Episodes

  • Cindy Schweich Handler, "A German Jew's Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany" (McFarland, 2025)

    Cindy Schweich Handler, "A German Jew's Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany" (McFarland, 2025)
    Feb 16 2026
    Cindy Schweich Handler’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Redbook, The Huffington Post, and a host of other national publications. She is a former editor and writer for the USA Today Network. A German Jew’s Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany (McFarland, 2025) is based on primary sources such as Fritz’s contemporaneous World War I diaries, journals kept by his wife, Elsbeth, and a copious collection of letters he wrote to her during their long separations. After 9/11, Harry Handler decided to explore this inheritance to see whether he could learn more about his grandfather’s life. A towering personality packed into a 5'3" frame, Oppenheimer was a wealthy Jewish Berliner who fled the Third Reich in mid-1938, joined basic training in the U.S. Army at forty-five, and ultimately became General Eisenhower’s legal aide and translator—tasked with helping to build a sustainable postwar democracy in his former homeland. This historical biography presents a previously untold David-and-Goliath story, demonstrating how one individual’s persistence can help change the course of history and forge a more hopeful future. A German Jew’s Triumph portrays Fritz Oppenheimer as a figure of extraordinary skill, moral complexity, and intellectual discipline. Cindy Schweich Handler preserves his voice, his diaries, and the historical record while also inviting readers to grapple with the discomforts of assimilation, restraint, and ethical judgment under extreme circumstances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
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    58 mins
  • Alex Alvarez and Richard R. Fernandez, "Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals That Made the Holocaust Possible" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

    Alex Alvarez and Richard R. Fernandez, "Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals That Made the Holocaust Possible" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
    Feb 15 2026
    Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals That Made the Holocaust Possible (Bloomsbury, 2025) is an eye-opening book highlights the role of elites in constructing systems of persecution and extermination during the Holocaust. Being highly educated or living within a certain social class doesn't prevent us from being lured into destructive systems, especially when they operate to our benefit. The perception that the Holocaust was largely a crime carried out by ill-educated thugs acting on nationalistic hysteria and xenophobic prejudice is a myth. Leaders from many sectors of society, including industry, science, and religion came to support and enable the Nazi government, often due to the ways in which they were able to profit and benefit from the policies of persecution and genocide. With both a social science and historical approach, Lethal Elites highlights and assesses the ways in which the influence, training, and expertise of the most powerful and best educated were used in service to the genocidal agenda of the National Socialist Regime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
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    59 mins
  • Tom Menger, "The Colonial Way of War: Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Tom Menger, "The Colonial Way of War: Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    Jan 30 2026
    The violence of colonial wars between 1890 and 1914 is often thought to have been uniquely shaped by the nature of each of the European empires. The Colonial Way of War: Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914 (Cambridge UP, 2025) argues instead that these wars' extreme violence was part of a shared 'Colonial Way of War'. Through detailed study of British, German and Dutch colonial wars, Tom Menger reveals the transimperial connectivity of fin-de-siècle colonial violence, including practices of scorched earth and extermination, such as the Herero Genocide (1904-1908). He explores how shared thought and practices arose from exchanges and transfers between actors of different empires, both Europeans and non-Europeans. These transfers can be traced in military manuals and other literature, but most notably in the transimperial mobility of military attachés, regular soldiers, settlers or 'adventurers'. Pioneering in its scope, Menger's work re-thinks the supposed exceptionality of standout cases of colonial violence, and more broadly challenges conceptions we have of imperial connectivity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Andrew I. Port, "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust" (Harvard UP, 2023)

    Andrew I. Port, "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust" (Harvard UP, 2023)
    Jan 11 2026
    As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany’s pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when Germans said “never again,” did they mean “never again Auschwitz” or “never again war”? Looking beyond solemn statements and well-meant monuments, Andrew I. Port examines how the Nazi past shaped German responses to the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda—and further, how these foreign atrocities recast Germans’ understanding of their own horrific history. In the late 1970s, the reign of the Khmer Rouge received relatively little attention from a firmly antiwar public that was just “discovering” the Holocaust. By the 1990s, the genocide of the Jews was squarely at the center of German identity, a tectonic shift that inspired greater involvement in Bosnia and, to a lesser extent, Rwanda. Germany’s increased willingness to use force in defense of others reflected the enthusiastic embrace of human rights by public officials and ordinary citizens. At the same time, conservatives welcomed the opportunity for a more active international role involving military might—to the chagrin of pacifists and progressives at home. Making the lessons, limits, and liabilities of politics driven by memories of a troubled history harrowingly clear, Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2023) is a story with deep resonance for any country confronting a dark past. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
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    1 hr and 16 mins
  • Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023)

    Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023)
    Jan 6 2026
    In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics not only offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost. Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss. She also comes to see how cutting-edge science can act as ritual—a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence. Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming-of-age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Jürgen Zimmerer, "Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness" (Reclam Verlag, 2023)

