
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United States Holocaust Memorial Council. In Pursuit of Justice: Examining the

Evidence of the Holocaust. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memor ial

Museum, 1997.

Published to mark the 50th anniversary of the verdict from the International Military Tribunal that

passed judgment on some of the Holocaust’s major perpetrators, this book commemorates postwar

trials of Nazi war criminals and provides documentation of some of the worst crimes of the 

Nazi regime.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.

New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1995. (Out of pr int)

The atlas presents the story of the Holocaust in detail—country by country, ghetto by ghetto, and

camp by camp. It includes more than 230 full-color maps and accompanying text, from the location

of Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) communities in 1933 to the makeup of postwar Europe in

1949–1950.

Volavkova, Hana, ed. I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and

Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942–1944. New York: Schocken, 1993.

A poignant memorial to the children of Terezin, the collages, drawings, and poems published in this

selection are impressive for their artistic merit and their value in documenting the feelings and lives

of the children in the camp. Some prior knowledge of what life in the camp was like will make this

book more meaningful to students.

Weinberg, Gerhard L. Ger many, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern

Ger man and World History. New York: Cambr idge University Press, 1995.

This collection of essays from the prominent scholar Gerhard Weinberg examines the nature of the

Nazi system and its impact on Germany and the course of World War II. Weinberg places the

Holocaust within the larger context of World War II.

Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews. New York: Pantheon, 1986.

Wyman asks and answers the basic questions about how much was known in America about the

“Final Solution.” In addition to his criticism of the official response from the U.S. government 

in general and from President Roosevelt in particular, Wyman also indicts some of the American

Zionist leaders.

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Zuccotti, Susan. The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1999.

Zuccotti examines the response to the Holocaust of ordinary French people. She draws on memoirs,

government documents, and personal interviews with survivors to tell the story of French men and

women, Jews and non-Jews, during the Holocaust.

Zuccotti, Susan. The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Zuccotti examines the Holocaust in Italy. She notes the generous acts toward Jews that characterized

the behavior of many Italians during the Holocaust but also notes the fact that antisemitic legislation was passed in Italy almost without dissent. Some Italians collaborated with the Germans in the

deportation of Jews from Italy.

3. BIOGRAPHY

Anger, Per. With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest: Memories of the War Years in

Hungary. Translated by David Mel Paul and Margareta Paul. Washington, D.C.:

Holocaust Library, 1996.

While Raoul Wallenberg is the dominant figure in this biography, the central theme of the book is

the fate of Hungarian Jews in the latter stages of World War II.The author combines his personal

memories as a member of the Swedish legation with a historical narrative of the events.Anger also

examines the history of antisemitism in Hungarian society and how it manifested itself in 1944.

Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

This is not a biography of Himmler in the traditional sense that it chronicles the life of the man from

birth to death. Rather, it focuses on his years as a Nazi, his relationship with Hitler, and his role 

in masterminding the “Final Solution.” Other Nazi leaders, like Goering and Goebbels, are discussed

at length.

Breitman, Richard, and Walter Laqueur. Breaking the Silence: The Man Who

Exposed the Final Solution. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England,

1986.

Eduard Schulte was a major German industrialist who abhorred Hitler and Nazism. He is the man

credited with passing on to the Allies news not only of troop movements and weapon programs but

also of the Nazi plans for genocide.This biography relates Schulte’s story from his childhood to his

postwar years.The authors also describe the responses of Allied governments to the information he

passed on to them.
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Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris. New York: W.W. Norton and Company,

1999.

Kershaw depicts the early years of Adolf Hitler from his birth in a small Austrian village in 1889

through the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. He argues that the sources for Hitler’s power

are to be found not only in the dictator’s actions but also in the social circumstances of Germany in

the early twentieth century.

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1937–1945: Nemesis. New York: W.W. Norton and

Company, 2000.

In this second volume of his two-volume biography of the Nazi dictator, Kershaw depicts Hitler

from his achievement of absolute power within Germany and early triumphs against other European

powers to the destruction of Germany and his suicide in Berlin in 1945.

Sereny, Gitta. Into that Darkness. New York: Random House, 1983.

Franz Stangl, a convicted Nazi war criminal, was interviewed in prison by the author.These interviews were supplemented by testimony from witnesses. Stangl was commandant of the camps at both

Sobibor and Treblinka. His testimony, as told to Sereny, is revealing and chilling.

4. FICTION

Appelfeld, Aharon. Badenheim, 1939. New York: Pocket Books, 1981.

The story revolves around a group of upper-class Jews in an Austrian resort town on the eve of war.

The author, himself a Holocaust survivor, creates a haunting picture of impending tragedy, heightened by the reader’s awareness of the events to come.

Begley, Louis. Wartime Lies. New York: David McKay, 1991.

Begley, himself a child caught up in the Holocaust, has written a first-person novel about a young

Jewish boy and his aunt who survive only due to a pattern of denial and compromise that leaves its

own scars.

Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York:

Viking Penguin, 1992.

Through this collection of remarkable short stories, Borowski describes his experiences in Auschwitz

and Dachau.His focus is on the atmosphere of the camps and its effect on the inner being.He probes

the minds of both victims and perpetrators.

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Fink, Ida. A Scrap of Time. New York: Schocken, 1989.

The title story in this collection of short stories concerns the way time was measured by Holocaust

victims. Other stories describe people in a variety of human situations distorted by the circumstances

of the times.

Friedlander, Albert. Out of the Whirlwind. New York: Schocken, 1989.

Not all of the entries in this anthology are fiction; excerpts also are included from historical works

and personal narratives.The book is arranged thematically, making it especially helpful for a teacher

looking for material to support specific aspects of a curriculum.

Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

Oskar Schindler was an influential German industrialist with high-level connections in Nazi

Germany. He used his position to protect many Jews. Keneally’s absorbing biography is based on

interviews with many of those helped by Schindler.

Kosinski, Jerzy. The Painted Bird. New York: Random House, 1983.

In this autobiographical novel, Kosinski chronicles the horrors visited upon a six-year-old boy

wandering through Europe during the Holocaust.

Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. New York: Random House, 1990.

Originally published as two separate stories in The New Yorker, the first, very brief title story tells of

a mother witnessing her baby’s death at the hands of camp guards.The second story,“Rose,” describes

that same mother 30 years later, still haunted by the event.

Schwarz-Bart, André. The Last of the Just. Cambridge, Mass.: Robert Bentley,

1981.

Based on the Talmudic legend of 36 men of each generation upon whose virtue the existence of the

world depends, this novel traces the history of the Levy family from medieval times to Ernie Levy,

the last of the just, who died at Auschwitz.
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5. MEMOIRS

Anatoli, A. Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel. Cambridge, Mass.:

Robert Bentley, 1979.

As a Russian boy of 12, A. Anatoli used to play in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev and was in

earshot of the machine-gun fire that signaled the massacre by Nazi mobile killing units of about

33,000 Jews on September 29 and 30, 1941. Babi Yar is an unforgettable account of the years of

German occupation.

Delbo, Charlotte. None of Us Will Return. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

Delbo joined the resistance movement in France in 1940 and was arrested together with her

husband by the Germans in March 1942.The Germans executed her husband but imprisoned and,

later, deported Delbo to Auschwitz in occupied Poland.The book is a series of memories about the

camp written in free verse and rhythmic prose in an attempt to symbolize time for prisoners in a

death camp.

Donat, Alexander. The Holocaust Kingdom. Washington, D.C.: Holocaust Library,

1999.

The author, a Polish Jew whose Holocaust experiences included the Warsaw ghetto, Majdanek, and

Dachau, was separated from his wife and son at Majdanek but was reunited with them after the war.

He tells his own story and the stories of others with whom he came in contact. His wife describes

her own experiences in the final section of the book.

Eliach, Yaffa. Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.

Through interviews and oral histories, Eliach garnered 89 tales, both true stories and fanciful

legends.This compelling collection bears witness, in a traditional idiom, to the victims’ suffering,

dying, and surviving.

Fenelon, Fania. Playing for Time. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press,

1997.

Fenelon recounts her experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis transported her

from the Drancy camp in Paris to the Auschwitz killing center.While her descriptions reveal the

horrors of the camps, the book’s primary focus is on her experiences in the Auschwitz-Birkenau

women’s orchestra.

