essay questions on the holocaust

150 Holocaust Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for good titles for a Holocaust project? This is one of the most tragic parts of WW2 that is definitely worth studying.

🔝 Top 10 Holocaust Questions for Essays

📝 holocaust essay: how to write, 🏆 holocaust essay examples & topics, 📌 holocaust thesis ideas, ✍️ holocaust essay topics for college, 💡 most interesting holocaust topics to write about, ❓ holocaust essay questions.

The most popular Holocaust essay topics are:

• The Holocaust and its causes
• Nazi human experiments as a part of the Holocaust
• Jewish ghettos in Poland
• The establishment of Auschwitz concentration camp
• The consequences of the Holocaust

Below you can find much more ideas. In this article, we’ve collected Holocaust thesis ideas and questions for essays. They will suite for middle school, high school, and college-level assignments. You’ll also find tips on writing your introduction, conclusion, and formulating a thesis statement, together with Holocaust essay examples. Write an ️A+ paper with us!

• What were the ideological causes of the Holocaust?
• How was anti-Jewish legislation in Germany established?
• What were the goals of the Nazi Euthanasia Program?
• How and where were the largest ghettos created?
• How did the concentration camp system expand across Europe?
• What were the three types of ghettos?
• How did the resistance efforts in the ghettos look like?
• Who were the key opponents of Nazism inside and outside Germany?
• How did the US government respond to Nazism?
• What were the consequences of the Holocaust?

The Holocaust has affected millions of people around the world. It is one of the most tragic and problematic topics of history. Holocaust essays help students to understand the issue better, analyzing its causes and consequences.

Organizing an essay on the Holocaust may be challenging, as there are many aspects to cover. We have developed some tips to help you through the process.

First, choose the Holocaust issue you want to discuss. Select one of the titles to work on. Some of the Holocaust essay topics include:

• Concentration camps in today’s Europe
• Lessons from the Holocaust: Fostering tolerance
• Present and future of the Holocaust research
• The causes of the Holocaust and discrimination against Jewish people
• How could people have stopped the Holocaust?
• Political issues behind the Holocaust
• The effects of the Holocaust on its survivors
• The factors and issues that contributed to Nazism

You can choose one of these holocaust essay questions or ask your professor for suggestions. Once that you have selected the topic of your essay, you can start working on the paper.

A well-developed structure is highly significant for an outstanding essay. Here are some tips on how to develop a structure for the paper:

• Think of the Holocaust essay prompts you want to discuss first. You can do preliminary research to see what issues you should cover.
• Ask your professor about the type of essay you should write. If it is an argumentative essay, you will need to leave space for at least one refutation paragraph and a rebuttal paragraph.
• Include an introductory paragraph (or several paragraphs if you are working on a longer essay). This paragraph should include the background information on the Holocaust and the problem you have selected. Discuss the goals of the paper and state your main claim at the end of this section.
• The main arguments of your paper will comprise body paragraphs. You may want to dedicate at least one separate paragraph for each of your claims. The number of body paragraphs is up to you, however, we would recommend including at least three of them. Hint: Make smooth transitions between paragraphs to make your paper look more organized.
• Remember that at least one body paragraph should state the general information about the Holocaust, its causes, and effects. You may discuss statistical data, global consequences, and primary victims.
• While working on a refutation paragraph, do not forget to prove that your arguments are more reasonable that the opposing perspectives. You can dedicate a separate paragraph for a rebuttal.
• A concluding section or a summary should state your main arguments again. You can also include a recommendation if necessary.
• Important tip: Do not make your paragraphs too short or too long. We would recommend writing between 65 and 190 words per paragraph and not more than 35 words per sentence. Making all body paragraphs of similar length is also a good idea that will make your paper look more professional.
• Ask your professor whether you need to include a title page and table of contents. Remember that a reference page is a must, as it includes all sources from the essay.
• If you are not sure that the selected structure is good, search for the holocaust essay titles and examples online and see how other students organize their papers. Avoid copying the works you will find.

Remember to look at the samples on our website to get some ideas for your excellent paper!

