Adi Nester is an Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first monograph, Unsettling Difference: Bible, Music Drama, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity, appeared with Cornell University Press. The book studies the discourse of Jewish difference in the first half of the twentieth century through its expressions in biblical-themed musical dramas, their literary sources, and the intellectual debates surrounding the works. Adi’...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 12 min
A detailed history of Nazi anti-partisan warfare on the Eastern Front during Operation Barbarossa. From the start of the war on the Eastern Front, Hitler's Ostheer, his Eastern Army, would wage a vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, in the East. Never before had such a wide-reaching campaign been fought. Preparations for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union had included the drawing up of plans and allocation of resources to secure the newly conquered territories. These plans included the...
May 29, 2025•1 hr 41 min
Today I interviewed Jan Borowicz about Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders (Routledge, 2024). "The assumptions of my book rely on a simple thesis: indifference to violence is impossible and that the primal scene for Polish culture is the experience of Nazism. In Poland we have still a humanitarian crisis by our border. And there is a tiny minority of local and non-local activists who sacrifice themselves and who give help to the people that are ...
May 21, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 267
Sébastien Tremblay is a historian specialized in queer, global, and conceptual history. Born in Montreal / Tiohtià:ke, he received his PhD at the DFG Graduate School 'Global Intellectual History' at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute in 2020. He is currently a Postdoc at the Department for History and Didactics of History at the University of Flensburg. His monograph, A Badge of Injury: The Pink Triangle as Global Symbol of Gay and Lesbian Identities in the 20th Century was published by DeGruyter ...
May 20, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 253
In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Although he never left his home in the university town of Tübingen, Crusius spent decades annotating books and manuscripts, corresponding with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and interviewing Greek Orthodox alms-seekers. Ultimately, he gathered his research into a seminal work called the Turcograecia, which served for centuries as Europe’s foremost s...
May 19, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 245
In Nazi Billionnaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties (Mariner Books, 2022), journalist David de Jong presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it. In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW—was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he h...
May 12, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 130
Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration (Purdue UP, 2025) discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre. Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine, where the Nazis and their collaborators killed virtually all the Jews who remained in the city during the occupation. After the war, Soviet ideology suppressed commemoration of the Holocaust, instead conceptualizing the universal su...
May 11, 2025•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 640
The Chelmno Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Press, 2019) is a comprehensive account of the Chelmno death camp. Chelmno was not only the first Nazi death camp, it also set a horrific example in establishing gas vans as the first mass use of poison gas to kill Jews. Chris Webb and Artur Hojan cover the construction and the development of the mass murder process as perfected by the Nazis. The story is painstakingly told from all sides, the Jewish inmates, some who survived the...
May 08, 2025•54 min•Ep. 220
Rosie was always told her red hair was a curse, but she never believed it. She often dreamed what it would look like under a white veil with the man of her dreams by her side. However, her life takes a harrowing turn in 1944 when she is forced out of her home and sent to the most gruesome of places: Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Rosie's head is shaved and along with the loss of her beautiful hair, she loses the life she once cherished. Among the chaos and surrounded by hopelessness, Rosie realizes th...
May 07, 2025•54 min•Ep. 638
The Anabaptists, alongside the Lutheran and Reformed churches, were the third major current in the sixteenth century Reformation movements. From their beginnings, the Anabaptists were highly diverse and yet they shared some central beliefs and practices for which they were quickly persecuted – for example, defenselessness and nonresistance, the refusal to swear oaths, and the separation of church and state. Ideal for both teachers and students, this book provides a comprehensive and scholarly ac...
May 06, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 299
At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp—mainly Jewish women and girls—were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop—called the Upper Tailoring Studio—was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant’s wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmaker...
May 05, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 637
Michael David Fox's Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule (Harvard UP, 2025) provides a local, close-up look at the everyday workings of Nazi and Soviet power, in a particular region. It discusses such themes as the Soviet Terror of the late 1930's and the trauma of the collectivization of agriculture, earlier in the decade, as well as the further traumas of Nazi occupation. Especially interesting is its focus on life-trajectories of specific individuals who had daily to nav...
May 03, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 303
In Burying the Enemy: The Story of Those who Cared for the Dead in Two World Wars (Yale University Press, 2025), Tim Grady recounts here a detailed history of the fate of combatants who died on enemy soil in England and Germany in World Wars I and II. The books draws on a rich archive of personal family experiences, and describes the often touching acts of kindness and reconciliation with families caring for graves of enemy personnel in churchyards and local cemeteries close to where those death...
Apr 27, 2025•55 min•Ep. 266
Music was an integral part of statecraft and identity formation in the Third Reich. Structured thematically and semiotically around the Wagnerian tetralogy of the Ring cycle, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe (U Toronto Press, 2025) provides a sonic read of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Alexandra Birch sheds light on the specific type of music promoted under Nazism, linked to larger Teutonic mythologies and histories espoused in rh...
Apr 25, 2025•1 hr 22 min
Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel’s philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they ...
Apr 20, 2025•48 min•Ep. 765
Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time of...