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Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. New

York: Pocket Books, 1984.

A psychiatrist and a concentration camp survivor, Frankl’s work is only secondarily a personal

memoir. Primarily, it is an attempt to understand and explain the psychology of camp victims

through Frankl’s own experiences and observations.

Klemperer, Victor. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years. New York:

Random House, 1998.

Klemperer was a professor at the University of Dresden when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Removed from his position, but protected from deportation by his non-Jewish wife, Klemperer

details the countless humiliations suffered by Jews in Nazi Germany from 1933 until the systematic

deportation of Jews began in 1941.

Leitner, Isabella. Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom. New York: Anchor Books,

1994.

Leitner, a survivor of Auschwitz, recounts the ordeal of holding her family together after her mother

is killed. Leitner describes her deportation from Hungary in the summer of 1944, her experiences

in Auschwitz, and her evacuation to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near the end of the war.

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Levi was an Italian Jew captured in 1943 and was still at Auschwitz at the time of liberation. He not

only chronicles the daily activities in the camp, but his inner reactions to it and the destruction of

the inner as well as the outer self.

Meed, Vladka. On Both Sides of the Wall. Washington, D.C.: Holocaust Library,

1993.

This is an informative memoir of the Warsaw ghetto by one of the young smugglers who maintained

contact between the ghetto and the “Aryan” side of the city. Working for the Jewish Combat

Organization (ZOB),Vladka Meed helped smuggle weapons and ammunition into the ghetto.

Nir, Yehuda. The Lost Childhood. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991.

This compelling memoir chronicles six extraordinary years in the life of a Polish Jewish boy, his

mother, and his sister, who all survived the Holocaust by obtaining false papers and posing as

Catholics.Yehuda Nir lost almost everything, including his father, his possessions, his youth and innocence, and his identity, but he managed to live with the help of chance, personal resourcefulness, and

the support of his family.
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Sierakowiak, Dawid, Alan Adelson, and Kamil Turowski. The Diary of Dawid

Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1996.

Dawid Sierakowiak was a 15-year-old boy in the Lodz ghetto in German-occupied Poland when he

began writing this diary. Edited and annotated by Alan Adelson and Kamil Turowski, Dawid provides

a vivid account of daily life in the Lodz ghetto.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Wiesel is one of the most eloquent writers of the Holocaust, and this book is his best-known work.

The compelling narrative describes his experience in Auschwitz.This narrative is often considered

required reading for students of the Holocaust.

6. DIARIES

Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition. New York:

Doubleday and Company, 1989.

This edition of the internationally acclaimed diary includes three different versions: the portion that

was originally found, the revisions made by Anne herself, and the version edited by her father. In

addition, there is extensive commentary on each version.

Hilberg, Raul, et al., eds. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow. Lanham, Md.:

Madison Books, 1982.

Czerniakow was chairman of the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council in Warsaw from the German invasion in 1939 until his suicide in 1942. His diaries record the history of the period and his personal

involvement with the Germans.

Ringelblum, Emmanuel. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel

Ringelblum. New York: Schocken, 1974.

The official archivist of the Warsaw ghetto, Ringelblum’s training as a historian made him uniquely

qualified to understand the importance of documenting events inside the ghetto. He carefully

collected and hid documentary evidence and personal notes.

Tory, Avraham. Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary. Cambridge,

Mass.: Har vard University Press, 1990.

Tory, a ghetto inmate and secretary of the Jewish Council, wrote this account under conditions of

extreme danger.This chronicle documents life and death in the Jewish ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania,

from June 1941 to January 1944. Translated from the Yiddish, the book includes a collection of

photos and sketches by artists in the ghetto.

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7. LITERATURE AND THE ARTS

Adam, Peter. Art of the Third Reich. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.

Adam presents hundreds of examples of artwork, officially sanctioned by the Third Reich. Many of

the illustrations are taken from German publications of the period and demonstrate how the nation’s

fine arts—including painting, film, and architecture—were manipulated by the regime into propaganda tools.Adam’s book is based on his film documentary of the same name.

Ezrahi, Sidra D. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1982.

This literary history of the Holocaust discusses a number of specific works, including works in

American literature.The author also focuses on the language of the Holocaust and the ways in which

different writers interpret the same facts.

Fuchs, Elinor, ed. Plays of the Holocaust: An International Anthology. New York:

Theater Communications Group, 1987.

The author has selected plays from a variety of nations in a number of literary styles. In addition to

the plays themselves, the book includes a bibliography of Holocaust drama.

Heinemann, Marlene E. Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust.

Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986.

Focusing on six books by women writers, including Charlotte Delbo’s None of Us Will Return,

Heinemann examines the areas in which Holocaust literature by female writers differs from that

created by male writers.

Hochhuth, Rolf. The Deputy. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New

York: Grove Press, 1964.

Hochhuth’s play examines the relationship that the Catholic Church had with Nazi Germany.The

work raises important issues about authority and the courage to confront evil.The author grapples

with the church’s failure to act when faced with the news of the mass murder of European Jews and

Catholic priests in Poland. Hochhuth’s work ignited a firestorm of debate when it premiered in

Berlin in 1963.

Insdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Films from both Hollywood and Germany are examined here as well as films produced in other,

mostly western, European countries. Both documentaries and fictional films are included as are short

and feature-length films. Insdorf particularly looks at whether a film confronts or evades the real

issues of the Holocaust.
92

Langer, Lawrence L. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven,

Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975.

Examining specific literary works, Langer provides detailed analysis of a number of novels, including

Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just and Kosinki’s The Painted Bird. He also includes some poetry and

Wiesel’s Night, which, although nonfiction, qualifies as literature due to its “imaginative power and

artful presentation.”

Roskies, David. Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish

Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1984.

This scholarly study of Jewish literature includes both pre- and post-Holocaust literature in addition to Holocaust literature itself. It also includes monuments and other works of art. It focuses on

the literary and artistic expression of modern Jewish experience in eastern Europe, beginning in the

late nineteenth century and continuing through World War I and the Holocaust into the postHolocaust world.

Schiff, Hilda. Holocaust Poetry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

This volume includes the work of 85 poets on subjects that are linked with the Holocaust. The

contributors range from world-renowned writers to those who are relatively unknown.

Skloot, Robert, ed. The Theater of the Holocaust: Four Plays. Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

The four plays by Shimon Wincelberg, Harold and Edith Lieberman, George Tabori, and Charlotte

Delbo reflect a range of stylistic and artistic approaches.Together, they constitute an eloquent testimony to the possibility of survival during times of extreme oppression and human degradation.

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

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INDEX OF BOOKS BY AUTHOR

Abzug, Robert H. Inside the Vicious Heart:Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, 64 

Adam, Peter. Art of the Third Reich, 91

Adelson,Alan, and Robert Lapides, eds. Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege, 64

Adler, David A. We Remember the Holocaust, 56

Allen,William S. The Nazi Seizure of Power:The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922–1945, 64, 75

Aly, Götz. “Final Solution”: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, 75

Anatoli,A. Babi Yar:A Document in the Form of a Novel, 88

Anger, Per. With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest: Memories of the War Years in Hungary, 85

Appelfeld,Aharon. Badenheim, 1939, 86

Appelfeld,Aharon. To the Land of the Cattails, 69

Arad,Yitzhak. Ghetto in Flames, 64

Atkinson, Linda. In Kindling Flame:The Story of Hannah Senesh, 1921–1944, 58

Auerbacher, Inge. I Am a Star: Child of the Holocaust, 60

Ayer, Eleanor H. Parallel Journeys, 60, 70

Bachrach, Susan D. The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936, 57, 64

Bachrach, Susan D. Tell Them We Remember:The Story of the Holocaust, 56

Bartoszewski,Wladyslaw T. The Warsaw Ghetto:A Christian’s Testimony, 75

Bauer,Yehuda, and Nili Keren. A History of the Holocaust, 63

Bauer,Yehuda, and Nathan Rotenstreich, eds. The Holocaust as Historical Experience, 76

Begley, Louis. Wartime Lies, 86

Berenbaum, Michael, ed. A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, 76

Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know:The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States

Holocaust Memorial Museum, 64, 73

Berenbaum, Michael, and Abraham J. Peck, eds. The Holocaust and History:The Known, the Unknown, the

