Holocaust (Audio)

Award-winning historian Wendy Lower discusses the lives and experience of German women in the Nazi killing fields. Her study chillingly debunks the age-old myth of the German woman as mother and breeder, removed from the big world of politics and war. The women Lower labels “furies” humiliated their victims, plundered their goods, and often killed them, and like many of their male counterparts, they got away with murder. Lower is the John K. Roth professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and has published widely on the Shoah in Eastern Europe. She is presented here as part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego. Series: "Writers" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 28811]

The Holocaust claimed anywhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million Romani lives, a tragedy the Romani people and Sinti refer to as the Porrajmos, or “the Devouring.” Notwithstanding the scope of the catastrophe, the Romani genocide was often ignored or minimized until Ian Hancock and others exposed this misfortune. A Romani-born British citizen, activist, and scholar, Hancock has done more than anyone to raise awareness about the Romani people during World War II. Now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Hancock is presented here as part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop, a partnership between Judaic Studies at UCSD and the UC San Diego Library.

Series: "Library Channel" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 28100]

Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg presents an illustrated talk focusing upon five paintings by Gustav Klimt that were stolen by the Nazis from the Viennese family of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer in 1938. As a result of a landmark case that Schoenberg argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Klimt paintings, valued at over $325 million, were returned by Austria to their rightful heir in 2006. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 28044]

Forty years ago, Dr. Joel Dimsdale started researching concentration camp survivors. Little did he know where his journey of discovery would lead him. After a visit from a Nuremberg executioner, he switched from studying victims to perpetrators. His latest research is based on an analysis of Rorschach inkblot tests administered at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. Using extensive archival data, Dimsdale reviews what the Nuremberg Rorschachs can (and cannot) tell us about the Nazi mass murderers. Dimsdale is presented by the Holocaust Living History Workshop, a program sponsored by the UC San Diego Library and UC San Diego Judaic Studies Department. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 24993]

What do we mean by “genocide”? Why are humans the only living creatures that kill their own kind in huge numbers? What place does the Holocaust occupy in the history of genocides? Yehuda Bauer, Professor Emeritus of History and Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the essential similarities and differences between the Holocaust and other genocides, particularly ones that have occurred during the last hundred years – Armenian, Cambodian, Ethiopian, Rwandan, and Darfurian Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 24017]

Award-winning historian Deborah Lipstadt gives a compelling reassessment of the groundbreaking trial that has become a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the world in which victims of genocide confront their perpetrators. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 22435]

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes historian Tom Segev for a discussion of his new book, The Life and Legends of Simon Wiesenthal. The conversation focuses on the roots of Wiesenthal's passionate commitment to justice and explores his lifelong quest to convict perpetrators of genocide. Series: "Conversations with History" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 20515]

Professor Mahlendorf discusses some unexpected reader responses to her recently acclaimed memoir, “The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood”, and the ghosts they raised up for some readers and for herself. Series: "Voices" [Humanities] [Show ID: 19388]

George J. Wittenstein, a surviving member of the White Rose, a Hitler resistance organization, discusses how history is created and defined depending on the author. He also recounts his experiences during WWII. Series: "Voices" [Humanities] [Show ID: 17610]

Using examples from visual and print media from the 1930s, Claudia Koonz explores the moral culture that normalized state-sanctioned persecution, theft, and murder under the Nazis. Series: "Humanitas" [Humanities] [Show ID: 14963]