Send us a text What makes someone a perpetrator? Are killers born or made? One thing that is clear in studying the Holocaust and other genocides is that perpetrators come in all shapes and sizes with just as diverse a set of motivations. On today’s episode, I talked with Alette Smeulers about her work in studying perpetrators from a variety of perspectives across many different forms of mass violence. Alette Smeulers is a professor in the faculty of law at the University of Groningen. Smeulers, ...
Jul 28, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 60
Send us a text Arguably, one of the worst places for prisoners to work during the Holocaust was the Sonderkommando—the group of prisoners forced to work in and around the gas chambers, disposing of corpses. Yet they also managed to create a number of texts that survived the Holocaust even if they did not. In this episode, I talk with Dominic Williams about the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, its place in the Holocaust, and the documents it left behind. Dominic Williams is an assistant professor of his...
Jul 14, 2025•1 hr 29 min
Send us a text The concept of genocide is one of the few ideas created from scratch in the 20th century. As a result, it can be incredibly complicated to interpret, both legally and historically. Indeed, the definition itself has often made it difficult to prosecute. In this episode, I talk with Benjamin Meiches about the evolution of the concept genocide, the role of the Holocaust in its creation, and the challenges the debate over definitions raise today. Benjamin Meiches is an associate profe...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 29 min
Send us a text When the Nazis carried out their infanous and well-documented book burning on the Opernplatz in May 1933, the literal fuel for that fire came from Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, an institution that both studied and provided treatment for LGBTQ Germans. In this episode, I talked with Brandy Schillace about Hirschfeld, the struggle for gay rights in Weimar Germany, and the Nazi assault on the gay community as well as the connections between this homophobia and...
Jun 23, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 57
Send us a text The story of Bulgaria and the Holocaust is often a narrative about how Bulgaria protected its Jews from the Nazis. But is this really case? Certainly not in the case of Thrace and Macedonia. In this episode, I talked with Nadege Ragaru about the history of the complex Holocaust in Bulgaria and its attempts to come to terms with this past. Nadège Ragaru is a research professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po Paris. Ragaru, Nadége. Bulgaria, the Jews, and the ...
Jun 09, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 56
Send us a text In December 1941, an SS man took a series of 12 photographs of an Einsatzgruppen killing in Latvia. The negatives were stolen by a survivor who had copies made and retrieved them after the war. In today’s episode, we explore what we can learn about the Holocaust from these photographs and, indeed, from photographs in general. I talk with Hillary Earl and Valerie Hébert who have written in depth about these images. Hilary Earl is a professor of history at Nipissing University. Vale...
May 19, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 55
Send us a text When did the Holocaust start? How soon after Hitler took power did anti-Jewish violence begin? These are some of the important questions we explore in this episode as I talk with Hermann Beck and the surge in antisemitic violence in the wake of the Nazi rise to power in 1933. In his pathbreaking book, Hermann Beck has documented an explosion of serious violence including murders in the immediate wake of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933. Importantly, we also talk ...
May 12, 2025•1 hr 13 min
Send us a text Among the books that many people talk about but few have read, certainly Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is one. But it IS a difficult read. How do we interpret this book? How significant is it? And what does it tell us about the Holocaust? These are some of the questions we tackled in this episode with the editors of a new volume on the subject. In this episode, I talked with Michael S. Bryant and John J. Michalcayk about this important book and how to understand it. Michalczyk, John J...
Apr 21, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 53
Send us a text Many Nazis including Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and Klaus Barbie escaped Europe and fled to South America in an attempt to evade prosecution for their crimes. We know quite a bit about their lives and crimes during the Holocaust but much less about the network of people that supported them in their new lives in South America. I spoke with Betina Anton about her work researching the people who helped Josef Mengele and her personal connection to this case. Note: Yo...
Apr 14, 2025•1 hr 18 min
Send us a text Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, led a terrible and fascinating life, from Nazi torturer to advisor to brutal South American dictatorships. However, unlike many, he was eventually brought to justice for his crimes. In this episode, I talk with Richard J. Golsan about the sensational trial of Klaus Barbie and its effect on the memory of the Holocaust in France. Richard J. Golsan is University Distinguished Professor and Director of the French Institute at Texas A&M University...
Apr 07, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 51
Send us a text How can the digital humanities address and explore the Holocaust? In these days of Chat GPT, we may be rightly wary about the use of computers to analyze the past. However, today’s episode shows how an ethical approach to using computational methods can expand our understanding of the past often by showing us new questions that we hadn’t considered before. In this episode, I talk with Todd Presner about his fascinating and impressive work with the “big data” of recorded Holocaust ...