Disputed, and the Reexamined, 76

Bierman, John. Righteous Gentile:The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust, 68 

Block, Gay, and Malka Drucker. Rescuers: Portraits in Moral Courage in the Holocaust, 65 

Boas, Jacob. We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust, 60, 70

Borowski,Tadeusz.This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 86

Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution, 85

Breitman, Richard, and Walter Laqueur. Breaking the Silence:The Man Who Exposed the Final Solution,

68, 85

Bridenthal, Renate, et al. When Biology Became Destiny:Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, 76

Browning, Christopher R. Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution, 76

Browning, Christopher R. Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, 77

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, 77

Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance:“Euthanasia” in Germany, 1900–1945, 77

Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945, 77

Chaikin, Miriam. A Nightmare in History:The Holocaust, 1933–1945, 56

Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. Atlas of Jewish History, 65, 77
94

Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg, 65, 70, 78

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. A Holocaust Reader, 73

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War against the Jews, 1933–1945, 73

Delbo, Charlotte. None of Us Will Return, 78, 88

Des Pres,Terrence. The Survivor:An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, 65, 78

Dobroszycki, Lucjan, ed. The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944, 78

Donat,Alexander.The Holocaust Kingdom, 88

Drucker, Olga Levy. Kindertransport, 61

Dwork, Debórah. Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, 78

Eliach,Yaffa. Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, 70, 88

Engelmann, Bernt. In Hitler’s Germany, 78

Ezrahi, Sidra D. By Words Alone:The Holocaust in Literature, 91

Feingold, Henry. The Politics of Rescue:The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945, 79

Fenelon, Fania. Playing for Time, 71, 88

Fink, Ida. A Scrap of Time, 69, 87

Flender, Harold. Rescue in Denmark, 65

Frank,Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank:The Critical Edition, 90

Frank,Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl, 61

Frankl,Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning:An Introduction to Logotherapy, 89

Friedlander,Albert. Out of the Whirlwind, 69, 87

Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, 79

Friedlander, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews:The Years of Persecution 1933–1939, 73

Friedman, Ina R. Flying against the Wind:The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied the Nazis, 58

Friedman, Ina R. The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis, 57

Fuchs, Elinor, ed. Plays of the Holocaust:An International Anthology, 91

Gallagher, Hugh Gregory. By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in 

the Third Reich, 79

Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 79

Gies, Miep, and Alison L. Gold. Anne Frank Remembered:The Story of the Woman Who Helped to 

Hide the Frank Family, 71

Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust:A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War, 74

Glatstein, Jacob. Anthology of Holocaust Literature, 69

Grossman, Mendel. My Secret Camera: Life in the Lodz Ghetto, 61, 66

Gutman, Israel, and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 79

Gutman, Israel, and Shmuel Krakowski. Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews during World War Two, 79

Hayes, Peter, ed. Lessons and Legacies:The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, 66, 80

Hayes, Peter, ed. Lessons and Legacies,Volume III: Memory, Memorialization and Denial, 66, 80

Heinemann, Marlene E. Gender and Destiny:Women Writers and the Holocaust, 91

Herzstein, Robert E. The War that Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media Campaign, 80

Hilberg, Raul.The Destruction of the European Jews, 63, 74

Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators,Victims, Bystanders:The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945, 63, 74

Hilberg, Raul, et al., eds. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, 90

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

94
A N N O T A T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

95

Hochhuth, Rolf. The Deputy, 91

Holliday, Laurel. Children in the Holocaust and World War II:Their Secret Diaries, 61

Horwitz, Gordon. In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen, 80 

Insdorf,Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, 91

Isaacman, Clara, and Joan A. Grossman. Clara’s Story, 61

Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, 80

Keneally,Thomas. Schindler’s List, 87

Kerr, Judith. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, 59

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, 86

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1937–1945: Nemesis, 86

Klee, Ernst, et al., eds.The Good Old Days:The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, 81

Klemperer,Victor. I Will Bear Witness:A Diary of the Nazi Years, 89

Koehn, Ilse. Mischling, Second Degree: My Childhood in Nazi Germany, 61

Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland:Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics, 81

Kosinski, Jerzy. The Painted Bird, 87

Laird, Christa. Shadow of the Wall, 59

Landau, Elaine.The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 57

Langer, Lawrence L. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, 92

Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah:An Oral History of the Holocaust, 81

Laska,Vera. Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust:The Voices of Eyewitnesses, 81

Leitner, Isabella. Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom, 62, 71, 89

Levi, Primo. Moments of Reprieve, 71

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz, 71, 89

Levin, Nora. The Holocaust:The Nazi Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945, 74

Lifton, Betty Jean. The King of Children:A Portrait of Janusz Korczak, 68

Lifton, Robert. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killings and the Psychology of Genocide, 81

Lipstadt, Deborah. Beyond Belief:The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945, 81

Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust:The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, 82

Lowry, Lois. Number the Stars, 59

Marrin,Albert. Hitler:A Portrait of a Tyrant, 58

Marrus, Michael. The Holocaust in History, 82

Marrus, Michael, and Robert O. Paxton.Vichy France and the Jews, 66, 82

Mayer, Milton. They Thought They Were Free:The Germans, 1933–45, 66

Meed,Vladka. On Both Sides of the Wall, 71, 89

Meltzer, Milton. Never to Forget:The Jews of the Holocaust, 57

Meltzer, Milton. Rescue:The Story of How Gentiles Saved Jews in the Holocaust, 57

Mendelsohn, Ezra.The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, 66, 82

Mosse, George. Nazi Culture:A Documentary History, 82

Nicholson, Michael, and David Winner. Raoul Wallenberg, 58

Niewyk, Donald L., ed. The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 74

Nir,Yehuda. The Lost Childhood, 72, 89

Noakes, Jeremy, and Geoffrey Pridham, eds. Nazism, 1919–1945:A Documentary Reader, 82
96

Orgel, Doris. The Devil in Vienna, 59

Orlev, Uri. The Island on Bird Street, 60

Orlev, Uri. The Man From the Other Side, 60

Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl, 70, 87

Patterson, Charles. Anti-Semitism:The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond, 67

Pettit, Jane. A Place to Hide:True Stories of Holocaust Rescues, 59

Phayer, Michael.The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965, 83

Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle:The Nazi War against Homosexuals, 67, 83

Read,Anthony, and David Fisher. Kristallnacht:The Tragedy of the Nazi Night of Terror, 67

Reiss, Johanna. The Upstairs Room, 62

Richter, Hans P. Friedrich, 60

Ringelblum, Emmanuel. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto:The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, 90

Rogasky, Barbara. Smoke and Ashes:The Story of the Holocaust, 57

Roskies, David. Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture, 92

Rubenstein, Richard L., and John K. Roth. Approaches to Auschwitz:The Holocaust and Its Legacy, 83

Rubenstein, Richard L. The Cunning of History, 83

Schiff, Hilda. Holocaust Poetry, 92

Schilling, Donald G. Lessons and Legacies II:Teaching the Holocaust in a Changing World, 67, 83

Schleunes, Karl A. The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939, 75

Scholl, Inge.The White Rose: Munich, 1942–1943, 69

Schwarz-Bart,Andre. The Last of the Just, 87

Sender, Ruth M. The Cage, 62

Sereny, Gitta. Into that Darkness, 86

Siegal,Aranka. Upon the Head of the Goat:A Childhood in Hungary, 1939–1944, 62

Sierakowiak, Dawid,Alan Adelson, and Kamil Turowski. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks

from the Lodz Ghetto, 72, 90

Skloot, Robert, ed. The Theater of the Holocaust: Four Plays, 92

Spiegelman,Art. Maus, 69

Stadtler, Bea. The Holocaust:A History of Courage and Resistance, 58

Tec, Nechama. Dry Tears:The Story of a Lost Childhood, 72

Tec, Nechama. When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland, 83

TenBoom, Corrie. The Hiding Place, 62

Toll, Nelly S. Behind the Secret Window:A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood during World War Two, 62

Tory,Avraham. Surviving the Holocaust:The Kovno Ghetto Diary, 90

Uhlman, Fred. Reunion, 70

United States Holocaust Memorial Council. In Pursuit of Justice: Examining the Evidence of the 

