Ian Buruma was personally invested in writing Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945. His interest in wartime Berlin stemmed from his father’s experience as a Dutch forced laborer in Germany’s capital from 1943 to 1945. Leo Buruma, whose mother was Jewish, was a law student in German-occupied Holland when he was compelled to work in a factory […]
It took Germany six decades to come to terms with the harsh treatment that the Nazi regime meted out to German army deserters during World War II. Upwards of 22,000 German soldiers were executed after Wehrmacht military courts pronounced them guilty of desertion and “undermining the military spirit.” Whether this is an accurate figure is […]
“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,” Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet revolutionary leader, famously said. Lenin’s succinct observation can be applied to October 7, 2023, when Hamas hordes attacked southern Israel in the deadliest day in Israeli history. Hamas’ invasion, which resulted in the deaths of roughly 1,220 Israelis […]
A profusion of books and monographs has been published on a topic fraught with passion and controversy — American Jews and slavery in the United States. Richard Kreitner is the latest author to enter this field. Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight To End Slavery (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) ranges […]
Antisemitism is now a focal point in the impassioned debate over free speech in the United States as defined by the First Amendment in the constitution, contends James Loeffler in his bold and thought-provoking work, Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America, published by Metropolitan Books. This debate is at […]
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, has recognized 2,673 Ukrainians as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor conferred on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. Nataliia Mariichyn’s great grandparents, Grigoriy and Mariya Palivoda, were among the recipients. They saved Eliezer (Leizer) Buchwald, his sister Shloma and their mother, Berta Leiblich. Their story […]
The French resistance movement battling the pro-German Vichy regime and its ally, Nazi Germany, was a source of hope to persecuted Jews in France. The resistance condemned Vichy’s antisemitic edicts and Germany’s genocidal policy toward Jews, yet the whiff of antisemitism persisted in its ranks. This, in essence, is the overarching theme of Renee Poznanski’s […]
Germans of mixed race ancestry fared badly in Nazi Germany. Thomas Paul Bernstein was one of them, a half-Jew who barely survived the brutalities of the Third Reich. He and his sister, Barbara, tell their story in Holocaust: German History And Our Half-Jewish Family (Cherry Orchard Books/Academic Studies Press), a book of distinction in terms […]
Richard J. Evans, in Hitler’s People: The Faces Of The Third Reich (Penguin Press), focuses on a rogue’s gallery of Nazis who created a fascist dictatorship and drove Germany into war, genocide and defeat in World War II. “Only by examining individual personalities and their stories can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality […]
Ilse Koch, a symbol of barbarism in the Third Reich, spent almost 24 years in prison, even as Nazi perpetrators who committed far greater crimes during the Holocaust received relatively light sentences or often escaped prosecution altogether. The wife of Karl Koch, the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, she acquired notoriety for allegedly having […]