• Holocaust and Bosnian Genocide Comparison The current paper aims to compare some of the most notable genocides in history, the Holocaust, and the Bosnian mass murder in terms of their aims, death tolls, tactics, and methods.
• The Holocaust: Poem “Tears of Blood” The extermination of the Roma was part of the general policy of the National Socialists to destroy political opponents, homosexual people, terminally and mentally ill, drug addicts, and Jews.
• Critique of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust Book “Night” Like many books on the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel’s Night is a dramatic picture of the horror times in the history of humankind and particularly in the history of the Jewish people.
• Nazi Medical Experiments During the Holocaust The information is maintained by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This photograph is maintained and produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• Reinhard Heydrich’s Role in the Holocaust With the help of his boss: Himmler[7], they used political forces to influence the police in an attempt to ensure the consolidation of the Nazi administration in the entire nation of Germany[8].
• The Relationship Between Epigenetics and the Effects of the Holocaust Tests are most likely to identify existing changes of DNA and the proteins related to DNA, which are responsible for the structure of the DNA and the availability of other elements related to the DNA.
• History of the Jews and the Holocaust The Nazi regime and its partners became the pioneers of the Holocaust. That being the case, the anti-Semitism ideas and prejudices experienced in Germany before the Second World War led to the infamous Holocaust.
• Was the Holocaust the failure of or the product of Modernity? The date that traditionally marks the beginning of modernist era is 1453, when the City of Constantinople was conquered by the Turkish Ottoman Empire, as far as this date symbolized the end of the Byzantine […]
• US Holocaust Policy During World War II However, the anti-Nazi campaign was not successful, and the main reason for this was the harsh foreign policy of the USA.
• Reasons Why the Jews Failed to Resist the Holocaust The award-winning book brings the readers to the lives and experiences of Vladek Spiegelman, a holocaust survivor, and his father during the period.
• Discussion of Holocaust and Immigration In “Holocaust Education and Remembrance in Australia,” Suzanne D.and Suzanne H.discuss the adverse effects and after-issues of immigration among the Jewish community and how it led to the concept that the Holocaust had a long-lasting […]
• The Holocaust and the Nakba: Tragedy and Trauma The Nakba refers to the destruction of hundreds of cities and towns and the Palestinian people’s cultural, economic, political, and social backgrounds.
• Holocaust Commemoration in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum This paper is relevant to the understanding of virtual exhibit since it highlights the major notions of memorialization that are included in the exhibition.
• Holocaust: Traditions and Encounters He was the only presenter in the video: he revealed the question about Sephardic Jews in the Holocaust and answered questions from the audience.
• Holocaust: Taking Steps Toward Evil To the Nazi leader, the Jews were an inferior race and were an alien threat to the German racial purity. The Germans blamed the Jews for having lost the World War 1 and accused them […]
• A Visit to the Holocaust Museum Houston The museum emphasizes the perils of intolerance, bigotry, and apathy by drawing on the lessons of the Holocaust and other massive genocides.
• “Holocaust Horror…” by Moore A considerable number of young people do not have the correct knowledge, and the most disturbing fact is that the Holocaust started to be interpreted in different ways.
• The Terror of the Holocaust in the Book “Hana’s Suitcase” by Karen Levine The story “Hana’s Suitcase” by Karen Levine is not fiction, where heroes and the plot are the imagination of the author; it is a documentary story where the situation and named people are real, they […]
• The Holocaust and Schindler’s List: Transforming the Human Perception of Violence The World War II genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, changed both the Jewish history and the history of the world, transforming the human perception of violence and religious conflicts.
• The Holocaust as a History-Cultural Phenomenon The Holocaust in the narrow sense represents the persecution and mass extermination of Jews who inhabited the German lands, the territories of Hitler’s allies, and the areas occupied during the war.
• Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel “Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale”: Author’s Understanding of the Holocaust Spiegelman uses mice to represent Jews because of the oppression they experienced while in Hitler’s concentration camps. The mistreatment the Jews experienced is similar to what mice experience in the presence of cats.
• Holocaust Museum Exhibition “State of Deception” Generally, evaluating a variety of facts from different sources, it becomes evident that the exhibition “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda” in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum can be seen as rather […]
• Holocaust: Ethnic and Cultural Diversity and the Real Face of Prejudice The holocaust refers to the murder of six million European Jews in the course of the Second World War. The holocaust was the highest level of prejudice in society during the time.
• German Attitudes Towards Third Reich and Holocaust Commemoration The Goldhagen debate represents a shift in the attitude of the Germans regarding the commemoration of the Third Reich and the remembrance of the holocaust.
• Jewish Holocaust and the Humour During the Dark Times This is the Jewish long tradition of jokes in Judaism that dates back to the Midrash and the Pentateuch but it generally refers to the more recent group of verbs that were first used in […]
• Human Response to Holocaust in “Nightfather” and “Fugitive Pieces” It is his memory of the nightmare that keeps him imprisoned, he appears in the camp again and again by the volition of his memory that is eager to play painful tricks with him.
• Holocaust Denial: Dynamics of Ethics While keeping this in mind, we will analyze the introduction of “holocaust denial” criminal charges into the penal code of many Western countries that simultaneously take pride in the fact that their democratic form of […]
• American’s Reaction to Jewish Holocaust Later when America joined Russia in the war against the Nazi Regime, the action was selective in that it failed to protect the Jews from genocide.
• Holocaust: From Discrimination to Concentration Camps The discrimination as said at workplaces and other areas was later to escalate to actual killing with the taking of power by the Nazi party establishing legal backing of their activities with the enactment of […]
• Jewish Family’s Experiences During the Holocaust Piecing together everything that I learned from my grandparents and parents, I have come to realize that I was shaped early on by the experience of my ancestors in the Holocaust and in Russia.
• Censorship, Holocaust and Political Correctness In this paper, we will focus on exploring different aspects of formal and informal censorship, in regards to a so-called “Holocaust denial”, as we strongly believe that people’s ability to express their thoughts freely is […]
• The Holocaust: Auschwitz Concentration Camp History In an attempt to dehumanize the victims of the Nazis and as a testament to the resilience of a few of the inmates of the camps, the mentality of the brutal Nazis is worth a […]
• Vatican and Holocaust: Did Pope help Jews The couple later stated that they never wanted the Pope to come out in the open and state that he was against the Nazis because then he will become the center of attention and to […]
• Holocaust: What Were Its Causes and Effects? After the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazis, the goal of the Nazis was to murder every individual of Jewish origin, which the Nazis defined as anyone with a trace of Jewish “blood” dating […]
• Henry Orenstein: Holocaust Survivor and Entrepreneur The Nazi regime, were under the impression that the Germans were ‘racially superior’ to the Jews and believed that the Jews were somehow lesser than them.
• The Holocaust: Historical Analysis The Holocaust, now the example of Jewish pain, has long stopped to be a piece of history, and is now regarded by spiritual and material alike, as a piece of divinity – a sacred text […]
• The Holocaust: Planned Physical Extermination In this essay, we are going to concentrate particularly on the point of the Holocaust in the countries of Eastern and Western Europe, namely the extermination of Jews that took place in Romania and France […]
• Holocaust Tragedy in Nazi Germany Since the forties of the twentieth century, another such theory, called the Holocaust, came into use in the context of the mass extermination of Jews in Europe by the Nazis. It is the education of […]
• The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation The sanctity of life should therefore be respected at all costs and so humanity should strive to coexist in peace and harmony in a manner that is sustainable to prevent the reoccurrence of such atrocities […]
• A Visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC People visited the museum to learn about the atrocities caused to the Jews by the Nazi administration, headed by Hitler. The other piece I learned is that in the museum there was a video of […]
• Holocaust in “Maus” Graphic Novel by Art Spiegelman It is quite peculiar that Spiegelman uses only the black-and-white color perhaps, this is another means to emphasize the gloomy atmosphere of the Nazi invasion and the reign of the anti-Semite ideas.
• Post-Holocaust and Imprisonment Literary Works It is possible that Celan uses repetition to express the feelings of repetitiveness that he and the other people felt during the imprisonment.
• Virginia Holocaust Museum’s Genocide Presentation In terms of the educational objective, I aimed to learn the aspects and details of the Holocaust through the artifacts, objects, and things that belonged to people experiencing these events’ atrocities.
• Virginia Holocaust Museum Trip and Experience I wanted to make sure that I could listen to myself and truly feel what the Holocaust was for humanity and is for me. I felt outraged that someone could think they had the right […]
• Virginia Holocaust Museum Field: Trip Reflection I must admit that the very fact of listening to the voice of somebody who went through the horrors of the Holocaust proved to be at least as revealing as all of the artifacts and […]
• The Poetry of the Holocaust Period In conclusion, it seems appropriate to state that Sutzkever is a metaphysical poet as his creative thought focuses on the beauty of nature and the truthful presentation of events.
• The Public Memory of the Holocaust In addition to his pain, Levi concerns the increasing temporal distance and habitual indifference of hundreds of millions of people towards the Holocaust and the survivors1 It causes the feeling of anxiety that was fuelled […]
• History of the Holocaust They can be outlined as follows: the historical legacy of anti-Semitism in Europe, the particulars of the German national character /the fact that the Nazis did succeed in dehumanizing the Jews, and the irrational hatred […]
• Holocaust and Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt This paper is devoted to the analysis of the Holocaust in general and the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in particular. The judges represented the states which were the main winners in the war: Great Britain, […]
• Holocaust Memorial Museum Textiles, for example, badges, uniforms, flags, costumes, and banners are also housed in the museum. Other types of materials housed in the museum are works on paper, such as announcements, posters, broadsides, and maps.
• Holocaust in “Survival in Auschwitz” by Primo Levi Another issue that needs to be discussed is that the economy of Germany was hurt because of the World War I, and it has affected the pride of the nation.
• 1942-1945 Holocaust: Nazi Germany’s Political Reasons Started in 1942 and taking place until the end of the war, the Holocaust was the genocide of Jewish people arranged by Hitler and implemented by the Nazi army.
• Holocaust vs. Japanese Colonial Era in Korea The Holocaust in the history of Jewish people, as well as Japanese occupation in the history of Korean people, was one of the greatest tragedies.
• Holocaust, Antisemitism, and Propaganda That is why, nowadays great attention is given to issues which led to the death of millions of people. Being a part of the ideology of Nazism, it led to the elimination of a great […]
• The Holocaust Effects: Books “Tzili” and “Wartime Lies” The natural experiences of growing up are changed and twisted by the war and its horrors, but the specific developments, their perceptions, and impacts are affected by the children’s personalities and circumstances of their lives, […]
• The Holocaust and Jehovas Witnesses The concept of “spiritual resistance” in the case of members of Jehovah’s Witness during the era of the Nazis in Germany focused primarily on continuing the acts associated with their faith despite the persecution they […]
• Holocaust: Nazi Anti-Jewish Policies and Actions The major policy that the Nazi implemented was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service that excluded Jews from government jobs.
• Holocaust and Nazi’s Racial Imperialism The scholar argues that the event was a result of the racial imperialism championed by the Nazi Party in the country.
• Adolf Hitler and a History of the Holocaust Before going any further it is important to point out the kind of mindset that the German people had back then that made it easier for Hitler to convince them to join him in a […]
• The Holocaust History: the Jewish Community Destruction To achieve its objective, the paper will expound on why the Nazi government targeted the Jews, why did these attacks come during this specific period, the role that average German citizens played and the overall […]
• Holocaust History, Its Definition and Causes Also notable about racism is the fact that it may take several forms and it is not just limited to the literal meaning of racism like the skin color, the size of the eyes, and […]
• Holocaust Experience in the Book ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel Eliezer’s depiction in the story as the main character in the story is that of a humble and religious young man.
• The Jewish Holocaust Novel ‘Night’ by Eliezer Wiesel Generally, Eliezer admired the fact that his father was prayerful and he kept his utmost faith in God even in the time of oppression.
• Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory by Deborah Lipstadt The book is divided into chapters that focus on the history and methods that are used to distort the truth and the memory of the Holocaust.
• The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Since its inception in 1993, the museum has served as the nation’s reminder when it comes to issues of the holocaust.
• Iran and Israel’s Nuclear Holocaust and the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Position As such conflict would put a serious threat to the safety of the region, the policy aims at the acceptance of nuclear deal and the development of the effective course of actions aimed at eliminating […]
• Liberal Democracy, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust The Nazis and other populist political movements in Germany believed that the Jews had undue influence in the country through their prominent positions in the media and the financial system4.
• Reconsidering the History: Holocaust Denial. The XXI Century Prospects Despite the fact that Holocaust was one of the hideous crimes against the humanity that is never to occur again, some tend to represent the tragic event as the stage of the history that people […]
• Nazi Germany & Holocaust The Nazi movement is a revolutionary movement that was associated with the mass murder of Jews and Communists in an attempt to restore the reputation of Germany at the international level. The Nazi regime under […]
• The Holocaust and Nazi Germany The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 led to the establishment of thousands of concentration camps, which were centers of mass murders of Jews.
• The Holocaust and Jews Extermination The Nazis perceived Internationalism in the context of the Holocaust to be a global perspective primarily held and advocated by Jews who were using it as a method designed to dominate the whole world.
• The Holocaust: Analysis of Life in the Kovno, Warsaw and Lodz Ghettos Due to the continued capturing and shooting of the Jews at the forts, Rabbi Shapiro felt that the Jews should be separated from the Lithuanians to live into the Ghetto and thus a seven member […]
• How Holocaust Has Been Projected by the Different Historians Over the Years? Several historians claimed that it was unfair as it was an act of barbarism and it promoted wicked behavior with the innocent people of Jewish community while on the other hand, it was said that […]
• Jewish Insight of Holocaust Holocaust, the extermination of Jews from the European land was the example of brutality and viciousness of the Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, many historians were observing the situation critically and wanted to present their ideas about […]
• Shooting At the Holocaust Museum According to the incident report, von Brunn entered the museum and shot the guard. His motive was to hold the board members who were in the building hostage for the economic difficulties that the country […]
• The Nazi Holocaust’s Effects This study aims at analyzing the claim that social and psychological effects of the Holocaust linger in areas of political systems in which the survivors of the holocaust currently reside.
• The History of the Holocaust Hitler said that the root cause of the problems were the despicable Jews of Europe. The direct victims were the Jews but the rest of the world understood the consequences of inaction and the lack […]
• Holocaust and the Cold War Cold war refers to the military and political tension between the United States of America and the Soviet Union immediately after the World War 2.
• Doris Bergen: Nazi’s Holocaust Program in “War and Genocide” The discussion of the Holocaust cannot be separated from the context of the World War II because the Nazi ideology of advancing the Aryans and murdering the undesirable people became one of the top reasons […]
• The ‘Banality’ of Abstraction: Western Philosophy’s Failure to Address the Moral Implications of the Holocaust Additionally, I would like to address the relationship of Arendt and Heidegger in the context of The Holocaust, and the effect that it had upon their philosophical works.
• Conduction of The Holocaust Propaganda against Jews The common media the Nazis used for the campaign against the Jews was the Weekly Nazis newspaper, “The attacker”.
• Does Global English Mean Linguistic Holocaust? It is not difficult to find examples of the extinction of languages in the wake of the introduction of English. Some of the most active areas of extinction include the American West, where a variety […]
• The Horror of the Holocaust in Different Styles of Writing One of the thematic thread that unites these three works of the writers from different countries is their attempt to reproduce how cruel and unfair the actions of the Nazi were. The Holocaust, the judgment […]
• Peter Eisenman; Building Germany, the Holocaust Memorial The Jews were not the Nazi’s only victims during the holocaust, other casualties were the weak and disabled people in the society, who were killed on the pretext of the Euthanasia program.
• The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide deals with one of the most debatable issues of the history of the twentieth century, i.e.
• The Holocaust: Religion, Race and Ethnicity Discrimination
• Holocaust Resistance: The Largest Jews Revolt Holocaust
• The Violent Conditions and Dehumanization Faced by the Jewish People During the Holocaust
• Analysis of the Causes of the Holocaust in Germany
• The Anger and Bewilderment of Holocaust Survivors
• Racist and Hate Crimes During the Holocaust
• The Long-Lasting Impact of the Holocaust on the Survivors
• The Holocaust, and the Statistics of the Tragic Events
• General Information About the Holocaust Was Genocide Against the Jewish Race
• The Causes and Effects the Holocaust Was Responsible for the Death of 6 Million
• Overview of the Chinese Holocaust and Experiments on Living People
• The Goals and Impact of the Holocaust Camps in Germany
• General Information About the Horrible Events That Took Place During the Holocaust
• The Different Killing Methods Used by the Nazi Germans During the Holocaust
• The U.S. Government’s Disregard of the Jewish Holocaust
• Survivor’s Syndrome Among Holocaust Survivors
• The German Holocaust: Treatment of the Germans After WWII
• Holocaust Survivor Testimonies: Time, Methodology and Memory
• The Link Between Nazi Propaganda and the Holocaust
• Holocaust Survivor Bewilderment and Anger
• Stolen Art Literature and Music of the Holocaust
• The Genesis and History of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany
• The Knowledge About the Holocaust To Avoid the Same Experience
• Analysis of the Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior
• The Horrific Experience and Fate of the Children During the Holocaust
• How Did the Holocaust Affect the Jewish Community?
• How Does the American Holocaust Show the Huge Decline of Native Americans?
• Was German “Eliminationist Anti Semitism” Responsible for the Holocaust?
• How Were Jews Treated During the Holocaust?
• What Is the Relationship Between Holocaust and Genocide?
• How the Holocaust Took Away the Rights of Jewish People?
• What Was the Strength of the Nazis During the Holocaust?
• With Whom Does Responsibility for the Holocaust Ultimately Lie?
• How the Pope Affected the Holocaust?
• What Events Led to the Holocaust in Germany?
• How Was Survival Possible in the Death Camps of the Holocaust?
• Were the Jehovah’s Witnesses Really Affected by the Holocaust?
• Why Does God Permit Tragic Events Like the Holocaust Terrorist Attacks?
• What Was Hitler’s Role in the Holocaust?
• Why Is Peter Eisenman Building a Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust in Germany?
• How Does the Holocaust Compare to One Other Form of Modern Genocide (Kurdish Genocide)?
• What Are the Problems Between Jews and Christians That Caused the Holocaust?
• How Did Oskar Schindler Act During the Holocaust?
• What Prejudices Were There During the Holocaust?
• How Did People Avoid Removal During the Holocaust?
• What Kind of Medical Experiments Were Carried Out During the Holocaust?
• How Did the Holocaust Affect Ordinary People?
• What Are the Proposals for Preventing a New Holocaust?
• How Did the U.S. React to the Holocaust in Germany?
• Why Was the World Silent During the Holocaust?
• How the Holocaust Affected Its Jewish Victims?
• What Are the Consequences of the Holocaust and Its Consequences for the Jews and the Rest of the Population?
• How the Holocaust Explodes the Concept of Mass Crime?
• Why Are Jews Demanding Compensation for Holocaust Damage?
• What Economic and Social Conditions Led to the Holocaust?
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126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles

The Holocaust is one of the most tragic events in world history, and writing an essay about it can help you understand it better. Among these Holocaust essay topics, you can find ideas for different types of middle school or college essays. Use them as the Holocaust essay titles or as a starting point for your dissertation research.

🕎 TOP 7 Holocaust Essay Topics

🏆 good titles for holocaust essays, 🎓 most interesting holocaust research paper topics, 💡 simple holocaust essay ideas, ❓ holocaust questions for essays, 📝 holocaust argumentative essay topics, 🔎 holocaust topics for research paper, ✍️ more holocaust essay titles.

• Escape from Sobibor: World War 2 Holocaust
• World War II: Holocaust and Discrimination of the Jews
• “I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala” and “American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World”: Comparison
• Herero Holocaust Among European Colonial Genocides
• Holocaust: Jewish Women’s Experiences
• World History: Researching of Holocaust
• “Children in the Holocaust and World War II” by Holliday
• Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers During the Holocaust The Holocaust was prevalent, with cruelties, tragedies, and atrocities directed at various groups defined by diverse characteristics.
• Holocaust and Its Physical and Mental Consequences This paper is a detailed and thorough study of the physical and mental consequences of the Holocaust on people who survived this terrible period of history.
• The Holocaust Impact on Jewish Theology Holocaust had a major impact on Jewish theology by providing an earth-shattering tragedy the likes of which the Jewish have never seen in the past, to explain.
• Holocaust and War in “Hiroshima” by John Hersey This paper provides a review of John Hersey’s accounts of the holocaust on “Hiroshima” and provides an understanding of how to handle incidences of war.
• Wiesel’s Holocaust Experiences Eliezer Wiesel’s view of human nature and understanding of God radically changed due to his experience of the Holocaust.
• Behavior of Witnesses in “Holocaust by Bullets” by Desbois Desbois’ book “Holocaust by Bullets” documents in detail the experience of witnesses to the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis.
• Turning Points of the Holocaust The year 1939 started with the Law Excluding Jews from Commercial Enterprises closing all Jewish-owned businesses on January 1.
• Holocaust and Moral Objectivism: “Surviving Auschwitz” “Surviving Auschwitz: Children of the Shoah” by WSGVU is a documentary that follows two Holocaust survivors as they visit their hometown and concentration camps.
• The Extent of the Holocaust as a Christian Problem The events of the Holocaust are considered a regrettable lapse in judgment on the part of the German Christian population and should be remembered to prevent such events.
• Holocaust and the United States To the most basic facts, the holocaust saw the death of approximately eleven million people, six million of these being Jews.
• The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust Comparing the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide the latter is much simpler in terms of cause, method, and outcome. The Holocaust is the direct result of anti-Semitism.
• Third Reich and Holocaust Commemoration The commemoration of the Third Reich and the holocaust through negative publicity like in Goldhaggen and crimes of the Wehrmacht gives the world a chance to ridicule the country.
• Facts of the Holocaust Holocaust was one of the most terrible events in history if the world marked by extreme violence and hostility.
• American Influence on Stopping Holocaust Had America been involved early and acted accordingly, millions of Jews could have been saved from the Holocaust.
• Holocaust and Genocide Analysis The ideology provided by Nazi underlined the descent of the German people from the Aryan race and rejected all other nations.
• Holocaust in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” Film Among hundreds of historical films on the matter, to my mind, “The boy in the striped pajamas” depicts the horror of the Holocaust most effectively.
• US Holocaust Memorial and American Indian Museums In this paper, I will evaluate the National Museum of the American Indian and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• Holocaust in “Night” Novel by Elie Wiesel While exterminating Jews, the Nazis were also trying to humiliate the ‘chosen people’ in every way possible. Wiesel’s book Night illustrates the validity of this suggestion.
• Holocaust Denial and Antisemitism Ideas Antisemitism has existed for centuries and taken different forms. This is a very dangerous phenomenon as it often resulted in cruel pogroms and even legal persecutions.
• “Night” a Book by Elie Wiesel about Holocaust Literature Analysis Night is a book written by Elie Wiesel that focuses on his experiences while imprisoned in one of the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust.
• Night by Elie Wiesel: A Memoir About the Holocaust Experiences Night by Elie Wiesel describes the little boy Eliezer. In his teens, Eliezer is a perfect embodiment of a child growing up in a perfect society.
• The Rwandan Genocide as One of the Devastating Genocides Since the Holocaust The historic Rwandan Genocide, organized by Hutu hardliners, resulted in the merciless murder of approximately one million individuals after a three months rampage in 1994.
• Environmental Studies: The Global Warming Holocaust Global climate change is a social issue that has captured the imagination of the world’s population. This issue is discussed in mass media and social media platforms.
• Concentration Camps During the Holocaust
• Saving Jews From the Holocaust Examined in Terms of Cognitive Dissonance Theories
• Nazi Beliefs and the Holocaust
• Holocaust Survivor Bewilderment and Anger
• Life During the Holocaust in the Eyes of Jean Amery
• Comparing Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin During the Holocaust
• Christian Churches Should Have Opposed the Nazi Holocaust
• Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Asian Genocide
• Stolen Art Literature and Music of the Holocaust
• German Anti-Semitism Was Responsible for the Holocaust
• Political Ideology and Other Factors Leading to the Holocaust
• Dehumanization During the Holocaust and Iranian Revolution
• Holocaust and Its Sociopolitical Causes
• American Foreign Policy During the Holocaust
• Moral Indifference, the Holocaust & the Directive for Genocide
• Croatia Before and After the Holocaust and World War II
• Death and Concentration Camps in the Holocaust History
• Nazi Propaganda During World War Two and the Holocaust
• Holocaust Victim’s Retribution and Reparations
• Nazi Germany and Virginia Holocaust Museum
• Medical Experiments During the Holocaust
• Pre Nazi Holocaust and the Civil War
• Holocaust and Bosnian Genocide Comparisons
• German Battalion 101’s Role in Perpetuating the Holocaust
• Hypothesis Concerning Holocaust Presented by David Cole
• Emotional Changes During the Holocaust
• Jewish Resistance During WWII and the Holocaust
• Holocaust Bystanders: Placing the Blame on Surrounding Citizens and Allied Nations
• Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
• Japanese Internment Camps and Holocaust Concentration Camps
• Holocaust and the Response of the American Catholic Church
• Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust
• Holocaust Denial Political Agenda
• Nuclear Holocaust United States
• Advancing the Individual’s Knowledge of the Holocaust
• Holocaust: Monuments, Memorials, and Public Demonstrations
• Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Holocaust
• Challenges Facing the Nazis and Other Jews in the Holocaust
• Holocaust Survivor Testimonies: Time, Methodology, and Memory
• American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
• How Did the Holocaust Affect the Development of Military Literature?
• How Did the Native American Removal Compared to the Holocaust?
• How Did the Nazis Use Propaganda During the Holocaust?
• How Ordinary Germans and Their Foreign Allies Willingly Participated in the Holocaust?
• How the Holocaust Affected It’s Jewish Victims?
• Were German Citizens Aware of the Holocaust?
• What Did the Holocaust and Japanese Relocation Act Have in Similarities?
• What Theological Questions Relevant to the Study of Judaism Are Raised by the Holocaust?
• What Was the Involvement of Ordinary Germans in the Holocaust?
• Why Germans Scientist, Engineers and Doctors Asked To Participate in the Holocaust?
• Why Should Future Generations Know About the Holocaust?
• Were the Jehovah Witnesses Really Affected by the Holocaust?
• Was German “Eliminationist Antisemitism” Responsible for the Holocaust?
• What Is Meant by Term the Holocaust Industry?
• Why Does God Permit Tragic Events Like the Holocaust Terrorist Attacks?
• Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?
• What Is the Environmental History of the Holocaust?
• Why Did the World Keep Silent During the Holocaust?
• What Is the Treatment of the Holocaust in High School History Textbooks?
• What Is the Culpability of Accounting in Perpetuating the Holocaust?
• Did Gender Matter During the Holocaust?
• What Are the Reflections on the Historiography of the Holocaust?
• Can There Be a Political Science of the Holocaust?
• How Did Holocaust Show the Problems of Historical Representation?
• Why the Holocaust Does Not Matter to Estonians?
• Bystanders during the Holocaust: should they be morally responsible for not intervening?
• Did the Nuremberg trials achieve justice for Holocaust victims?
• Should teaching the history of the Holocaust be mandatory in schools?
• Should Holocaust denial be legally punishable?
• Does the Holocaust illustrate the dangers of unchecked government power?
• Should Holocaust restitution claims be limited to a specific timeframe?
• The Holocaust and the problem of evil: does this genocide contradict the existence of a benevolent God?
• Should non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust be commemorated equally to Jewish victims?
• Should Holocaust museums adopt a truthful or sensitive approach to showing Holocaust atrocities?
• Is it justifiable for Holocaust victims to seek financial restitution from companies collaborating with Nazis?
• The Holocaust denial: the motivations behind it and its consequences.
• What were the motivations of people participating in the Holocaust genocide?
• The impact of the Holocaust survivors’ testimonies on understanding the history.
• The role of the Holocaust in countering modern hate speech and prejudice.
• Similarities and differences between the Holocaust and other genocides.
• How did the Nazi propaganda incite violence during the Holocaust?
• Evaluating the effectiveness of resistance movements during the Holocaust.
• The psychological effects of the Holocaust on survivors.
• Children’s experiences of separation and survival during the Holocaust.
• Non-Jewish people’s rescue efforts during the Holocaust.
• The ethical challenges involved in the artistic representation of the Holocaust.
• The role of international law in preventing genocide after the Holocaust.
• Beyond Auschwitz: lesser-known Holocaust concentration camps.
• How is the Holocaust remembered and commemorated today?
• The role of ordinary citizens in perpetrating the Holocaust.
• The Warsaw Ghetto uprising and its impact on the Jewish resistance.
• The portrayal of the Holocaust in literature and movies.
• The Holocaust and gender: unique experiences of male and female victims.
• Challenges that followed the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.
• The effects of the Holocaust on the victims’ descendants.