Holocaust, 84

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Historical Atlas of the Holocaust, 67, 84

Van der Rol, Ruud, and Rian Verhoeven. Anne Frank beyond the Diary:A Photographic Remembrance, 59

Volavkova, Hana, ed. I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin

Concentration Camp, 1942–1944, 58, 84

Weinberg, Gerhard L. Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History, 84

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

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Wiesel, Elie. Night, 63, 72, 90

Wyman, David S.The Abandonment of the Jews, 84

Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust:The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, 75

Yoors, Jan. Crossing:A Journal of Survival and Resistance in World War II, 72

Zar, Rose. In the Mouth of the Wolf, 63

Zuccotti, Susan. The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 68, 85

Zuccotti, Susan.The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival, 68, 85
Sinaida Grussman holds a name card intended to help surviving family members locate her at the Kloster

Indersdorf displaced persons camp in Germany. (after May 7, 1945) 

USHMM
A N N O T A T E D V I D E O G R A P H Y

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ANNOTATED VIDEOGRAPHY

This annotated videography has been designed to identify videotapes addressing Holocaust history

that have been used effectively in classrooms.The titles listed here have been chosen both because of

their individual merit and because most of them are readily available. Many excellent videotapes are

not on this list because they are too difficult to obtain. Most annotations suggest a distributor from

whom educators can purchase their own tapes, although the availability and distribution can change.

Many of the videos may be purchased by phone and mail order from the United States Holocaust

Memorial Museum Shop (100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW,Washington, DC 20024-2126; tel. 202-

488-6144; www.holocaustbooks.com). Alternatively, educators can rent or borrow the videotapes

from Holocaust resource centers, libraries, and schools.

A main concern of educators using audiovisual materials on the Holocaust is that graphic footage

depicting people who were starved, tortured, or killed can be upsetting to viewers of all ages.

Videotaped eyewitness testimonies often contain vivid descriptions of the horrors encountered by

victims.When the horror is presented, it should be done in a sensitive manner, and only to the extent

necessary to achieve the objective of the lesson.

In any study of the Holocaust, the sheer number of victims challenges easy comprehension.Video

footage can remind students that individual people—families of grandparents, parents, and children—

are behind the statistics.The first-person accounts and stories contained in many of the videotapes

provide students with a context for studying collective numbers.Although students should be careful

about overgeneralizing from first-person accounts such as those from survivors, journalists, relief

workers, bystanders, and liberators, these individual stories help students get beyond statistics and

make historical events of the Holocaust more immediate.

This videography includes recommendations for use at the middle school and high school levels.

Many of the videos are appropriate for both levels whereas others have been recommended for high

school students only.Videos recommended for older students usually present concepts or topics too

complex for younger students, who often lack awareness of the relevant history needed to understand the information presented.

In choosing a videotape, teachers should consider the length of the videotape and the density of the

information presented. Some videotapes on this list require a considerable commitment of time; the

longest is the ten-hour documentary Shoah. Such videos contain a great deal of historical information and should be viewed in segments.

Educators indicate that most students are engaged by the videotapes listed in this pamphlet and that

they want to discuss what they have viewed. Most students demonstrate a high level of interest in

studying the Holocaust precisely because the subject raises questions of fairness, justice, individual

identity, peer pressure, conformity, indifference, and obedience—issues that adolescents tend to

confront in their daily lives. Students also are struck by the magnitude of the Holocaust and by the

fact that so many people allowed this genocide to occur by acting as collaborators or perpetrators or

by failing to protest or resist as bystanders.
100

The videotapes on this list have been classified as documentaries, survivor testimonies, animation,

docudramas, or dramas.As a general rule, this videography does not recommend the use of “docudramas,” which use dramatic license to recreate historical events. Nevertheless, three docudramas,The

Wannsee Conference, Au Revoir les Enfants (Goodbye, Children), and Schindler’s List, have been selected

on their merits.When showing any docudrama, educators should remind viewers that the film is a

fictional account of historic events.

Although videos may capture and isolate an event or a memory for the historical record, viewers

should be reminded that not even documentary footage is neutral.The subjective process of selection and editing is basic to filmmaking; the decision to record something can and does alter what we

see or do not see. If students are aware of this bias of selection, it can help them to analyze events

from various vantage points.

For example, a good deal of documentary footage was filmed by the Nazis, often for propaganda

purposes. Students can gain more sophisticated insights into the history if they examine some of the

motives behind recording and producing a particular film.They should be encouraged to ask why a

particular scene was filmed or how people in the film responded to having their pictures taken. Many

people filmed by the Nazis were obviously under duress.

Documentary footage also was taken by camp liberators at the end of World War II. Many of these

soldiers had endured the hardships of war and had seen evidence of Nazi atrocities throughout

Europe.Thus, these filmmakers brought their own perspectives to their work.

Condensed accounts of the Holocaust that continually show people only as victims can in themselves

be dehumanizing. Showing a video that captures life before the Holocaust provides a useful balance.

Students may better understand the dimensions of the tragedy when they see the richness and diversity of Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust. By showing images of children and their families

in the kinds of situations captured on home video today such as vacations, holidays, weddings,

and school graduations, teachers can use these types of films to help students identify and empathize

with the victims.

Where a teacher has been unable to arrange for a survivor to meet with students in person, an alternative is the use of videos that feature survivor testimony. Hearing someone speak about his or her

own experiences during the Holocaust helps to personalize an event beyond the often numbing

statistics and is another way to promote students’ identification with and empathy for the victims.

The videography that follows lists videotapes by topics, beginning with videos that provide a general

overview of the Holocaust.The topics are generally arranged in chronological order, beginning with

videos on life before the Holocaust and continuing through ghettos and camps to rescue, resistance,

and liberation to post-Holocaust subjects, including the war crimes trials.The videography concludes

with videos on subjects related to but not directly addressing the Holocaust. An index to all annotated videos by title and subject can be found after the annotations.

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KEY

D Documentary DR Drama

ST Survivor testimony B/W Black and white

DD Docudrama C Color

A Animation CC Closed captioned

OVERVIEWS OF THE HOLOCAUST

GENOCIDE, 1941–1945 (THE WORLD AT WAR SERIES)

D, C, B/W 00:50:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #SV2.

Credits: Produced and directed by Michael Darlow, 1982.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

The story of the destruction of European Jewry is told using archival footage and testimonies

of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. This excellent overview has been used effectively by

many teachers.

GENOCIDE (STORY OF MAN’S INHUMANITY TO MAN)

D, C 01:30:00 

Source: Simon Wiesenthal Center, Media Department, 9760 West Pico Blvd.,

Los Angeles, CA 90035.

Credits: Produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and narrated by Orsen Welles and 

Elizabeth Taylor, 1981.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

The story of the Holocaust is told using documentary film and photographs. Provides a good

overview of the topic for a general audience relatively unfamiliar with the Holocaust.

HOLOCAUST 

D, B/W 00:24:00

Source: Ergo Media Inc., P.O. Box 2037,Teaneck, NJ 07666-1437; 1-800-695-3746.

Credits:Written and directed by Ben Kerner and produced by the Israeli Film Service, David Schuetz,

and Yigal Efrati, 1988.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This 1988 film uses German archival footage to provide a brief overview of Nazi Germany from

1933 until 1945. Some of the topics include the Nazi rise to power, the book burning,

Kristallnacht, the Evian Conference, ghettos, camps, and Jewish resistance.
102

THE HOLOCAUST: IN MEMORY OF MILLIONS

C 01:30:00

Source: Social Studies School Service, 10010 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232;

1-800-421-4246.

Credits: Hosted by Walter Cronkite for the Discovery Channel, 1993.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This film serves as an introduction to the Holocaust and traces the gradual escalation of the

persecution of Jews under the Nazis. It includes interviews with survivors and soldiers who

liberated concentration camps as well as archival film and personal photographs.

SHOAH

ST, C (Part 1) 02:00:00; (2) 02:00:00; (3) 01:50:00; (4) 02:00:00; (5) 01:56:00

Source:Available in most video stores and many libraries.Also may be purchased from the Simon

Wiesenthal Center,Yeshiva University of Los Angeles, 9760 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA

90035; 310-553-9036.