    Jürgen Zimmerer, "Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness" (Reclam Verlag, 2023)
    Jan 3 2026
    Erinnerungskämpfe: Neues deutsches Geschichtsbewusstsein (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2023) is a new, provocative volume on German memory cultures and politics edited by Jürgen Zimmerer. What can be loosely translated as Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness is a collection of chapters that lay bare a mosaic of a diverse German memory landscape as well as the major debates and turning points by which it is continuously shaped. It is subdivided in five sections together encompassing 23 chapters and covers German Empire and colonialism, National Socialism and the Second World War, the Holocaust and multidirectional memory, East/West Germany and reunification, and, finally, today's Berlin Republic. This volume gains in relevance by the day and shows how the German past(s) and the way they are debated, commemorated, and weaponized today and by whom has real-life, if not existential, consequences. It is far from an exclusively German matter. Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness is of interest for all those who critically engage with the instrumentalization of memory in ongoing cultural wars in other national contexts as well, such as the heated debates and rightwing attacks in the United States and elsewhere surrounding fields such as Critical Race Theory, Gender or Queer Studies that emerge out of the White Supremacist backlash and the concomitant increase in racism, trans- and homophobia. Jürgen Zimmerer is Professor of Global History and the head of the research center “Hamburg’s (post-)colonial legacy” at the University of Hamburg. He served as the founding president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars for twelve years until 2017 and was the Senior Editor of the Journal of Genocide from 2005 to 2011. His research interests include German Colonialism, Comparative Genocide studies, Colonialism and the Holocaust, and Environmental Violence and Genocide and, for the specific German context, his work has been crucial in revealing the deep connections between the Holocaust and German colonialism – up until that point two German histories of violence hegemonically thought of as ontologically different, if thought together at all. His publications include German Rule, African Subjects: State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in Colonial Namibia (2021) and From Windhoek to Auschwitz? Reflections on the Relationship between Colonialism and National Socialism forthcoming in English in 2024. Miriam Chorley-Schulz is an Assistant Professor and Mokin Fellow of Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon and the co-founder of the EU-funded project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present. She holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and is the author of Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees (Berlin: Metropol, 2016) which was awarded the “Hosenfeld/Szpilman Memorial Award.” Henriette Sölter is a communications and PR consultant with expertise on the interface of contemporary art and culture, international perennial formats, and strategic institutional positioning. She has worked with institutions such as documenta, Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), is a member of Bergen Assembly's executive board and is part of the New Patrons network for citizen-commissioned art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Lisa Silverman, "The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity After the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Lisa Silverman, "The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity After the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Dec 28 2025
    In his influential Anti-Semite and Jew, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed "If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him." In doing so he articulated the figure of an Antisemite responsible for imagining the Jew in a formulation that has lasted for decades. This figure became an indispensable trope in the period immediately after the war. It enabled Germans and Austrians to navigate a radically changed political and cultural landscape and reestablish lives upended by war by denying complicity in perpetuating antisemitic ideology. The deeply ingrained cultural practices that formed the basis for age-old prejudices against Jews persisted via coded references, taking new forms, and providing fertile ground for explicit eruptions. Decades before the Nazi persecution of the Jews would emerge as a master moral paradigm of evil in popular culture, the constructed Antisemite became part of a forceful narrative structure that allowed stereotypes about Jews to persist, even as explicit antisemitism became taboo. Lisa Silverman examines the crucial development and implications of the figural Antisemite in a range of trials, films, and texts during the first years after the end of the Second World War. She argues that, in their economically shattered, emotionally exhausted, and culturally impoverished postwar world, Austrians, Germans, and others used the Antisemite as a way to come to terms with their altered circumstances and to shape new national self-understandings. A readily recognizable and easily adaptable figure of evil, the Antisemite loomed large as a powerful and persistent trope in a wide range of artistic and cultural narratives. As a figure onto which to project or imagine as a source of the hatred of Jews, the Antisemite allowed audiences to avoid facing the implications of crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices and to deny the endurance of widespread and often coded antisemitic prejudices. In postwar Europe, where everyone looked to blame others for the murder and dispossession of the Jewish population, the authority to define the Antisemite as a receptacle for explicit Jew-hatred became a powerful force. As The Postwar Antisemite argues, antisemitism as a hidden code gained new force, packing stronger, more effective punches and affording its users more power. This era is critical to understanding ongoing struggles over the authority to set the parameters of antisemitism and the power and persistence of this hatred in society. Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • Martin Herskovitz, "Son of the Shoah: Poems from a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor" (McFarland, 2025)

    Martin Herskovitz, "Son of the Shoah: Poems from a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor" (McFarland, 2025)
    Dec 26 2025
    As a third generation Holocaust survivor, this was an important conversation with a second generation survivor. Marty has been conducting workshops on writing memory for quite a while and that's where we met - in his workshops with Jewish Ethiopians in Israel. Son of the Shoah: Poems from a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor is his emotional reckoning with his parents and the world as being born into a world of pain and distance. At times I saw my own parents in the discussion and at times I would hear my friend whose family is descended from Jews tortured in the Inquisitions. This was an intimate and powerful discussion which will help the field of memory and Holocaust studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
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    33 mins