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The Holocaust

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 11, 2023 | Original: October 14, 2009

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, Romani people, the intellectually disabled, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The word “holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition during World War II, with mass killing centers in concentration camps. About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.

Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler . Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .

The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf ” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer , becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. 

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

HISTORY Vault: Third Reich: The Rise

Rare and never-before-seen amateur films offer a unique perspective on the rise of Nazi Germany from Germans who experienced it. How were millions of people so vulnerable to fascism?

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland , starting World War II . German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution ) to “the Jewish question.”

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide . Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz , the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum . What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums . Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe . Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations .

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World History Project - Origins to the Present

Course: world history project - origins to the present   >   unit 7.

• BEFORE YOU WATCH: The Fallen of World War II
• WATCH: The Fallen of World War II
• READ: The Second World War
• READ: Economics in the Second World War
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: World War II
• WATCH: World War II

READ: The Holocaust

• READ: Nuclear Weapons
• READ: Thirty Years of Continuous War
• World War 2

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Second read: key ideas and understanding content.

• In what ways did the Nazis kill their victims?
• What ideas did the Nazis use to create hostility towards Jewish people?
• What are some early ways in which the Nazis restricted Jewish rights?
• Why were Jewish pregnant women, children, and mothers particularly targeted for gassing?
• According to the author, many enslaved Jews worked in private companies and were killed by people who knew them. Why is this point important?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

• The author argues that, “We need to be on the lookout for when we, too, become “used to” the casual oppression of others, when our everyday compassion for people different from us disappears.” Can you think of examples from your own life or from your society of people getting “used to” bad treatment of others? Are there ways in which we can act to avoid repeating this kind of atrocity?

The Holocaust

A spiral of fascism, origins and first steps before the second world war, intensification after 1939, the “final solution”, who were the killers.

This kind of killing was very different from the industrial, relatively insulated, and impersonal mass murder in gas chambers, which distinguished the Holocaust from other genocides. Instead, it was intimate, face-to-face mass murder in towns where the victims, perpetrators, and bystanders often knew each other beforehand and where no one was entirely passive or could claim not to have seen, heard, or known about the killing.

• Eugenics is a pseudo-science (fake science) that claims you can create a better race of people by preventing the reproduction of people you believe are inferior due to race, ability, sexuality, or other reasons.

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In the Shadow of the Holocaust

By Masha Gessen

Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures are the least of it. The memorials that sneak up on you—the monument to burned books, which is literally underground, and the thousands of Stolpersteine , or “stumbling stones,” built into sidewalks to commemorate individual Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, mentally ill people, and others murdered by the Nazis—reveal the pervasiveness of the evils once committed in this place. In early November, when I was walking to a friend’s house in the city, I happened upon the information stand that marks the site of Hitler’s bunker. I had done so many times before. It looks like a neighborhood bulletin board, but it tells the story of the Führer’s final days.

In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, when many of these memorials were conceived and installed, I visited Berlin often. It was exhilarating to watch memory culture take shape. Here was a country, or at least a city, that was doing what most cultures cannot: looking at its own crimes, its own worst self. But, at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way. This is true in the physical, visual sense. Many of the memorials use glass: the Reichstag, a building nearly destroyed during the Nazi era and rebuilt half a century later, is now topped by a glass dome; the burned-books memorial lives under glass; glass partitions and glass panes put order to the stunning, once haphazard collection called “Topography of Terror.” As Candice Breitz, a South African Jewish artist who lives in Berlin, told me, “The good intentions that came into play in the nineteen-eighties have, too often, solidified into dogma.”

Podcast: The Political Scene Masha Gessen talks with Tyler Foggatt.

Among the few spaces where memory representation is not set in apparent permanence are a couple of the galleries in the new building of the Jewish Museum, which was completed in 1999. When I visited in early November, a gallery on the ground floor was showing a video installation called “Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres.” The video was set in Kibbutz Be’eri , the community where, on October 7th, Hamas killed more than ninety people—almost one in ten residents—during its attack on Israel, which ultimately claimed more than twelve hundred lives. In the video, Be’eri residents take turns reciting the lines of a poem by one of the community’s members, the poet Anadad Eldan: “. . . from the swamp between the ribs / she surfaced who had submerged in you / and you are constrained not shouting / hunting for the forms that scamper outside.” The video, by the Berlin-based Israeli artists Nir Evron and Omer Krieger, was completed nine years ago. It begins with an aerial view of the area, the Gaza Strip visible, then slowly zooms in on the houses of the kibbutz, some of which looked like bunkers. I am not sure what the artists and the poet had initially meant to convey; now the installation looked like a work of mourning for Be’eri. (Eldan, who is nearly a hundred years old, survived the Hamas attack.)

Down the hallway was one of the spaces that the architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed the museum, called “voids”—shafts of air that pierce the building, symbolizing the absence of Jews in Germany through generations. There, an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, titled “Fallen Leaves,” consists of more than ten thousand rounds of iron with eyes and mouths cut into them, like casts of children’s drawings of screaming faces. When you walk on the faces, they clank, like shackles, or like the bolt handle of a rifle. Kadishman dedicated the work to victims of the Holocaust and other innocent victims of war and violence. I don’t know what Kadishman, who died in 2015, would have said about the current conflict. But, after I walked from the haunting video of Kibbutz Be’eri to the clanking iron faces, I thought of the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas. Then I thought that, if I were to state this publicly in Germany, I might get in trouble.

On November 9th, to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Star of David and the phrase “ Nie Wieder Ist Jetzt! ”—“Never Again Is Now!”—was projected in white and blue on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. That day, the Bundestag was considering a proposal titled “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility: Protecting Jewish Life in Germany,” which contained more than fifty measures intended to combat antisemitism in Germany, including deporting immigrants who commit antisemitic crimes; stepping up activities directed against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement; supporting Jewish artists “whose work is critical of antisemitism”; implementing a particular definition of antisemitism in funding and policing decisions; and beefing up coöperation between the German and the Israeli armed forces. In earlier remarks, the German Vice-Chancellor, Robert Habeck, who is a member of the Green Party, said that Muslims in Germany should “clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as not to undermine their own right to tolerance.”