Credits: Directed by Claude Lanzmann, 1985.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This powerful film includes interviews with victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, and takes us

to the locations of the Holocaust in camps, towns, and railways.The video may be segmented

for classroom use. (See Lanzmann’s book on p. 81 in the Bibliography for the text of the film.)

WITNESS TO THE HOLOCAUST

ST, B/W 02:10:00 (Two-video set)

Source:ADL, 823 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017.

Credits: Production of the Holocaust Education Project for Zachor: National Jewish Resource Center.

Produced and directed by C. J. Pressma, 1984.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This video presents a series of seven documentaries that can easily be segmented for specific

topical use in the classroom. Each segment is approximately 20 minutes in length. Survivor

narration is combined with photos and historic film footage. The topics include Rise of the

Nazis, Ghetto Life, Deportations, Resistance,“The Final Solution,” Liberation, and Reflections.

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

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LIFE BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST

IMAGE BEFORE MY EYES

D, C, B/W 01:30:00

Source: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 9760 West Pico Blvd.,Yeshiva University of Los Angeles,

Los Angeles, CA 90035; 310-553-9036.

Credits:YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Produced by Josh Waletzky, Susan Lazarus, 1980.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

Using photographs,drawings,home movies,music,and interviews with survivors,this documentary

re-creates Jewish life in Poland from the late nineteenth century up to the time of its destruction during the Holocaust.The diversity of the culture is examined as well as its achievements.

THE CAMERA OF MY FAMILY: FOUR GENERATIONS IN GERMANY,

1845–1945

D, C, B/W 00:20:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #ADL45V-J4.

Credits:Anti-Defamation League, 1991.

Recommended for Middle School and High School.

Catherine Hanf Noren left Nazi Germany with her Jewish parents shortly after her birth in

1938.This film describes her perseverance as an adult to use old family photographs to trace her

family roots through several generations.A guide is included.

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS 

DR, C 01:35:00

Source: Simon Wiesenthal Center, Media Department, 9760 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90035.

Credits: Directed by Vittorio De Sica and produced by Arthur Cohn, 1971.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Adapted from Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 semi-autobiographical novel, this film chronicles the

gradual disintegration of the Jewish community living in Italy at the beginning of World War II.

As Fascist persecution of the Jews escalates from the onset of Benito Mussolini’s antisemitic

edicts in 1938 to the mass arrests and deportations in German-occupied Italy in 1943, the

wealthy Finzi-Contini family opens their lush gardens to the persecuted friends of their

daughter, Micol, and their son,Alberto.
104

THE LAST CHAPTER

D, C 01:25:00

Source: No distributor currently available.

Credits: Narrated by Theodore Bikel; produced and directed by Benjamin and Lawrence Rothman.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This documentary traces the history of the earliest Jewish communities in Poland through their

destruction during World War II. It also examines the pogroms in the postwar period, which

occurred as survivors tried to return to Poland and rebuild their lives.

PERPETRATORS

A NEW GERMANY, 1933–1939 (THE WORLD AT WAR SERIES)

D, C, B/W 00:52:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #SV251V-J5.

Credits:Written and directed by Michael Darlow, 1975.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This video traces the rise of Hitler to power as well as Nazi racism and antisemitic policies before

the war. Photo stills and film footage are complemented by the testimonies of survivors and

German perpetrators.The development and role of the Nazis’ elite SS corps is highlighted.

THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE

DD, C 01:26:49

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #SV443V.

Credits: Directed by Heinz Schirk. Coproduction of Infafilm GmbH Munich; Manfred Korytowski,

Austrian Television ORF; and Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation, 1984.

Recommended for Middle School and High School.

The video dramatizes the famous conference where the leading Nazis discussed the implementation of the “Final Solution” by the German bureaucracy. In German with English subtitles.

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

104
105

A N N O T A T E D V I D E O G R A P H Y

HITLER: THE WHOLE STORY

D, C, B/W 02:30:00

Source: Social Studies School Service, 10010 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232;

1-800-421-4246.

Credits: Produced by Weiner Rieb and directed by Joachim C. Fest and Christian Herrendoerfer, 1989.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This documentary about Adolf Hitler is divided into three 50-minute tapes. Part 1,The Early

Years, focuses on Hitler’s early career and his successful rise to power. Part 2,The Rise of the

Reich, focuses on Hitler’s consolidation of power in Germany and the establishment of the Nazi

dictatorship.The last tape,The War Years, focuses on Hitler’s leadership during World War II and

the genocidal atrocities committed by the Nazis. Based on Joachim C. Fest’s biography, Hitler.

HEIL HITLER: CONFESSIONS OF A HITLER YOUTH

D, C, B/W 00:30:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #TL338V-J4.

Credits: HBO, 1991.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

Alfons Heck, a former member of the Hitler Youth and now a U.S. citizen dedicated to

Holocaust education, recounts the compelling story of how he became a fanatic supporter of

Nazism. Documentary footage vividly demonstrates how songs, youth camps, speeches, and

propaganda turned millions of young Germans like Heck into the most fervent and loyal proponents of Nazi racism and militarism.The short length of this highly recommended film makes

it especially suitable for classroom use.Teachers may wish to use Eleanor Ayer’s Parallel Journeys

to accompany this film (see pp. 60, 70).

THE TRIAL OF ADOLF EICHMANN

D, C 02:00:00 

Source: PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place,Alexandria,VA 22314-1698; 1-800-344-3337.

Credits: Hosted by David Brinkley and produced by Daniel B. Polin, 1997.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This film includes actual trial footage of the process in Jerusalem against SS colonel Adolf

Eichmann, one of the principal organizers of the Holocaust. He was primarily responsible for

the deportation of the Jews of Europe to extermination camps in occupied Poland. Eichmann’s

escape at the end of World War II sparked a 15-year manhunt to bring him to justice.
106

RACISM, ANTISEMITISM

THE LONGEST HATRED: THE HISTORY OF ANTI-SEMITISM

D, C, CC 02:30:00

Source:WGBH, P.O. Box 2284, South Burlington,VT 05407-2284; 1-800-255-9424.

Credits:Thames Television and WGBH Educational Foundation, 1993.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Drawing on interviews with Jews and antisemites as well as prominent scholars in Europe,

America, and the Middle East, this video traces antisemitism from its earliest manifestations to

recent outbreaks in Germany and Eastern Europe.This film can be segmented for classroom use.

SHADOW ON THE CROSS

D, C 00:52:00

Source: Landmark Media, 3450 Slade Run Drive, Falls Church,VA 22042; 1-800-342-4336.

Credits: CTVC Production for Channel 4, England. Produced by Ray Bruce, 1990.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This documentary film looks at the tragic story of Jewish-Christian relations over the past 2,000

years and explores the influences of historic Christian antisemitism on the Third Reich.The film

is divided into two parts. Part 1 summarizes the history of religious antisemitism over the 2,000

years Jews lived in Europe as a religious minority. In Part 2, theologians discuss the implications

of the Holocaust for Jewish-Christian relations today.This is useful for college or high school

history, political science, religion, or philosophy classes.

OF PURE BLOOD

D, C, B/W 01:40:00

Source: No distributor currently available.

Credits: Produced by Maryse Addison and Peter Bate.A film by Clarissa Henry and Marc Hillel, 1972.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Using historical film footage and interviews with some of Hitler’s victims, this film chronicles

the Nazis’ attempts to create a “master race.” This is an excellent film for examining the issue of

eugenics and racism. It also helps answer the question, How was Hitler representative of the

master race when he failed to match the ideal of the tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed German? One

segment of this film portrays nudity.

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

106
A N N O T A T E D V I D E O G R A P H Y

107

MOSAIC OF VICTIMS

ANNE FRANK: A LEGACY FOR OUR TIME

D, B/W 00:38:30

Source: SVE and Churchill Media 6677 N. Northwest Highway, Chicago, IL 60631-1304;

1-800-829-1900.

Credits: Narrated by Beverly Feldt and written and produced by Danny Miller, 1985.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adults

Developed in cooperation with the Anne Frank Center, this film consists of two parts:The Story

of Anne Frank and The Lesson of Anne Frank. Using period photography and excerpts from the

Diary of Anne Frank, the film briefly chronicles Anne Frank’s life and death as well as her plea

for tolerance in a hostile world.The film includes an accompanying teacher’s guide.

