When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. In 2020, the archives were finally opened. Based on thousands of never-before-seen documents, Brown University Professor Emeritus David Kertzer’s book “The Pope at War” paints a dramatic portrait of what the Pope did and did not do as war enveloped Rome and the continent, and as the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews. Kertzer's earlier book, “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise ..read more

Between 1918 and 1921, Ukrainian peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution murdered over a 100,000 Jews. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. In his new book “In the Midst of Civilized Europe,” acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and ..read more

Among the most striking exhibits at the Auschwitz museum are undoubtedly the mountains of loot stolen from Jews murdered upon arrival. Shoes, suitcases, spectacles, and more fill entire rooms in the former barracks of the main camp. Surviving the Shoah when their owners did not, they constitute a potent proof of the Nazis’ abiding concern with material gain. In this talk, author and historian Peter Hayes traces the ways by which the German corporate world became deeply implicated in—and in many respects indispensable to—the Nazi regime’s persecution, exploitation, and murder of Europe’s Jews ..read more

Twentieth-century fascism was a political ideology encompassing totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism, and, in Germany’s case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Historians of the Holocaust tend to reject the notion of fascism as a causal explanation for its origins. Conversely, scholars of fascism present the Shoah as a particular event that is not central to fascist historiography. In this lecture Federico Finchelstein examines the challenge the Holocaust presents to the transnational history of ideology and politics. A leading contemporary authorit ..read more

How does the concept of space enhance our understanding of the Holocaust? In this talk, British historian Tim Cole tells the story of the Shoah through an exploration of landscapes victims moved—and were moved—through across Europe. His exploration of the “Holocaust landscapes” shines a powerful light on the geographic dimensions of the Shoah. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 37452 ..read more

Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was a man of many names and identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. Renamed Israel by the Nazis, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. In exile, he fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus. Marc David Baer discusses his new book “German, Jew, Muslim, Gay” in which he tells the story of a highly unconventional man and reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories ..read more

When the Second World War came to an end, Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich, lay in ruins. Few contemporaries, if any, could have anticipated that 70 years later, Berlin would boast large diaspora communities of Palestinians and Israelis who have made a home among Germans. In “The Moral Triangle,” Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and Germans in Berlin to explore the fraught relationship between the three groups in the context of official German policies, public discourse and the private sphere. Atshan is author of ..read more

Helen Epstein, a prolific journalist and author, discusses her mother's memoir about her life in Nazi-occupied Europe. "Franci's War" starts in 1942 when 22-year-old Franci Rabinek began a three-year journey that would take her from Terezin, the Nazis’ “model ghetto,” to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, slave labor camps in Hamburg, and finally Bergen Belsen. Trained as a dress designer, Franci survived the war and would go on to establish a fashion salon in New York. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 37412 ..read more

Who was Josef Mengele? After the end of the Holocaust, the German physician has been increasingly viewed as the personification of supreme evil both in the minds of survivors and the public at large. In this lecture based on his highly acclaimed book “Mengele,” David Marwell untangles history and myth surrounding the man known variously as the Angel of Death and the good uncle, suggesting that Mengele was not so much a uniquely monstrous perpetrator, but more a willing part of a monstrous machine of destruction. Marwell has had a distinguished career as chief of investigative research at the U ..read more

What is everyday life, and how is it experienced under extreme stress? This is the broader question that animates the research of Anna Hájková, an associate professor of Modern Continental European History at the University of Warwick. In her talk, Hájková examines sex work, sexual violence, and coercion of Jewish women and men in concentration camps, ghettos, and in hiding. She is the author of many journal articles and books, including her current project, “Boundaries of the Narratable: Transgressive Sexuality and the Holocaust.” This pioneering study seeks to contribute to our understanding ..read more