The Holocaust History Podcast

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 The story of Countess Janina (Mehlberg) Suchodolska is something that would be rejected by Hollywood as too far-fetched, but it is a true story.  Janina was a Jewish Pole hiding in plain sight as a Polish noblewoman who then went on to rescue prisoners from one of the deadliest concentration camps.

In this episode, I talk with historians Joanna Sliwa and Barry White about their incredible new book about Janina Mehlberg.  We talk about her incredible story, but also what it means for our understanding of rescue and Polish-Jewish relations.

Joanna Sliwa is an historian and Administrator of the Saul Kagan Fellowship for Advanced Shoah Studies and of the University Partnership Program in Holocaust Studies at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Elizabeth White is an historian who has worked as an historian in the US State Department’s Office of Special Investigations tracking down Nazi war criminals and also at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Sliwa, Joann and Elizabeth White. The Counterfeit Countes: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust(2024)

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The second largest Nazi victim group after the Jews was Soviet POWs.  The experience of these people has been documented in part by the latest volume of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos.

In this week’s episode, I talked with Dallas Michelbacher, one of the researchers on this project and a scholar of the Nazi genocide of Soviet POWs.

Dallas Michelbacher is an applied researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

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The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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How did Holocaust perpetrators feel about what they did and how were they able to keep doing it?  The question of perpetrator motivation has been one that scholars of the Holocaust have been interested in from the beginning.

But what about the phenomenon of perpetrators who seem to have been disgusted by what they were engaged in?  What does this signify? Is it some deep moral objection or something else.

In this episode, I talked with Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic about her truly thought-provoking work on interpretating these expressions of disgust.

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic is a philosopher and teaching associate professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

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The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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                  Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) is a haunting film focused on the domestic life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family.  The family lived in a villa directly next to the Auschwitz I camp.  

                  In this podcast, I talk with film scholar and screenwriter Barry Langford about the history of Holocaust film as well as The Zone of Interest.  We cover a lot of ground from technical choices to the nature of the so-called “banality of evil.”

                  The Zone of Interest is available for free on Amazon Prime UK and for purchase on Amazon US.

Barry Langford is a professor of film studies at Royal Holloway University.  He is also an award-winning professional screenwriter.

Langford, Barry and R. Eaglestone (eds). Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (2007)

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The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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The story of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust is an incredibly complex and difficult one.  On the one hand, Poles and Jews both suffered horribly under the Nazis.  On the other, however, the general climate in Poland was inhospitable to Jews and many Poles took advantage of the Nazi occupation to victimize their Jewish neighbors for a variety of reasons.

In this episode, I talked with Jan Grabowski about the history of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust.  We talked about the role of the Blue Police in hunting down and killing the Jews and we also talked about the polarizing memory battles and weaponization of this history in Poland today.

Jan Grabowski is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa.  He is a renowned scholar of the Holocaust and author of several important books on the topic.

Grabowski, Jan. On Duty - The Polish Blue & Criminal Police in the Holocaust (2024)Grabowski, Jan. Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland (2022)Grabowski, Jan. Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland(2013)

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The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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Somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 Jews, Roma, and ethnic Serbs were murdered in the Jasenovac concentration camp in what is now Croatian.  This camp was run by Croatians without Nazi involvement.  Yet few outside of the Balkans have heard of it.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Stipe Odak about the incredibly complex history of the camp as well as the Holocaust in region.  We also delve into the difficult memory politics of the camp and its use during the 1990s Balkan genocides.

Stipe Odak is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and, as of September 2024, an assistant professor in the field of applied ethics at the same university. He received his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from UC Louvain (Belgium) and a doctorate in Theology from KU Leuven (Belgium).

Odak, Stipe and Andriana Kuznar, Danijeila Lucic, eds. Jasenovac Concentration Camp: An Unfinished Past (2023)

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The Treblinka extermination center was responsible for the murder of approximately 925,000 Jews during the Holocaust.  It was the deadliest killing site after Auschwitz.  Yet few people know that it was also the scene of a successful uprising and mass escape by the prisoners there.

In this conversation with Chad Gibbs, we talked about the history of the camp as well as the work he has done in recreating the vital social networks among prisoners that enabled the prisoner revolt.

Chad Gibbs is an Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies and the Director of Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston.  His forthcoming book deals with the history of the prisoner uprising at Treblinka.

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The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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From the earliest days of the Third Reich through the end of the war, there were organized efforts to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis.  Perhaps as many as 10,000 were rescued in this way, but without their parents.  They ended up in a variety of countries and had diverse set of experiences.  

In addition, the story of the Kindertransport has worked its way into the cultural memory of the Holocaust, particularly in the United Kingdom.  In this episode, I spoke with Amy Williams about the incredibly complex history of these operations and the ways in which they have been commemorated.

Dr. Amy Willams is currently a fellow at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School, New York. For the past two years she was the module leader of the undergraduate module “Holocaust and Genocide” at Nottingham Trent University. Her new co-authored book with Prof. Bill Niven “Memory of the Kindertransport in National and Transnational Memories: Exhibitions, Memorials, and Commemorations” has recently been published by Camden House. She is working on her next co-authored book with Bill for Yale University Press on the transnational history of the Kindertransport, due to be published in 2026. Her third book for Mitteldeutscher Verlag entitled “Kindertransport: Eine Spurensuche” or “In Search of the Kindertransport” is a testimony book based on 150 interviews.

Williams, Amy and William Niven. National and Transnational Memories of the Kindertransport: Exhibitions, Memorials, and Commemorations (2023)

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The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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General Dwight Eisenhower’s visit to the Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945 fundamentally changed his outlook on the war and on his enemy, the Nazis.  It also changed the way he carried out his duties later as US Military Governor in charge of both caring for former concentration prisoners as well as dealing with former Nazis, and, later, as President of the United States.

In this conversation with Jason Lantzer, we talk about all of this and more.

You can see some wartime footage of Eisnehower’s visit to Ohrdruf here courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Jason Lantzer is an historian and also Assistant Director of the Honors Program at Butler University.

Lantzer, Jason. Dwight Eisenhower and the Holocaust: A History (2023)

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Email the podcast at [email protected]

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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

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We talk a lot about learning from the Holocaust and lessons from the Holocaust, but we don’t talk nearly enough about HOW to TEACH the Holocaust.  Understanding how to present this complex and often difficult material to students at a variety of different grade levels (as well as to the public at heritage sites) is a critical task.

In this episode, Dr. Irene Ann Resenly talks about the pedagogy of teaching about the Holocaust, challenges of working with this material in the classroom, and the ways in which heritage sites engage with visitors.

Irene Ann Resenly has worked as a Holocaust educator and scholar for nearly two decades in diverse settings and is currently a middle school social studies teacher in suburban Wisconsin.

Resenly, I. A. (2022). Site Educators in Germany’s Perceptions of Practice: The Sense-Maker and the Storyteller. In Tour Guides at Memorial Sites and Holocaust Museums: Empirical Studies in Europe, Israel, North America and South Africa. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. pp. 33-45.

Schweber, S., & Resenly, I. A. (2018). Curricular Imprints or the Presence of Curricular Pasts: A Study of One Third Grader’s Holocaust Education 12 Years Later. Holocaust Education in Primary Schools in the Twenty-First Century: Current Practices, Potentials and Ways Forward. pp. 3-18.

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at [email protected]

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

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