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At least 2 million Jews were murdered by mass shooting in the Soviet Union.  The perpetrators responsible for most of these killings were the men of the Einsatzgruppen.  In this week’s episode, I talk with Jürgen Mathäus about the history of these units, their evolution from 1938 on, and the role they played in the Holocaust.

Jürgen Mathäus is the director of the Applied Research Program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The views expressed in this segment are those of the speaker; they do not necessarily represent the opinions of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Matthäus, Jürgen, Jochen Böhler, and Klaus-Michael Mallmann. War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (2014)

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What was the relationship between Christianity?  Could one be both a Nazi and a Christian?  What was the relationship between religious antisemitism and other forms of Jew hatred?  On today’s episode, I talked with Richard Steigmann-Gall about these difficult but important questions.  

Richard Steigmann-Gall is an associate professor of history at Kent State University.

Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945(2009)

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What is it like to visit a Nazi extermination camp or even a Holocaust site in general?  Last year, I was fortunate enough to travel to Poland with three friends to a number of camps and Holocaust-related sites and museums.  I thought I would do something different in this episode and invite them to talk about their experiences.

Stuart Bertie is an architect and photographer with strong family connections to WW2. He has photographed for the National WW2 Museum, and is currently working on the Band of Brothers Currahee to Normandy documentary project.

Mary Brazier is a Mental Health Social Worker in the NHS with an MA in military history and a special interest in psychiatry in the Second World War.

Lesley Moore is an accountant that is interested in the history of the Holocaust during WW2, in particular Operation Reinhard. She has recently starting guiding Holocaust tours in Krakow, Poland

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The wife of Nazi camp commandant Karl Koch, Ilse, became a lasting symbol of the evil and depravity of the Nazi state.  She was accused of a variety of crimes and underwent three trials, including one by the Nazis themselves.  However, there is more to the story.

In this episode, I talk with Tomaz Jardim about the real Ilse Koch and he unpacks the three trials as well as how the Ilse Koch ascended as the mythic epitome of Nazi evil.

Tomaz Jardim is a professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Jardim, Tomaz. Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald” (2024) 

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Historian Timothy Snyder wrote that, between 1941 and 1944, Belarus was the deadliest place on earth.  And he was right.  The population there, both Jewish and non-Jewish suffered under the full weight of the Nazi genocidal project from the Holocaust by Bullets to the Hunger Plan.

In this episode, I talked with Franziska Exeler about the Holocaust in Belarus as well as its aftermath in postwar justice and its place in postwar memory.

Franziska Exeler is an assistant professor at the Free University Berlin and a research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge.

Exeler, Franziska. Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (2022)

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The Bełżec extermination camp was the first of the so-called Operation Reinhard camps to open.  In some ways, it provided the model for the other Reinhard camps of Sobibor and Treblinka.  In this episode, Chris Webb provides a detailed history of the camp and a detailed discussion of the important role that Bełżec played in the Final Solution.

Chris Webb is an independent researcher who has written multiple books on the Operation Reinhard camps.  He is also the creator of three important web resources on the Holocaust: the Holocaust Historical Society, ARC: The Aktion Reinhard Camps, and HEART: Holocaust Education and Research Team.

Webb, Chris. The Belzec Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (2016)

Webb, Chris. The Sobibor Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (2017)

Webb, Chris. The Treblinka Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (2014)

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In 1985, the nine-hour film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann hit theaters.  This powerful production featured survivor testimony as well as secretly filmed interviews with Nazi perpetrators.  

It’s length and the way it was shot challenges our understanding of what a Holocaust film is.  Is it a documentary film or something else? How has it impacted both our understanding of the event as well as the ways in which others have made films and movies about the Holocaust?  In this discussion with Dominic Williams, we dive into all these questions and more!

 
Dominic Williams is an assistant professor of history at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK.

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas Chare. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Testimonies, Histories, Representations (2019)

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas Chare. Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz (2016)

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When the Einsatzgruppen began reporting that they were murdering Jews, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park intercepted and decoded the messages.  Throughout the Holocaust, these men and women deciphered the reports of the SS and documented the crimes of the Nazi state.

On this episode, I talk with journalist and researcher Christian Jennings about the Holocaust Code and what we can learn about the Holocaust from decoded Nazi transmissions.

Christian Jennings is a British author and foreign correspondent, and the author of ten non-fiction books of modern history and current affairs. THis latest book is The Holocaust Codes: Decrypting the Final Solution. He has lectured for Bletchley Park on German codebreaking, and from 1994-2012 he spent fifteen years reporting for newspapers and TV on international current affairs and complex war crimes investigations, including genocide and its aftermath, across twenty-three countries in the Western Balkans and Africa.

Jennings, Christian. The Holocaust Codes: The Untold Story of Decrypting the Final Solution (2024)

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The first victims were not Jews per se, but Germans.  That is to say, that the Nazis first murdered mentally and physically handicapped Germans that they considered to be unworthy of living.  In so doing, they drew on the long history of the eugenics movement. 

In this episode, I talked with Marius Turda about the role eugenics played in the Nazi state, its connections to the larger global eugenics movement, and the echoes of this history today.

Marius Turda is a professor and historian of eugenics and the Holocaust as well as the director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University.

Turda, Marius. Modernism and Eugenics (2010)

Turda, Marius. Eugenics and Nation in Early 20th Century Hungary (2014)

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The topic of resistance during the Holocaust is always a controversial one. What is resistance?  What did it take to stand up to the Nazis when the vast majority of Germans did not.

In this episode, I talk with historian Mark Roseman about a remarkable group of socialists in Nazi Germany who made the difficult choice to stand up in ways both big and small.  We also talk about nature of resistance and what makes a resister or rescuer.

Mark Roseman is a distinguished professor of history and the Pat M Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University.

Roseman, Mark. Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany (2020)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.