Germany has long regulated the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered and discussed. In 2008, when then Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke before the Knesset, on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, she emphasized Germany’s special responsibility not only for preserving the memory of the Holocaust as a unique historical atrocity but also for the security of Israel. This, she went on, was part of Germany’s Staatsräson —the reason for the existence of the state. The sentiment has since been repeated in Germany seemingly every time the topic of Israel, Jews, or antisemitism arises, including in Habeck’s remarks. “The phrase ‘Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson ’ has never been an empty phrase,” he said. “And it must not become one.”

At the same time, an obscure yet strangely consequential debate on what constitutes antisemitism has taken place. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization, adopted the following definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This definition was accompanied by eleven examples, which began with the obvious—calling for or justifying the killing of Jews—but also included “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

This definition had no legal force, but it has had extraordinary influence. Twenty-five E.U. member states and the U.S. State Department have endorsed or adopted the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing for the withholding of federal funds from colleges where students are not protected from antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A. On December 5th of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution condemning antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A.; it was proposed by two Jewish Republican representatives and opposed by several prominent Jewish Democrats, including New York’s Jerry Nadler.

In 2020, a group of academics proposed an alternative definition of antisemitism, which they called the Jerusalem Declaration . It defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)” and provides examples that help distinguish anti-Israel statements and actions from antisemitic ones. But although some of the preëminent scholars of the Holocaust participated in drafting the declaration, it has barely made a dent in the growing influence of the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2021, the European Commission published a handbook “for the practical use” of the I.H.R.A. definition, which recommended, among other things, using the definition in training law-enforcement officers to recognize hate crimes, and creating the position of state attorney, or coördinator or commissioner for antisemitism.

Germany had already implemented this particular recommendation. In 2018, the country created the Office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism, a vast bureaucracy that includes commissioners at the state and local level, some of whom work out of prosecutors’ offices or police precincts. Since then, Germany has reported an almost uninterrupted rise in the number of antisemitic incidents: more than two thousand in 2019, more than three thousand in 2021, and, according to one monitoring group, a shocking nine hundred and ninety-four incidents in the month following the Hamas attack. But the statistics mix what Germans call Israelbezogener Antisemitismus —Israel-related antisemitism, such as instances of criticism of Israeli government policies—with violent attacks, such as an attempted shooting at a synagogue, in Halle, in 2019, which killed two bystanders; shots fired at a former rabbi’s house, in Essen, in 2022; and two Molotov cocktails thrown at a Berlin synagogue this fall. The number of incidents involving violence has, in fact, remained relatively steady, and has not increased following the Hamas attack.

There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the B.D.S. movement, as was the South African Jewish photographer Adam Broomberg.

In 2019, the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning B.D.S. as antisemitic and recommending that state funding be withheld from events and institutions connected to B.D.S. The history of the resolution is telling. A version was originally introduced by the AfD, the radical-right ethnonationalist and Euroskeptic party then relatively new to the German parliament. Mainstream politicians rejected the resolution because it came from the AfD, but, apparently fearful of being seen as failing to fight antisemitism, immediately introduced a similar one of their own. The resolution was unbeatable because it linked B.D.S. to “the most terrible phase of German history.” For the AfD, whose leaders have made openly antisemitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era nationalist language, the spectre of antisemitism is a perfect, cynically wielded political instrument, both a ticket to the political mainstream and a weapon that can be used against Muslim immigrants.

The B.D.S. movement, which is inspired by the boycott movement against South African apartheid, seeks to use economic pressure to secure equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, end the occupation, and promote the return of Palestinian refugees. Many people find the B.D.S. movement problematic because it does not affirm the right of the Israeli state to exist—and, indeed, some B.D.S. supporters envision a total undoing of the Zionist project. Still, one could argue that associating a nonviolent boycott movement, whose supporters have explicitly positioned it as an alternative to armed struggle, with the Holocaust is the very definition of Holocaust relativism. But, according to the logic of German memory policy, because B.D.S. is directed against Jews—although many of the movement’s supporters are also Jewish—it is antisemitic. One could also argue that the inherent conflation of Jews with the state of Israel is antisemitic, even that it meets the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism. And, given the AfD’s involvement and the pattern of the resolution being used largely against Jews and people of color, one might think that this argument would gain traction. One would be wrong.

The German Basic Law, unlike the U.S. Constitution but like the constitutions of many other European countries, has not been interpreted to provide an absolute guarantee of freedom of speech. It does, however, promise freedom of expression not only in the press but in the arts and sciences, research, and teaching. It’s possible that, if the B.D.S. resolution became law, it would be deemed unconstitutional. But it has not been tested in this way. Part of what has made the resolution peculiarly powerful is the German state’s customary generosity: almost all museums, exhibits, conferences, festivals, and other cultural events receive funding from the federal, state, or local government. “It has created a McCarthyist environment,” Candice Breitz, the artist, told me. “Whenever we want to invite someone, they”—meaning whatever government agency may be funding an event—“Google their name with ‘B.D.S.,’ ‘Israel,’ ‘apartheid.’ ”

A couple of years ago, Breitz, whose art deals with issues of race and identity, and Michael Rothberg, who holds a Holocaust studies chair at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to organize a symposium on German Holocaust memory, called “We Need to Talk.” After months of preparations, they had their state funding pulled, likely because the program included a panel connecting Auschwitz and the genocide of the Herero and the Nama people carried out between 1904 and 1908 by German colonizers in what is now Namibia. “Some of the techniques of the Shoah were developed then,” Breitz said. “But you are not allowed to speak about German colonialism and the Shoah in the same breath because it is a ‘levelling.’ ”

The insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust and the centrality of Germany’s commitment to reckoning with it are two sides of the same coin: they position the Holocaust as an event that Germans must always remember and mention but don’t have to fear repeating, because it is unlike anything else that’s ever happened or will happen. The German historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, who heads the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, in Berlin, has argued that unified Germany turned the reckoning with the Holocaust into its national idea, and as a result “any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself, through comparisons with other German crimes or other genocides, can [be] and is being perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation-state.” Perhaps that’s the meaning of “Never again is now.”

Some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust spent the rest of their lives trying to tell the world that the horror, while uniquely deadly, should not be seen as an aberration. That the Holocaust happened meant that it was possible—and remains possible. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive, systematic, and efficient nature of the Holocaust was a function of modernity—that, although it was by no means predetermined, it fell in line with other inventions of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno studied what makes people inclined to follow authoritarian leaders and sought a moral principle that would prevent another Auschwitz.

In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.”

The occasion for Arendt’s letter was a planned visit to the United States by the party’s leader, Menachem Begin. Albert Einstein, another German Jew who fled the Nazis, added his signature. Thirty years later, Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. Another half century later, in Berlin, the philosopher Susan Neiman, who leads a research institute named for Einstein, spoke at the opening of a conference called “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” She suggested that she might face repercussions for challenging the ways in which Germany now wields its memory culture. Neiman is an Israeli citizen and a scholar of memory and morals. One of her books is called “ Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil .” In the past couple of years, Neiman said, memory culture had “gone haywire.”

Germany’s anti-B.D.S. resolution, for example, has had a distinct chilling effect on the country’s cultural sphere. The city of Aachen took back a ten-thousand-euro prize it had awarded to the Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad; the city of Dortmund and the jury for the fifteen-thousand-euro Nelly Sachs Prize similarly rescinded the honor that they had bestowed on the British-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie. The Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe had his invitation to a major festival questioned after the federal antisemitism commissioner accused him of supporting B.D.S. and “relativizing the Holocaust.” (Mbembe has said that he is not connected with the boycott movement; the festival itself was cancelled because of COVID .) The director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Peter Schäfer, resigned in 2019 after being accused of supporting B.D.S.—he did not, in fact, support the boycott movement, but the museum had posted a link, on Twitter, to a newspaper article that included criticism of the resolution. The office of Benjamin Netanyahu had also asked Merkel to cut the museum’s funding because, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s opinion, its exhibition on Jerusalem paid too much attention to the city’s Muslims. (Germany’s B.D.S. resolution may be unique in its impact but not in its content: a majority of U.S. states now have laws on the books that equate the boycott with antisemitism and withhold state funding from people and institutions that support it.)

After the “We Need to Talk” symposium was cancelled, Breitz and Rothberg regrouped and came up with a proposal for a symposium called “We Still Need to Talk.” The list of speakers was squeaky clean. A government entity vetted everyone and agreed to fund the gathering. It was scheduled for early December. Then Hamas attacked Israel . “We knew that after that every German politician would see it as extremely risky to be connected with an event that had Palestinian speakers or the word ‘apartheid,’ ” Breitz said. On October 17th, Breitz learned that funding had been pulled. Meanwhile, all over Germany, police were cracking down on demonstrations that call for a ceasefire in Gaza or manifest support for Palestinians. Instead of a symposium, Breitz and several others organized a protest. They called it “We Still Still Still Still Need to Talk.” About an hour into the gathering, police quietly cut through the crowd to confiscate a cardboard poster that read “From the River to the Sea, We Demand Equality.” The person who had brought the poster was a Jewish Israeli woman.

The “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility” proposal has since languished in committee. Still, the performative battle against antisemitism kept ramping up. In November, the planning of Documenta, one of the art world’s most important shows, was thrown into disarray after the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung dug up a petition that a member of the artistic organizing committee, Ranjit Hoskote, had signed in 2019. The petition, written to protest a planned event on Zionism and Hindutva in Hoskote’s home town of Mumbai, denounced Zionism as “a racist ideology calling for a settler-colonial, apartheid state where non-Jews have unequal rights, and in practice, has been premised on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on it under the heading “Antisemitism.” Hoskote resigned and the rest of the committee followed suit. A week later, Breitz read in a newspaper that a museum in Saarland had cancelled an exhibit of hers, which had been planned for 2024, “in view of the media coverage about the artist in connection with her controversial statements in the context of Hamas’ war of aggression against the state of Israel.”