CHILDREN REMEMBER THE HOLOCAUST

D, B/W 00:45:36

Source: SVE and Churchill Media, 6677 N. Northwest Highway, Chicago, IL 60631-1304;

1-800-829-1900.

Credits: Narrated by Keanu Reeves, produced by Mark Gordon, and directed by D. Shone Kirkpatrick,

1996.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This documentary uses quotes from the diaries of Jewish children who were affected by the

Holocaust, historical photographs, and documentary film footage to relate the history of 

the Holocaust.

MORE THAN BROKEN GLASS: MEMORIES OF KRISTALLNACHT

D, ST, C 00:57:00

Source: Ergo Media Inc., P.O. Box 2037,Teaneck, NJ 07666; 1-800-695-3746. #616.

Credits:Written, produced, and directed by Chris Pelzer, 1988.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Using archival footage, photographs, and interviews with survivors, the film describes Jewish life

in Germany prior to and during the Holocaust.This documentary is excellent for examining

the persecution of German Jews.
108

ONE SURVIVOR REMEMBERS

D, C, B/W 00:36:00

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Shop, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW,

Washington, DC 20024-2126; 202-488-6144.

Credits: Home Box Office in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and

Wentworth Films, Inc., 1995.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein eloquently recounts the personal story of her life before the

war in Poland, her Holocaust experiences, including the painful loss of most of her family, and

the suffering she endured on a final “death march” near the end of the war.

PERSECUTED AND FORGOTTEN

D, ST, C 00:54:00

Source: EBS Productions, 360 Ritch Street, San Francisco, CA 94107; 415-495-2327.

Credits: Medienwerkstatt Franken, 1989.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This video follows a group of German Roma (Gypsies) as they return to Auschwitz after World

War II. In personal accounts, Roma (Gypsies) recall the “Gypsy Police,” the Institute for Racial

Hygiene, and the genealogical research that led to their imprisonment and murder during

World War II.The Roma (Gypsies) who are interviewed also reveal the discrimination they

continue to suffer.

PURPLE TRIANGLES

D, ST, C 00:25:00

Source:Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., 25 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, NY

11201.

Credits: Produced and directed by Martin Smith, 1991.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

During the Holocaust,Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted as a religious group.Their story is told

by surviving members of the Kusserow family who describe their arrest and incarceration in

concentration camps, where they were identified by purple triangles.

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

108
A N N O T A T E D V I D E O G R A P H Y

109

WE WERE MARKED WITH A BIG “A”

D, C, B/W 00:44:00

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Shop, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW,

Washington, DC 20024-2126; 202-488-6144.

Credits: Directed by Elke Jeanrond and Joseph Weishaupt, 1991.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Little is known about the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazis.Three gay survivors tell the

story of their arrests and incarceration in concentration camps. In German, with subtitles.

JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES STAND FIRM AGAINST NAZI ASSAULT

D, C, ST, CC 01:18:00

Source:Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., 25 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, NY

11201-2483; 718-625-3600.

Credits: Produced by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, 1996.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This film documents the persecution of Witnesses by the Nazi regime. It includes commentary

from noted historians and testimony from more than 20 Jehovah’s Witnesses who survived 

Nazi persecution.

ANNE FRANK REMEMBERED

D, C 01:57:00

Source: Social Studies School Service, 10010 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232;

1-800-421-4246.

Credits: Narrated by Kenneth Branagh and Glenn Close, 1995.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This film uses archival film and photos, interviews with Anne’s family and friends, as well as

documents to present the life of Anne Frank and her family from her years in Frankfurt,

Germany, through her final years in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

SURVIVORS OF THE HOLOCAUST

D, ST, C, B/W 01:10:00

Source: Social Studies School Service, 10010 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232;

1-800-421-4246.

Credits: Produced by June Beallor and James Molls for Stephen Spielberg and the Survivors of the

Shoah Visual History Foundation and Turner Home Entertainment, 1996.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This documentary examines the work of director Stephen Spielberg in compiling and documenting the testimony of Holocaust survivors. It includes survivor testimony on their life before,

during, and after World War II.
110

GHETTOS

LODZ GHETTO

D, C, B/W 01:43:00

Source:Alan Adelson, Exec. Dir., Jewish Heritage Project, Inc., 150 Franklin Street, #1W,

New York, NY 10003; 212-925-9067.

Credits: Produced by Alan Adelson and directed by Alan Adelson and Kathryn Taverna, 1989.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This documentary recounts the history of one of the last ghettos to be liquidated. The film

draws on written accounts by Jews in the Lodz ghetto and on photographs, slides, and rare 

film footage.The book Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community under Seige may be effectively paired

with the video (see p. 64).

THE WARSAW GHETTO

D, B/W 00:51:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #BV103V.

Credits: BBC Production, 1969.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

Narrated by a ghetto survivor, this documentary uses historic film footage made by the Nazis

and shows the creation of the ghetto, early Nazi propaganda, scenes from everyday life, and the

final weeks of resistance before the ghetto was liquidated.

THERESIENSTADT: GATEWAY TO AUSCHWITZ

ST, C, B/W 01:00:00

Source:American Film and Video Association, 1993.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

Survivors, who were children in the Theresienstadt ghetto during the war tell their stories.The

T

film includes original artwork and photographs from the ghetto. E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

110
A N N O T A T E D V I D E O G R A P H Y

111

CAMPS

AUSCHWITZ: IF YOU CRIED, YOU DIED

D, C, B/W 00:28:00

Source: Impact America Foundation, Inc., c/o Martin J. Moore, 9100 Keystone at the Crossing 

Suite 390, Indianapolis, IN 46240-2158; 317-848-5134.

Credits: Impact America Foundation, 1991, 1993.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

Two survivors recount their experiences in Auschwitz after returning there with family

members. Combined with historic footage, this is a moving commentary on prejudice. It also

discusses Holocaust deniers.Teacher’s guide available.

TRIUMPH OF MEMORY

D, ST, C 00:30:00

Source: PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place,Alexandria,VA 22314-1698; 1-800-344-3337.

Credits: Produced and directed by Robert Gardner with Executive Producers, Sister Carol Rittner,

R.S.M., and Sondra Myers, 1972.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

Non-Jewish resistance fighters sent to Nazi concentration camps bear witness to the atrocities

that took place in Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.This film is divided into

three parts, which can be segmented for classroom use: initiation to the camps, daily life in the

camps, and genocide.This is an excellent film for cultivating understanding of the Holocaust and

life in the camps. It also includes a discussion of the victimization of Roma (Gypsies).

KITTY: RETURN TO AUSCHWITZ

D, ST, C 01:22:00

Source: Social Studies School Service, 10010 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232;

1-800-421-4246.

Credits: Directed and produced by Peter Marley, 1979.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

Kitty Felix Hart and her son revisit Auschwitz.She recalls how she and her mother survived their

internment there. Kitty, who was in the camp between the ages of 16 and 18, tells her story and

tries to comprehend what happened in Auschwitz.
112

LOST CHILDHOOD: THE STORY OF THE BIRKENAU BOYS

D, ST, CC, B/W, C 00:48:00

Source: SVE and Churchill Media, 6677 N. Northwest Highway, Chicago, IL 60631-1304;

1-800-829-1900.

Credits:Written by Rich Newberg; Edited by Mike Mobrea, and Produced by Rich Newberg and

Mike Mobrea, 1995.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This documentary tells the story of 89 Jewish boys whom the Nazis deported to AuschwitzBirkenau and selected for forced labor.Their story is told through the testimony of some of the

survivors as well as through artwork and wartime film footage.The film includes an accompanying teacher’s guide.

MEMORY OF THE CAMPS

D, B/W 00:58:00

Source: PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place,Alexandria,VA 22314-1698; 1-800-344-3337.

Credits: Frontline Television. Narrated by Trevor Howard, 1995.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

British and American film crews working for the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied

Expeditionary Force in Europe entered Nazi concentration camps in 1945.Their film records

what Allied armies found soon after the liberation of the camps.

RESISTANCE

FLAMES IN THE ASHES

D, ST, B/W 01:30:00

Source: Ergo Media, Inc., P.O. Box 2037,Teaneck, NJ 07666; 1-800-695-3746.