Mar 31, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 50
Send us a text Many of us have seen or listened to recorded Holocaust survivor testimony. But have we thought about HOW that testimony was created? And what role that process of eliciting testimony might play in the kinds of things survivors talk about it? In this episode, I talked with Noah Shenker about how three different archives approached gathering testimony but also about what this means for our understanding of the Holocaust and the ways that survivors remember and recount their experien...
Mar 24, 2025•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 49
Send us a text Among the flood of displaced persons that washed across Germany after WWII were a large number of perpetrators, particularly from Eastern Europe. They mostly passed unnoticed (and unbothered) by occupation authorities to start new lives elsewhere. A large number of these Holocaust perpetrators arrived in Australia where they not only remained unrepentant but established new fascist networks. In this episode, I talk with Jayne Persian about these fascists in exile in Australia. Per...
Mar 17, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 48
Send us a text What is it like to have a Nazi in the family? What if that Nazi was Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz? One of the least studied areas of Holocaust history is the ways in which the families and descendants of former Nazis engage with their family history. I am very grateful to be joined on this week’s podcast by Kai Hoess, grandson of Rudolf Hoess, to talk about his family history and his own journey to coming to terms with his past. As always, this podcast does not endorse...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 47
Send us a text Architecture (and architects) played a critical role in not just the Third Reich, but also the Holocaust. Nazi architects helped embody the Nazi worldview in their monumental work but also in the designs of concentration camps. They were willing collaborators in the use of slave labor and, ultimately, in the construction of the apparatuses of genocide. In this episode, I talk with architecture and Holocaust historian Paul Jaskot about all these facets of architecture in the Third ...
Mar 03, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 46
Send us a text How did Jews in Germany resist the Nazis? What were the choices that they made to stand up against the regime where its authoritarian power was greatest? In this episode, I talk with Wolf Gruner about his research on this topic and his surprising discovery of the extent of resistance by Jewish Germans in the heart of the Nazi state. Wolf Gruner is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History and director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Resea...
Feb 24, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 45
Send us a text The Holocaust in Poland left hundreds of towns and villages that had previously had large Jewish populations empty. However, important Jewish sites like synagogues and cemeteries remained. Polish communities were then confronted with what do with these places. In this fascinating conversation with Yechiel Weizman, we talk about his work in researching this and how some communities attempted to destroy these places and how some were were quite literally haunted by their Holocaust p...
Feb 03, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 44
Send us a text Ultimately, the story of the Holocaust is one centered in places: where something happened, where someone was from, where someone wanted to go. In this episode, I talked with two scholars about the role of geography in the Holocaust but also about how we use geographical approaches and methodologies to ask (and answer new important historical questions. Anne Kelly Knowles is the McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine. Tim Cole is a professor of social history at t...
Jan 27, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 43
Send us a text How does one talk with a Holocaust survivor about their experiences? What is the role of survivor testimony in understanding the Holocaust? In this episode, I talk with psychologist, Holocaust scholar, and playwright Hank Greenspan about his lifetime of talking with survivors and what he has learned from that experience. Henry “Hank” Greenspan is an emeritus psychologist, oral historian and playwright at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who has been interviewing, writing ab...
Jan 20, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 42
Send us a text The Nazis first targeted mentally and physically disabled Germans for mass killing, before they targeted Jews. However, discrimination and ableist thought predated the Nazis and followed them into the postwar era. In this episode, I talk with Dagmar Herzog about both the Nazi “euthanasia” campaign, but also the larger context of discrimination against disabled people. We also talk about those who tried to care for these vulnerable people as well as those who lobbied for their reco...
Jan 13, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 41
Send us a text In this episode, I talked with Jacob Flaws about the spaces of Treblinka. His work analyses this extermination camp from a spatial perspective, focusing on the physical and ideological boundaries of the camp. His work shows that the fences of the camp did not contain the truth of its existence and he details the ways in which the local population from the surrounding area interacted with the Nazi killing process and its victims. Jacob Flaws is an assistant professor of history at ...
Jan 06, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 40
Send us a text Philosopher Theodore W. Adorno famously said that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Here he gives an example of the way that many thinkers and philosophers struggled with the post-Holocaust world. In this episode, I talked with philosopher and Holocaust scholar John K. Roth about the ways that philosophy approaches the Holocaust and how Nazi genocide challenges our understanding of the world. John K. Roth is Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Claremo...
Dec 30, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 39
Send us a text 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...
Dec 16, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 38
Send us a text 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) Follow on Twitter @holoca...
Dec 09, 2024•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 37
Send us a text 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 work...
Nov 25, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 36
Send us a text 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 ...
Nov 18, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 35
Send us a text 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...
Nov 11, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 34
Send us a text 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 impor...
Nov 04, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 33
Send us a text 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 D...
Oct 28, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 32
Send us a text 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 au...
Oct 21, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 31