This November, I left Berlin to travel to Kyiv, traversing, by train, Poland and then Ukraine. This is as good a place as any to say a few things about my relationship to the Jewish history of these lands. Many American Jews go to Poland to visit what little, if anything, is left of the old Jewish quarters, to eat food reconstructed according to recipes left by long-extinguished families, and to go on tours of Jewish history, Jewish ghettos, and Nazi concentration camps. I am closer to this history. I grew up in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-seventies, in the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust, because only a part of my family had survived it and because Soviet censors suppressed any public mention of it. When, around the age of nine, I learned that some Nazi war criminals were still on the loose, I stopped sleeping. I imagined one of them climbing in through our fifth-floor balcony to snatch me.

During summers, our cousin Anna and her sons would visit from Warsaw. Her parents had decided to kill themselves after the Warsaw Ghetto burned down. Anna’s father threw himself in front of a train. Anna’s mother tied the three-year-old Anna to her waist with a shawl and jumped into a river. They were plucked out of the water by a Polish man, and survived the war by hiding in the countryside. I knew the story, but I wasn’t allowed to mention it. Anna was an adult when she learned that she was a Holocaust survivor, and she waited to tell her own kids, who were around my age. The first time I went to Poland, in the nineteen-nineties, was to research the fate of my great-grandfather, who spent nearly three years in the Białystok Ghetto before being killed in Majdanek.

The Holocaust memory wars in Poland have run in parallel with Germany’s. The ideas being battled out in the two countries are different, but one consistent feature is the involvement of right-wing politicians in conjunction with the state of Israel. As in Germany, the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands saw ambitious memorialization efforts, both national and local, that broke through the silence of the Soviet years. Poles built museums and monuments that commemorated the Jews killed in the Holocaust—which claimed half of its victims in Nazi-occupied Poland—and the Jewish culture that was lost with them. Then the backlash came. It coincided with the rise to power of the right-wing, illiberal Law and Justice Party, in 2015. Poles now wanted a version of history in which they were victims of the Nazi occupation alongside the Jews, whom they tried to protect from the Nazis.

This was not true: instances of Poles risking their lives to save Jews from the Germans, as in the case of my cousin Anna, were exceedingly rare, while the opposite—entire communities or structures of the pre-occupation Polish state, such as the police or city offices, carrying out the mass murder of Jews—was common. But historians who studied the Poles’ role in the Holocaust came under attack . The Polish-born Princeton historian Jan Tomasz Gross was interrogated and threatened with prosecution for writing that Poles killed more Polish Jews than Germans. The Polish authorities hounded him even after he retired. The government squeezed Dariusz Stola, the head of POLIN , Warsaw’s innovative museum of Polish Jewish history, out of his post. The historians Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking were dragged into court for writing that the mayor of a Polish village had been a collaborator in the Holocaust.

When I wrote about Grabowski and Engleking’s case, I received some of the scariest death threats of my life. (I’ve been sent a lot of death threats; most are forgettable.) One, sent to a work e-mail address, read, “If you keep writing lies about Poland and the Poles, I will deliver these bullets to your body. See the attachment! Five of them in every kneecap, so you won’t walk again. But if you continue to spread your Jewish hatred, I will deliver next 5 bullets in your pussy. The third step you won’t notice. But don’t worry, I’m not visiting you next week or eight weeks, I’ll be back when you forget this e-mail, maybe in 5 years. You’re on my list. . . .” The attachment was a picture of two shiny bullets in the palm of a hand. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, headed by a government appointee, tweeted a condemnation of my article, as did the account of the World Jewish Congress. A few months later, a speaking invitation to a university fell through because, the university told my speaking agent, it had emerged that I might be an antisemite.

Throughout the Polish Holocaust-memory wars, Israel maintained friendly relations with Poland. In 2018, Netanyahu and the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, issued a joint statement against “actions aimed at blaming Poland or the Polish nation as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators of different nations.” The statement asserted, falsely, that “structures of the Polish underground state supervised by the Polish government-in-exile created a mechanism of systematic help and support to Jewish people.” Netanyahu was building alliances with the illiberal governments of Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, in part to prevent an anti-occupation consensus from solidifying in the European Union. For this, he was willing to lie about the Holocaust.

Each year, tens of thousands of Israeli teen-agers travel to the Auschwitz museum before graduating from high school (though last year the trips were called off over security issues and the Polish government’s growing insistence that Poles’ involvement in the Holocaust be written out of history). It is a powerful, identity-forming trip that comes just a year or two before young Israelis join the military. Noam Chayut, a founder of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group in Israel, has written of his own high-school trip, which took place in the late nineteen-nineties, “Now, in Poland, as a high-school adolescent, I began to sense belonging, self-love, power and pride, and the desire to contribute, to live and be strong, so strong that no one would ever try to hurt me.”

Chayut took this feeling into the I.D.F., which posted him to the occupied West Bank. One day he was putting up property-confiscation notices. A group of children was playing nearby. Chayut flashed what he considered a kind and non-threatening smile at a little girl. The rest of the children scampered off, but the girl froze, terrified, until she, too, ran away. Later, when Chayut published a book about the transformation this encounter precipitated, he wrote that he wasn’t sure why it was this girl: “After all, there was also the shackled kid in the Jeep and the girl whose family home we had broken into late at night to remove her mother and aunt. And there were plenty of children, hundreds of them, screaming and crying as we rummaged through their rooms and their things. And there was the child from Jenin whose wall we blasted with an explosive charge that blew a hole just a few centimeters from his head. Miraculously, he was uninjured, but I’m sure his hearing and his mind were badly impaired.” But in the eyes of that girl, on that day, Chayut saw a reflection of annihilatory evil, the kind that he had been taught existed, but only between 1933 and 1945, and only where the Nazis ruled. Chayut called his book “ The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust .”

I took the train from the Polish border to Kyiv. Nearly thirty-four thousand Jews were shot at Babyn Yar, a giant ravine on the outskirts of the city, in just thirty-six hours in September, 1941. Tens of thousands more people died there before the war was over. This was what is now known as the Holocaust by bullets. Many of the countries in which these massacres took place—the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine—were re-colonized by the Soviet Union following the Second World War. Dissidents and Jewish cultural activists risked their freedom to maintain a memory of these tragedies, to collect testimony and names, and, where possible, to clean up and protect the sites themselves. After the fall of the Soviet Union, memorialization projects accompanied efforts to join the European Union. “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, “ Postwar .”

In the Rumbula forest, outside of Riga, for example, where some twenty-five thousand Jews were murdered in 1941, a memorial was unveiled in 2002, two years before Latvia was admitted to the E.U. A serious effort to commemorate Babyn Yar coalesced after the 2014 revolution that set Ukraine on an aspirational path to the E.U. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, in February, 2022, several smaller structures had been completed and ambitious plans for a larger museum complex were in place. With the invasion, construction halted. One week into the full-scale war, a Russian missile hit directly next to the memorial complex, killing at least four people. Since then, some of the people associated with the project have reconstituted themselves as a team of war-crimes investigators.

The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has waged an earnest campaign to win Israeli support for Ukraine. In March, 2022, he delivered a speech to the Knesset, in which he didn’t stress his own Jewish heritage but focussed on the inextricable historical connection between Jews and Ukrainians. He drew unambiguous parallels between the Putin regime and the Nazi Party. He even claimed that eighty years ago Ukrainians rescued Jews. (As with Poland, any claim that such aid was widespread is false.) But what worked for the right-wing government of Poland did not work for the pro-Europe President of Ukraine. Israel has not given Ukraine the help it has begged for in its war against Russia, a country that openly supports Hamas and Hezbollah.

Still, both before and after the October 7th attack, the phrase I heard in Ukraine possibly more than any other was “We need to be like Israel.” Politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and ordinary Ukrainians identify with the story Israel tells about itself, that of a tiny but mighty island of democracy standing strong against enemies who surround it. Some Ukrainian left-wing intellectuals have argued that Ukraine, which is fighting an anti-colonial war against an occupying power, should see its reflection in Palestine, not Israel. These voices are marginal and most often belong to young Ukrainians who are studying or have studied abroad. Following the Hamas attack, Zelensky wanted to rush to Israel as a show of support and unity between Israel and Ukraine. Israeli authorities seem to have other ideas—the visit has not happened.

While Ukraine has been unsuccessfully trying to get Israel to acknowledge that Russia’s invasion resembles Nazi Germany’s genocidal aggression, Moscow has built a propaganda universe around portraying Zelensky’s government, the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainian people as Nazis. The Second World War is the central event of Russia’s historical myth. During Vladimir Putin’s reign, as the last of the people who lived through the war have been dying, commemorative events have turned into carnivals that celebrate Russian victimhood. The U.S.S.R. lost at least twenty-seven million people in that war, a disproportionate number of them Ukrainians. The Soviet Union and Russia have fought in wars almost continuously since 1945, but the word “war” is still synonymous with the Second World War and the word “enemy” is used interchangeably with “fascist” and “Nazi.” This made it that much easier for Putin, in declaring a new war, to brand Ukrainians as Nazis.

Netanyahu has compared the Hamas murders at the music festival to the Holocaust by bullets. This comparison, picked up and recirculated by world leaders, including President Biden, serves to bolster Israel’s case for inflicting collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Similarly, when Putin says “Nazi” or “fascist,” he means that the Ukrainian government is so dangerous that Russia is justified in carpet-bombing and laying siege to Ukrainian cities and killing Ukrainian civilians. There are significant differences, of course: Russia’s claims that Ukraine attacked it first, and its portrayals of the Ukrainian government as fascist, are false; Hamas, on the other hand, is a tyrannical power that attacked Israel and committed atrocities that we cannot yet fully comprehend. But do these differences matter when the case being made is for killing children?