Credits:A Ghetto Fighters’ House Release, produced by Monia Avrahami, 1986.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Historic, seldom seen footage tells the story of the variety of ways that Jews resisted the Nazis.

Both murderers and resistance fighters tell the story. In Hebrew,Yiddish, French, Italian, and

Polish, with subtitles.

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

112
A N N O T A T E D V I D E O G R A P H Y

113

PARTISANS OF VILNA

D, C, B/W 02:10:00

Source: National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University, Lown 102,Waltham, MA 02254;

617-899-7044. #M5053.

E-mail: ncjf@logos.cc.brandeis.edu

Website: www.brandeis.edu/jewishfilm/index.html

Credits: Produced by Aviva Kempner and directed by Josh Waletzky, 1987.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Featuring 40 interviews with survivors, this film tells the story of Jewish resistance in the Vilna

ghetto.Music sung in the ghetto and resistance as well as archival film footage add to the production.The film documents the moral dilemmas and difficulties the resisters faced both inside the

ghetto and later, in relations with non-Jews in partisan camps in the forests. It also shows the

prominent role women played in the Vilna resistance. An important film best suited for more

advanced students of the Holocaust. In Hebrew,Yiddish, and English, with subtitles.

ESCAPE FROM SOBIBOR

DR, C 02:29:00

Source: Social Studies School Service, 10010 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232;

1-800-421-4246.

Credits: Directed by Jack Gold and starring Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer, 1987.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This film is a recreation of the prisoner uprising at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland. In mid-October 1943, more than 300 Jewish prisoners escaped from the camp in

the face of German machine-gun fire and by running across a minefield; more than 100 were

recaptured and later shot.

DARING TO RESIST: THREE WOMEN FACE THE HOLOCAUST

D, C, B/W 00:57:18

Source:Women Make Movies, Inc., 462 Broadway Suite 500, New York, NY 10013;

212-925-0606.

Credits: Produced and directed by Barbara Attie and Martha Goell Lubell and narrated by Janeane

Garofalo, 1999.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This film tells the story of three Jewish teenage girls: Faye Schulman,a photographer and partisan

fighter in the forests of eastern Poland; Barbara Rodbell, a ballerina in Amsterdam who delivered underground newspapers as well as secured food and other aid for Jews in hiding; and

Schulamit Lack, who acquired false papers and a safe house for Jews attempting to flee Hungary.
114

RESCUE

ASSIGNMENT RESCUE: THE STORY OF VARIAN FRY AND THE

EMERGENCY RESCUE COMMITTEE 

D, C, B/W 00:26:00

Source: Social Studies School Service, 10010 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232;

1-800-421-4246.

Credits: Narrated by Meryl Streep; directed by Richard Kaplan, produced by Richard Kaplan and

Christina Lazard; written by Christina Lazardi, 1997.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

The film tells the story of Varian Fry, one American man who was able to enter Vichy France

and help hundreds of men and women, including prominent artists such as Marc Chagall,

Jacques Lipschitz, and Andre Breton, to escape the Nazis to safety in the United States in 1940.

THE COURAGE TO CARE

D, C, B/W 00:28:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #ADL150V.

Credits: Produced and directed by Robert Gardner with Executive Producers Sister Carol Rittner,

R.S.M., and Sondra Meyers, 1986.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

The film, nominated in 1986 for an Academy Award for best short documentary film, encounters ordinary people who refused to succumb to Nazi tyranny and reached out to help victims

of the Holocaust.

THE OTHER SIDE OF FAITH

D, ST, C 00:27:00

Source: Documentaries International Film and Video Foundation, 1800 K Street, NW,

Suite 1120,Washington, DC 20006; 202-429-9320.

Credits: Produced by Sy Rotter, 1990.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

Filmed on location in Przemsyl, Poland, this first-person narrative tells of a courageous sixteenyear-old Catholic girl who, for two-and-a-half years, hid thirteen Jewish men, women, and

children in the attic of her home.

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114
A N N O T A T E D V I D E O G R A P H Y

115

RAOUL WALLENBERG: BETWEEN THE LINES

D, ST, C, B/W 01:25:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #SV996V.

Credits:Written and directed by Karin Altmann, 1985.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, was responsible for saving thousands of lives. Friends,

family, and former members of his staff describe Wallenberg’s efforts to stem the Nazi destruction of Hungarian Jewry. The video also examines the controversy surrounding his arrest and

imprisonment in 1945 by the Soviets. Historic film footage is used.

AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS (GOODBYE, CHILDREN)

DD, C 01:03:00

Source: Orion Home Video, 1888 Century Park East, Los Angeles, CA 90067;

310-282-2576

Credits: Produced and directed by Louis Malle, 1987.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Based on Malle’s own experiences in a French boarding school during the German occupation,

this moving film documents the friendship between a 12-year-old Catholic boy and a Jewish

youngster being sheltered at the school by a priest.The movie ends with the betrayal of the hidden

child’s identity to the Gestapo and his arrest, along with the priest. In French, with subtitles.

SCHINDLER’S LIST

DD, B/W, C 03:17:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #MCA172V-J5.

Credits: Directed by Steven Spielberg, adapted from Thomas Keneally’s fictionalized account of a true

story, 1993.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

Shot on location in Poland in stark black-and-white, this compelling Oscar-winning film tells

the story of German businessman Oskar Schindler who saved more than 1,000 Jews from deportation and death.The book Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally (see p. 87) chronicles the story

more fully and with the greater nuance that a written account allows. Contains graphic violence,

strong language, and nudity.
116

WEAPONS OF THE SPIRIT

D, C 00:38:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #ADL156V.

Credits:Written, produced, and directed by Pierre Sauvage, 1988.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

This is the story of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small Protestant village in south-central

France, and how its predominantly Protestant citizens responded to the Nazi threat against the

Jews. Residents of the area hid and cared for 5,000 Jews, many of them children.

AMERICAN AND INTERNATIONAL RESPONSES

SAFE HAVEN

D, ST, C 00:57:40

Source: No distributor currently available.

Credits:WXXI-TV, Rochester, NY. Produced and directed by Paul Lewis, 1987.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

Safe Haven tells the story of America’s only refugee camp for victims of Nazi terror. Nearly 1,000

refugees were brought to Oswego, New York, and held for 18 months in a camp known as Fort

Ontario.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?

D, B/W 01:30:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #KN103V-J4.

Credits: Produced by James R. Kurth and Laurence Jarvik and directed by Laurence Jarvik, 1982.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This film examines American responses to the Holocaust with particular attention to the actions

(or failures to act) of American Jewish leaders. It is a detailed, informative presentation of a

complex topic, with oral testimony from a wide range of Jews and non-Jews involved with the

issue of Jewish rescue. Graphic images.

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

116
A N N O T A T E D V I D E O G R A P H Y

117

AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST: DECEIT AND INDIFFERENCE

D, B/W, C 01:00:00

Source: PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place,Alexandria,VA 22314-1698; 1-800-344-3337.

Credits: Produced by Marty Ostrow, 1994.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This film focuses mostly on the responses of Roosevelt, the State Department, and other U.S.

government leaders to the Nazis’ persecution and mass murder of European Jews. Weaving

together interviews, official photos and documents, home movies, and archival footage, the

production is especially good at tracing the complex social and political factors that shaped

American responses to the Holocaust.The history is interwoven with the moving personal story

of Jewish refugee Kurt Klein, who failed in his efforts to obtain visas for his parents to follow

him to the United States.

THE DOUBLE CROSSING: THE VOYAGE OF THE ST. LOUIS

D, B/W, C 00:29:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #ER110V-J4.

Credits:A production of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois and Loyola University of

Chicago. Produced by Elliot Lefkovitz and Nancy Partos, 1992.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

More than 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 on the luxury cruise ship the 

St. Louis were denied entry to Cuba and the United States and forced to return to Europe. In

interviews interwoven with archival footage and photos, surviving passengers relive their voyage.

The general issues this highly recommended film addresses—racism, quota systems for refugees,

and immigration policies—remain urgent ones today.

THE BOAT IS FULL

DR, B/W 01:44:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #FJ100V-J4.

Credits: Produced by George Reinhart, Limbo Films, Inc., in coproduction with SRG, ZDF, ORF and

directed by Markus Imhoo, 1980.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

In 1942, the Swiss government, alarmed at the vast numbers of people fleeing Nazi Germany,

established stringent immigration policies as they declared the country’s “lifeboat” full.

Nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film, this suspenseful drama tells the story of

a group of refugees forced back to the border by ordinary citizens too frightened or indifferent

to take them in. In German, with English subtitles.
118

LIBERATION

HOLOCAUST: LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ

D, B/W, C 00:18:00

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #EBE 296 V.

Credits: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

The liberation of Auschwitz is filmed by Soviets, whose cameras linger on the faces of the

inmates. Commentary describes the selection process, medical experiments, and daily life at

Auschwitz. Soviet cameraman Alexander Vorontsov shares his impressions of the liberation.

Highly graphic footage is included.

LIBERATION 1945: TESTIMONY

D, B/W, C 01:16:00

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW,Washington,

DC 20024-2126; 202-488-6144.

Credits: Produced by Sandy Bradley,Wentworth Films, in association with the United States Holocaust

Memorial Museum, 1995.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This film includes expanded eyewitness testimony produced for the Museum’s special exhibition, Liberation 1945. Jewish survivors and Allied liberators recall how they felt at liberation and

describe conditions inside the camps, including difficulties faced by medical relief teams working

in the liberated camps. Survivors interned in displaced persons camps describe the organization

of those camps and their efforts both to find surviving family members and, by marrying, to

establish new families.

OPENING THE GATES OF HELL

D, B/W, C 00:45:00

Source: Ergo Media Inc., P.O. Box 2037,Teaneck, NJ 07666; 1-800-695-3746.

Credits: Production of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois and Loyola University of

Chicago. Directed by Timothy Roberts, 1992.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

American liberators of the Nazi concentration camps share their memories of what they saw.

Interviews are effectively combined with historic photos and footage showing the camps that

were liberated by Americans: Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Dachau, Landsberg, and Mauthausen.

The video includes graphic footage.

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

118
A N N O T A T E D V I D E O G R A P H Y

119

WAR CRIMES TRIALS

MURDERERS AMONG US: THE SIMON WIESENTHAL STORY

DR, C 02:57:55

Source: Zenger Video, 10200 Jefferson Blvd., P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802;

1-800-421-4246. #WV117V.

Credits: HBO Pictures, Robert Cooper Production. Produced by John Kemeny and Robert Cooper,

1988.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This is the true story of a Holocaust survivor who committed himself in the years after liberation to the task of hunting Nazis and bringing them to justice. It is also useful for examining the

response to the Holocaust in the postwar period.

RELATED FILMS

THE FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE

D, ST, C, B/W, CC 00:28:00

Source:Atlantis Productions, 1252 La Granada Drive,Thousand Oaks, CA 91362;

805-495-2790.

Credits:Written, produced, and directed by J. Michael Hagopian, Ph.D., 1975.

Recommended for Middle School, High School, and Adult.

Nominated for an Emmy, this is a shortened version of The Armenian Case, which documents

the Armenian genocide that took place during and after World War I. Personal narrative is

included with historic photos and film footage.

FOR THE LIVING

D, C 01:00:00

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW,

Washington, DC 20024-2126; 202-488-6144.

Credits: Produced by WETA,Washington, D.C., 1993.

Recommended for High School and Adult.

This film documents the creation, design,and building of the United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum in Washington, D.C. Combining archival film footage and photos with on-location

scenes at former Nazi camps in Poland, the video shows how the Museum’s Permanent

Exhibition tells the story of both victims and survivors of the Holocaust.This film works best as

an orientation for visitors to the Museum.
120

INDEX OF VIDEOTAPES BY TITLE

America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference, 117

Anne Frank:A Legacy for Our Time, 107

Anne Frank Remembered, 109

Assignment Rescue:The Story of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, 114

Au Revoir Les Enfants (Goodbye, Children), 115

Auschwitz: If You Cried,You Died, 111

Boat is Full,The, 117

Camera of My Family,The: Four Generations in Germany 1845–1945, 103

Courage to Care,The, 114

Children Remember the Holocaust, 107

Daring to Resist:Three Women Face the Holocaust, 113

Double Crossing,The:The Voyage of the St. Louis, 117

Escape from Sobibor, 113

Flames in the Ashes, 112

For the Living, 119

Forgotten Genocide,The, 119

Garden of the Finzi-Continis,The, 103

Genocide (Story of Man’s Inhumanity To Man), 101

Genocide, 1941–1945 (World At War Series), 101

Heil Hitler: Confessions of a Hitler Youth, 105

Hitler:The Whole Story, 105

Holocaust, 101

Holocaust,The: In Memory of Millions, 102

Holocaust: Liberation of Auschwitz, 118

Image Before My Eyes, 103

Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault, 109

Kitty: Return to Auschwitz, 111

Last Chapter,The, 104

Liberation 1945:Testimony, 118

Lodz Ghetto, 110

Lost Childhood:The Story of the Birkenau Boys, 112

Longest Hatred,The:The History of Antisemitism, 106

Memory of the Camps, 112

More than Broken Glass: Memories of Kristallnacht, 107

Murderers among Us:The Simon Wiesenthal Story, 119

New Germany,A, 1933–1939, 104

Of Pure Blood, 106

One Survivor Remembers, 108

Opening the Gates of Hell, 118

Other Side of Faith, The, 114

T E A C H I N G A B O U T T H E H O L O C A U S T

120
A N N O T A T E D V I D E O G R A P H Y

121

Partisans of Vilna, 113

Persecuted and Forgotten, 108

Purple Triangles, 108

Raoul Wallenberg: Between the Lines, 115

Safe Haven, 116

Schindler’s List, 115

Shadow on the Cross, 106

Shoah, 102

Survivors of the Holocaust, 109

Theresienstadt: Gateway to Auschwitz, 110

Trial of Adolf Eichmann,The, 105

Triumph of Memory, 111

Wannsee Conference,The, 104

Warsaw Ghetto,The, 110

We Were Marked with a Big “A,” 109

Weapons of the Spirit, 116

Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?, 116

Witness to the Holocaust, 102

INDEX OF VIDEOTAPES BY SUBJECT

American and International Responses, 116–117

Camps, 111–112

Ghettos, 110

Liberation, 118

Life before the Holocaust, 103–104

Mosaic of Victims, 107–109

Overviews of the Holocaust, 101–102

Perpetrators, 104–105

Racism,Antisemitism, 106

Related Films, 119

Rescue, 114–116

Resistance, 112–113

War Crimes Trials, 119
FRONT COVER PHOTOS 

(left to right)

Two members of the SA encourage the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. (April 1, 1933) 

Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz

A member of the SA throws confiscated books into a bonfire during the public burning of "un-German" books in Berlin, Germany. 

(May 10, 1933)

USHMM

These shops in Berlin were among more than 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses that were vandalized in anti-Jewish riots known as Kristallnacht

("The Night of Broken Glass"). (November 10, 1938)

Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz

Prisoners stand during a roll call at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. (ca. 1938–1941)

USHMM

(bottom)

A Jewish girl from Vienna sits on a staircase after her arrival in England. Close to 10,000 children found refuge in England in what was called

the Kindertransport. (December 12, 1938)

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

BACK COVER PHOTOS 

(left to right)

Jews cross a pedestrian bridge from one section of the Lodz ghetto (in Poland) to another. German guards control access to the ghetto from

the street below—a main thoroughfare that is not part of the ghetto. (1941) 

USHMM

Under SS guard, prisoners perform forced labor in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. (1942)

National Archives and Records Administration

Prisoners perform forced labor in the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland. (ca. 1943–44)

Leopold Page Photographic Collection, courtesy of USHMM

Members of the SS separate Hungarian Jewish men from women and children upon arrival at the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in Poland.

After separating the victims by gender, the SS selected individuals for forced labor or murder in gas chambers. (spring 1944)

Yad Vashem

(bottom)

Sinaida Grussman holds a name card intended to help surviving family members locate her at the Kloster Indersdorf displaced persons camp in

Germany. (after May 7, 1945)

USHMM
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW

Washington, D.C. 20024-2126

www.ushmm.org

Mauthausen, 1942 Plaszow, 1943–44 Auschwitz, 1944

DP Camp, 1945

Lodz Ghetto, 1941