Apr 07, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 172
In Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton UP, 2024), Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism. Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politic...
Apr 06, 2025•55 min•Ep. 520
Poems by and biographies of inmates of the Dachau Concentration Camp, testimonies to the persistence of the humanity and creativity of the individual in the face of extreme suffering. The concentration camp at Dachau was the first established by the Nazis, opened shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. It first held political prisoners, but later also forced laborers, Soviet POWs, Jews, and other "undesirables." More than 30,000 deaths were documented there, with many more unrecorded. In the...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 8 min
Although most perished, hundreds of thousands of Central European Jews escaped the Holocaust; tens of thousands of these Jewish refugees ended up in East Asia, Southeast Asia, or South Asia. Taking a global and transnational approach, German-Speaking Jewish Refugees in Asia, 1930-1950 (Routledge, 2025) examines the cultural, political, and socioeconomic encounters among and between Asian and European states and empires, Central European Jews, and Asians between 1930 and 1950, offering important ...
Mar 26, 2025•1 hr 7 min
This compelling family history spans from the 1890s to the 21st century, weaving personal stories into the broader fabric of German history to reveal a deeply moving account of survival, courage, and resilience. At the heart of this narrative is Paul Bernstein, a Jewish WWI veteran who was awarded for his bravery but ultimately perished in Auschwitz in 1944, and his wife, Johanna Moosdorf, a non-Jewish woman who fought tirelessly to protect their family. Their two half-Jewish children, Barbara a...
Mar 24, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 621
The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was the frontline in the Cold War, packed with hundreds of thousands of Soviet and East German troops armed with the latest Warsaw Pact equipment, lined up along the 1,400 km Inner German Border. However, because of the repressive East German police state, little human intelligence about these forces reached the West. Who were they? Where were they located? What were they doing? How were they equipped? What were their intentions? NATO was lined up...
Mar 23, 2025•1 hr 51 min•Ep. 256
In Well Worth Saving (Yale University Press, 2019), Professor Laurel Leff explores how American universities responded to the sudden and urgent appeals for help from scholars trapped in Nazi-dominated Europe. Although many scholars were welcomed into faculty or research positions in the US, thousands more tried to find a way over and failed. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholar...
Mar 18, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 1550
Over the past two decades, natural things—especially those collected, exchanged, studied, and displayed in museums, such as animals, plants, minerals, and rocks—have emerged as fascinating protagonists for historical research. Nature on Paper: Documenting Science in Prussia, 1770-1850 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024) follows a different, humbler set of objects that make it possible to trace the global routes and shifting meanings of those natural things: the catalogs, inventories, and other paper tool...
Mar 17, 2025•43 min•Ep. 27
In Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism (U Wisconsin Press, 2025), Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust has been understood and represented in Germany from the Nazi period to the present. In many regions outside Germany, a small number of known Holocaust rescuers are often held up as exemplars of broad pro-Jewish sentiment among that country's population during World War II, thereby projecting an image of national moral virtue. Within ...
Mar 16, 2025•58 min•Ep. 171
Forged in Genocide traces the early history of colonial capitalism in Namibia with a central focus on migrants who came to be key to the economy during and as a result of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904-1908). It posits that Namibia, far from being a colonial backwater of the early 20th century, became highly integrated into the labor flows and economies of West and Southern Africa, and even for a time was one of the most sought-after regions for African migrants because of rela...
Mar 15, 2025•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 209
East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025) examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequality, and literature, highlighting the overt functions, latent functions, and side effects associated with each sphere. Communism in East Central Europe had cracks from the beginning, as uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 demonstrated. But with the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Solidarity in Poland in the Summer of 1980...
Mar 09, 2025•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 223
A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinist terror in Hungary and East-Central Europe. In Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist R...
Mar 03, 2025•48 min•Ep. 220
Hitler’s Hunting Squad in Southern Europe: The Bloody Path of Fritz Schubert through Occupied Crete and Macedonia (Pen and Sword, 2024) traces the violent path of Fritz Schubert and his Greek 'hunting squad' across occupied Crete and Macedonia, offering a complete translation (by Stratis A. Porfyratos) of Thanasis Fotiou's comprehensive study on the German Lieutenant during World War II. The author's research reveals previously unknown aspects of Schubert's life and his actions as an officer, in...
Feb 23, 2025•21 min•Ep. 1543
The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War (Purdue UP, 2025) starts when the travesty ends, telling the story of the ravine’s memory and forgetting in Soviet literature and culture—in Russian as well as in Yiddish. This book challenges the prev...
Feb 22, 2025•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 610
A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Brandeis UP, 2024) explores the fascinating history of Zionist and Israeli "Oriental Studies" (mizrahanut), particularly the study of Islam, Arabic, and the Middle East, as a field deeply rooted in the academic traditions of early 20th-century German universities. Drawing on rich archival documentation in German, Arabic, English, and Hebrew, it traces the migration of Orientalist knowledge from Germany to Mandatory Palest...
Feb 21, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 170