In the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when its troops were occupying the western suburbs of Kyiv, the director of Kyiv’s museum of the Second World War, Yurii Savchuk, was living at the museum and rethinking the core exhibit. One day after the Ukrainian military drove the Russians out of the Kyiv region, he met with the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and got permission to start collecting artifacts. Savchuk and his staff went to Bucha, Irpin, and other towns and cities that had just been “deoccupied,” as Ukrainians have taken to saying, and interviewed people who had not yet told their stories. “This was before the exhumations and the reburials,” Savchuk told me. “We saw the true face of war, with all its emotions. The fear, the terror, was in the atmosphere, and we absorbed it with the air.”

In May, 2022, the museum opened a new exhibit, titled “Ukraine – Crucifixion.” It begins with a display of Russian soldiers’ boots, which Savchuk’s team had collected. It’s an odd reversal: both the Auschwitz museum and the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., have displayed hundreds or thousands of shoes that belonged to victims of the Holocaust. They convey the scale of loss, even as they show only a tiny fraction of it. The display in Kyiv shows the scale of the menace. The boots are arranged on the floor of the museum in the pattern of a five-pointed star, the symbol of the Red Army that has become as sinister in Ukraine as the swastika. In September, Kyiv removed five-pointed stars from a monument to the Second World War in what used to be called Victory Square—it’s been renamed because the very word “Victory” connotes Russia’s celebration in what it still calls the Great Patriotic War. The city also changed the dates on the monument, from “1941-1945”—the years of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany—to “1939-1945.” Correcting memory one monument at a time.

In 1954, an Israeli court heard a libel case involving a Hungarian Jew named Israel Kastner. A decade earlier, when Germany occupied Hungary and belatedly rushed to implement the mass murder of its Jews, Kastner, as a leader of the Jewish community, entered into negotiations with Adolf Eichmann himself. Kastner proposed to buy the lives of Hungary’s Jews with ten thousand trucks. When this failed, he negotiated to save sixteen hundred and eighty-five people by transporting them by chartered train to Switzerland. Hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews were loaded onto trains to death camps. A Hungarian Jewish survivor had publicly accused Kastner of having collaborated with the Germans. Kastner sued for libel and, in effect, found himself on trial. The judge concluded that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil.”

The charge of collaboration against Kastner rested on the allegation that he had failed to tell people that they were going to their deaths. His accusers argued that, had he warned the deportees, they would have rebelled, not gone to the death camps like sheep to slaughter. The trial has been read as the beginning of a discursive standoff in which the Israeli right argues for preëmptive violence and sees the left as willfully defenseless. By the time of the trial, Kastner was a left-wing politician; his accuser was a right-wing activist.

Seven years later, the judge who had presided over the Kastner libel trial was one of the three judges in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here was the devil himself. The prosecution argued that Eichmann represented but one iteration of the eternal threat to the Jews. The trial helped to solidify the narrative that, to prevent annihilation, Jews should be prepared to use force preëmptively. Arendt, reporting on the trial , would have none of this. Her phrase “the banality of evil” elicited perhaps the original accusations, levelled against a Jew, of trivializing the Holocaust. She wasn’t. But she saw that Eichmann was no devil, that perhaps the devil didn’t exist. She had reasoned that there was no such thing as radical evil, that evil was always ordinary even when it was extreme—something “born in the gutter,” as she put it later, something of “utter shallowness.”

Arendt also took issue with the prosecution’s story that Jews were the victims of, as she put it, “a historical principle stretching from Pharaoh to Haman—the victim of a metaphysical principle.” This story, rooted in the Biblical legend of Amalek, a people of the Negev Desert who repeatedly fought the ancient Israelites, holds that every generation of Jews faces its own Amalek. I learned this story as a teen-ager; it was the first Torah lesson I ever received, taught by a rabbi who gathered the kids in a suburb of Rome where Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union lived while waiting for their papers to enter the United States, Canada, or Australia. In this story, as told by the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust is a predetermined event, part of Jewish history—and only Jewish history. The Jews, in this version, always have a well-justified fear of annihilation. Indeed, they can survive only if they act as though annihilation were imminent.

When I first learned the legend of Amalek, it made perfect sense to me. It described my knowledge of the world; it helped me connect my experience of getting teased and beaten up to my great-grandmother’s admonitions that using household Yiddish expressions in public was dangerous, to the unfathomable injustice of my grandfather and great-grandfather and scores of other relatives being killed before I was born. I was fourteen and lonely. I knew myself and my family to be victims, and the legend of Amalek imbued my sense of victimhood with meaning and a sense of community.

Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it—that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood—has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time. Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status, many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Conversely, in the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever.

For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.

The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.

From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away. In 1948, the year the state was created, an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv described the dire conditions—“old people so weak they were on the verge of death”; “a boy with two paralyzed legs”; “another boy whose hands were severed”—in which Palestinians, mostly women and children, departed the village of Tantura after Israeli troops occupied it: “One woman carried her child in one arm and with the other hand she held her elderly mother. The latter couldn’t keep up the pace, she yelled and begged her daughter to slow down, but the daughter did not consent. Finally the old lady collapsed onto the road and couldn’t move. The daughter pulled out her hair … lest she not make it on time. And worse than this was the association to Jewish mothers and grandmothers who lagged this way on the roads under the crop of murderers.” The journalist caught himself. “There is obviously no room for such a comparison,” he wrote. “This fate—they brought upon themselves.”

Jews took up arms in 1948 to claim land that was offered to them by a United Nations decision to partition what had been British-controlled Palestine. The Palestinians, supported by surrounding Arab states, did not accept the partition and Israel’s declaration of independence. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the proto-Israeli state, starting what Israel now calls the War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. Those who did not were driven out of their villages by Israeli forces. Most of them were never able to return. The Palestinians remember 1948 as the Nakba, a word that means “catastrophe” in Arabic, just as Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. That the comparison is unavoidable has compelled many Israelis to assert that, unlike the Jews, Palestinians brought their catastrophe on themselves.

The day I arrived in Kyiv, someone handed me a thick book. It was the first academic study of Stepan Bandera to be published in Ukraine. Bandera is a Ukrainian hero: he fought against the Soviet regime; dozens of monuments to him have appeared since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. He ended up in Germany after the Second World War, led a partisan movement from exile, and died after being poisoned by a K.G.B. agent, in 1959. Bandera was also a committed fascist, an ideologue who wanted to build a totalitarian regime. These facts are detailed in the book, which has sold about twelve hundred copies. (Many bookstores have refused to carry it.) Russia makes gleeful use of Ukraine’s Bandera cult as evidence that Ukraine is a Nazi state. Ukrainians mostly respond by whitewashing Bandera’s legacy. It is ever so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea that someone could have been the enemy of your enemy and yet not a benevolent force. A victim and also a perpetrator. Or vice versa. ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described what Jan Tomasz Gross wrote. It also misstated when Anna’s parents decided to kill themselves and Anna’s age at the time of those events.

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Understanding the Causes of the Holocaust

This essay is about the causes of the Holocaust, examining the complex factors that led to this atrocity. It highlights the deep-rooted anti-Semitism in Europe, the socio-political climate of post-World War I Germany, and the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. The essay explains how economic hardship and political instability facilitated the Nazis’ ascent to power and their implementation of radical policies. It also discusses the legal mechanisms that stripped Jews of their rights and the widespread complicity of ordinary individuals. The essay underscores the importance of understanding these causes to prevent such horrors in the future.

How it works

The Holocaust, an unparalleled tragedy in the annals of human history, led to the systematic annihilation of six million Jews and countless other innocents by the Nazi regime during the tumultuous era of World War II. Unraveling the complex tapestry of causality behind the Holocaust entails a nuanced exploration of multifaceted factors, encompassing entrenched anti-Semitism, the socio-political landscape of post-World War I Germany, and the ascendancy of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi doctrine.

Anti-Semitic sentiments had permeated European societies for epochs, manifesting in myriad forms ranging from societal ostracism to brutal pogroms.

This protracted history of prejudice provided fertile ground for the Nazis to cultivate and exploit anti-Jewish animus. Jews became convenient scapegoats for economic woes and social upheavals, a phenomenon exacerbated during periods of crisis. The aftermath of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles left Germany mired in economic disarray and political tumult, fostering an environment ripe for the germination of extremist ideologies.

The emergence of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party marked a watershed moment in the orchestration of the Holocaust. Hitler’s fanatical fixation on racial purity and the purported supremacy of the Aryan race constituted the ideological bedrock of Nazism. The Nazis promulgated the notion of Jewish inferiority and their portrayal as a perilous adversary, necessitating their eradication for the preservation and sanctity of the German Volk. This doctrine was systematically propagated through propaganda, which dehumanized Jews and cast them as a malignant scourge upon society.

The socio-economic turbulence and political instability within the Weimar Republic further facilitated the meteoric rise of the Nazis. The cataclysmic Great Depression of the late 1920s wreaked havoc on the global economy, dealing a particularly devastating blow to Germany. Hyperinflation, rampant unemployment, and widespread destitution engendered a populace desperate for radical remedies. The Nazi Party, with its pledge to resurrect Germany’s former glory and provide employment, garnered substantial support. Upon attaining power, the Nazis swiftly moved to consolidate their authority, quash political opposition, and institute their radical agenda.

The machinations of the Holocaust were set into motion through a labyrinthine labyrinth of laws and decrees systematically stripping Jews of their liberties and entitlements. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, for instance, rendered Jews devoid of German citizenship and proscribed intermarriage or intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews. These statutes institutionalized racial discrimination and paved the way for more draconian measures. Additionally, the Nazis established a labyrinthine network of concentration camps, which eventually metamorphosed into extermination camps engineered for mass extermination.

A pivotal element was the complicity of myriad ordinary individuals who either actively participated in or passively acquiesced to the atrocities. This collusion spanned from direct involvement by Nazi functionaries and soldiers to the apathy or tacit endorsement of numerous German civilians and denizens of occupied territories. Diverse motives, including fear, indoctrination, opportunism, and anti-Semitic convictions, coalesced to engender the widespread collaboration and silence that facilitated the Holocaust.

The international response to the burgeoning menace of Nazism and the persecution of Jews proved woefully inadequate. Preceding the eruption of World War II, many nations, including the United States and Britain, evinced reluctance to harbor substantial numbers of Jewish refugees, leaving multitudes bereft of refuge. This dearth of intervention and succor for the victims further emboldened the Nazi regime in its genocidal designs.

In summation, the Holocaust was precipitated by a nexus of historical, social, political, and economic forces. Entrenched anti-Semitism, the socio-economic tumult of post-World War I Germany, the ascendance of Hitler and Nazi ideology, and the collusion of individuals and nations all played pivotal roles. Discerning these causative factors is imperative not only for comprehending the enormity of this cataclysm but also for averting the recurrence of such abominations. The Holocaust serves as an indelible testament to the catastrophic repercussions of intolerance, prejudice, and apathy in society.

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Holocaust Museums Debate What to Say About the Israel-Hamas War

Students are bringing up antisemitic tropes and asking survivors and docents: What is Palestine? Is there a genocide in Gaza?

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By Dana Goldstein and Marc Tracy

Dana Goldstein, who covers education, reported from Atlanta. Marc Tracy, who covers cultural institutions, reported from New York.

At a Holocaust museum in Atlanta, staff members had typically ended their tours by saying that many survivors of the death camps immigrated to Palestine.

But after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the guides noticed that some students would ask a simple but complicated question: Is this the Palestine that we’ve been hearing about?

So staff members at the museum, the Breman, made a few changes, according to Rabbi Joseph Prass, the museum’s education director. Now, docents explain to visitors that many Holocaust survivors found refuge in “the British Mandate of Palestine” or “the area that would become the country of Israel.”

Each year, roughly two dozen Holocaust museums in the United States teach millions of visitors — often students on field trips — about the Nazi genocide of six million Jews, a history that is fading from living memory.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel and the ensuing war, that mission has felt especially urgent, as the number of bias incidents against Jews has risen across the country.

The Israel-Hamas war has also forced museums to confront one of the most emotional and divisive issues within the Jewish community: how to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Many Holocaust museums include the story of Israel’s founding in 1948, depicting the country as a refuge for Jewish survivors. But they often do not mention, or address only in guarded terms, a subject that increasingly interests some visitors: the Nakba, Palestinians’ term for their displacement amid Israel’s founding.

“The question is always context,” said Debórah Dwork, a Holocaust historian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. And at these museums, she said, Israel’s founding is set in the context of the mass murder of Jews in Europe.

“The Nakba is not part of that context,” Ms. Dwork said. “It’s rarely treated, if at all.”

Many of the museums have a broader mission beyond the Holocaust: They want to raise awareness about prejudice, mass killings and human rights. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has created case studies of other atrocities, including the Ottoman genocide of Armenians, ethnic cleansing in the Ethiopian civil war and the Burmese killings of Rohingya Muslims, which the U.S. State Department considers to be a genocide.

In May, the Illinois Holocaust Museum opened a core exhibition called “Voices of Genocide,” highlighting the experiences of witnesses to mass killings in Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Guatemala.

And many museums have devoted attention to non-Jewish victims of the Nazis, like the Roma, L.G.B.T.Q. people and people with disabilities, as well as to U.S. civil rights abuses like Jim Crow laws and the internment of Japanese Americans.

Now, the museums must contend with the Israel-Hamas war, and the fact that all sides invoke the Holocaust to make their case. To supporters of Israel’s war effort, there is a direct line between the antisemitism that fueled the Holocaust and the ideology of Hamas, whose attack on Israel made Oct. 7 the deadliest day for Jews since the Nazi genocide.

Others, including many young museum visitors, have heard antiwar protesters’ claims equating the Israel military campaign with genocide. And they have been steeped in social media images that show tens of thousands of Palestinians killed and millions displaced from their homes. For them, no humanitarian crisis is more pressing.

Omer Bartov, a professor of history at Brown University and a scholar of genocide, said that in the current political climate, visitors will naturally have questions about how the museums see the war in Gaza and Israel.

“If you talk about equality, dignity, human rights as the lessons that we learned from the Holocaust, when an entire regime of international law was put into place, does that apply to everyone?” he said. “Or is the Jewish state exempt from that because of its past?”

Engaging with a New Generation

Some Holocaust museums have developed plans for how to handle questions related to the Israel-Hamas war.

If visitors raise the question of genocide, Rabbi Prass said, he and other museum speakers have developed a clear response: While the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is tragic, “The term genocide? We don’t feel this is an appropriate use of the term, given the topic we talk about. It doesn’t apply.”

Some museums point visitors to the text of the United Nations Genocide Convention, which does not define the term merely as the killing of civilians from a particular national, ethnic or religious group. It requires that the killings were committed with “intent to destroy” the group.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum — founded by Holocaust survivors in Skokie, outside Chicago — prepared an eight-page guide on the Israel-Hamas war to help volunteers answer questions. The document states that Hamas was the “aggressor”; that international legal scholars have not found the war to meet the criteria for genocide; that there is “nothing antisemitic” about supporting Palestinian statehood, but there is in supporting Hamas or in chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.”

“It’s natural that when people are processing what they’re seeing in the world, to ask questions about Israel and Gaza,” said Bernard Cherkasov, the museum’s chief executive.

He added, “The hostages not being released and the innocent Palestinians paying the ultimate price — that is a humanitarian crisis that needs to be acknowledged, no matter what labels we put on it.”

Andrew Hollinger, a spokesman for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, declined a request for an interview about how the museum was responding to the war and the claim of a genocide in Gaza. In a written statement, he said that “the museum’s primary role is educating the public about how and why the Holocaust happened, and the longstanding unchecked antisemitism that made it possible.”

Ruth Wisse, a scholar of Jewish literature and politics at Harvard, said Holocaust museums should respond to the moment by teaching students more about contemporary antisemitism, including on the left and in the Muslim world.

And museums should celebrate Israel, she said, and present its founding in 1948 at the “middle point” of their historical narrative, instead of at its culmination. This would allow the museums, she said, to depict Jewish self-determination, for the first time in two millenniums, as a potent contrast to the victimization of the Holocaust.

“If they do it that way, you would have kids who would understand the story of Israel,” she said. “They would understand its miraculous nature.”

Debating a Genocide’s Legacy

Since the Israel-Hamas war began, antisemitic images have sometimes crept into antiwar protest imagery. For instance, the star of David in the Israeli flag has sometimes been replaced by a swastika, and some pro-Palestinian activists have shared images that recall classic antisemitic propaganda , like the portrayal of the Jew as a hidden and manipulative puppet master.

And more students have mentioned antisemitic tropes they have heard, like claims that the media are controlled by Jews, according to Mallory Bubar, an education consultant for Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage.

In response, the museum published a guide to antisemitism for educators. It explains some basic facts about Jewish history — for example, that for centuries, governments limited the types of jobs Jews were allowed to do, helping to explain their prevalence as moneylenders. The guide sketches how antisemitism often takes the form of conspiracy theories about Jewish power.

But the guide, and many of the museums, do not address a question that has been fraught for decades, and has been central to the U.S. political debate over the war: At what point does anti-Israel protest veer into antisemitism? It has been a matter of fierce debate among Jews, especially between generations.

For instance, there is a divide over the phrase “never again,” long associated with remembering the Holocaust. The Nancy and David Wolf Holocaust and Humanity Center in Cincinnati has used the phrase “never again is now” to highlight the horror of Oct. 7 and what the museum has characterized as global indifference to Jewish suffering.

Jackie Congedo, a spokeswoman for the museum, suggested in an interview that accusing Israel of genocide could itself be an antisemitic act. “It feels to me a lot like what has happened to Jews throughout history — the vilification and jumping to frame Jews as the worst possible thing in every given society,” she said.

But some Jewish pro-Palestinian groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have used the same slogan — “never again is now” — to call attention to Palestinian suffering and push for a cease-fire, while referring to Israel’s conduct as genocidal.

Simone Zimmerman, 33, a founder of IfNotNow, recalled that on a visit years ago to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, stories of anti-Jewish laws and segregation reminded her of elements of the Palestinian experience.

“It’s unsurprising they are asking questions about parallels,” Ms. Zimmerman said of today’s young visitors to Holocaust museums. “The reason we make comparisons is not to say everything is exactly the same, but to learn from history.”

At the Illinois Holocaust Museum, Marion Deichmann, a 91-year Holocaust survivor, periodically shares her story with middle school students. As a girl, she journeyed with her mother from their native Germany to Luxembourg, and then France. Her mother was arrested in the 1942 Vél d’Hiv roundup of Jews in France and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was killed.

Ms. Deichmann has thought about how she would respond if a student compared the present war to the Holocaust.

“There is no comparison,” she would say, “with the six million Jews that were murdered in camps.”

Dana Goldstein covers education and families for The Times.  More about Dana Goldstein

Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York. More about Marc Tracy

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

After a barrage from Hezbollah militants on northern Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened a “very intense”  military response.

Even as Hamas and Israel appear to be inching closer to a cease-fire agreement, analysts are skeptical that the sides will ever implement a deal  that goes beyond a temporary truce.

Some Gazans are urging Hamas to accept a cease-fire plan outlined by President Biden, but many remain deeply skeptical  that the United States, as Israel’s chief ally, would truly bring an end to the war.

Columbia Law School: The website of the Columbia Law Review was taken offline by its board of directors after its editors published  an article arguing Palestinians are living under a “brutally sophisticated structure of oppression” by Israel that is a crime against humanity.

A Debate at Holocaust Museums: The Israel-Hamas war has also forced Holocaust museums to confront one of the most emotional and divisive issues within the Jewish community: how to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict .

In the West Bank: Since the war in Gaza began, armed Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied territory, often accompanied by the army, have stepped up seizures of land long used by Palestinians .

A Fateful Encounter: In an Israeli prison infirmary, a Jewish dentist came to the aid of a desperately ill Hamas inmate. Years later, the prisoner became a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack .

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