titles for essays about 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!

• 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.
• 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 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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”.
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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].
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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 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.
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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, […]
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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 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.
• 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 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, […]
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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’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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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: 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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 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 […]
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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 […]
• 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.
• 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.
• “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.
• 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: 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 […]
• 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 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.
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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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.

• Turning Points of the Holocaust
• Escape from Sobibor: World War 2 Holocaust
• Environmental Studies: The Global Warming Holocaust
• Holocaust in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” Film
• “I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala” and “American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World”: Comparison
• US Holocaust Memorial and American Indian Museums
• World War II: Holocaust and Discrimination of the Jews
• Holocaust: Jewish Women’s Experiences This essay will focus on concerns that Jewish women experienced in the Holocaust by drawing on specific experiences from prisoners of concentration camps.
• World History: Researching of Holocaust Today, more than ever, it is necessary to work with national communities, conduct tolerance seminars and training, and prevent extremism.
• “Children in the Holocaust and World War II” by Holliday The book “Children in the Holocaust and World War II” describes what difficulties a brother and a sister experienced in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland during World War II.
• 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.
• 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.
• Herero Holocaust Among European Colonial Genocides The source identifies a pattern of events that preceded the holocaust in Germany. As Ter-Matevosyan notes, the holocaust is one of the worst historic moments in modern history.
• 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.
• Antisemitism Controversy and Holocaust Denial 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.
• 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.
• 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
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• 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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StudyCorgi. (2022, May 10). 126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/holocaust-essay-topics/

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StudyCorgi . "126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles." May 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/holocaust-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles." May 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/holocaust-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Holocaust were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on January 21, 2024 .

Home — Essay Samples — History — Nazi Germany — Holocaust

Essays on Holocaust

Hook examples for holocaust essays, the unimaginable horror hook.

Begin your essay by vividly describing the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, such as concentration camps, mass extermination, and the human suffering that occurred during this dark period in history. Use powerful and descriptive language to evoke emotions in your readers.

The Survivor's Testimony Hook

Share a compelling personal testimony of a Holocaust survivor. Use direct quotes or excerpts from survivors' accounts to provide firsthand insights into the experiences and resilience of those who lived through the Holocaust.

The Nuremberg Trials and Justice Hook

Discuss the Nuremberg Trials and the pursuit of justice for the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Highlight the importance of holding individuals accountable for their actions and the establishment of principles for international law.

The Heroes of the Holocaust Hook

Introduce the stories of individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, such as Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg. Emphasize acts of bravery and compassion in the face of extreme adversity.

The Lessons of History Hook

Reflect on the broader lessons and moral implications of the Holocaust. Discuss the importance of remembering and learning from this tragic event to prevent future genocides and promote tolerance and understanding.

The Art and Literature of Survival Hook

Showcase how Holocaust survivors used art, literature, and other forms of expression to cope with their trauma and convey their experiences. Explore the therapeutic and documentary aspects of creative works produced during and after the Holocaust.

The Holocaust in Contemporary Context Hook

Connect the Holocaust to current events, discussing instances of hate crimes, discrimination, and genocide in the modern world. Highlight the importance of remembrance and education to prevent the recurrence of such atrocities.

The Resilience and Hope Hook

Share stories of resilience and hope within the Holocaust, such as clandestine education in concentration camps or acts of solidarity among prisoners. Explore the indomitable human spirit that emerged even in the darkest times.

The Forgotten Victims Hook

Draw attention to less-discussed aspects of the Holocaust, such as the experiences of Romani people, disabled individuals, or political dissidents who also suffered persecution. Shed light on the diversity of victims and their stories.

The Role of Witnesses and Documentation Hook

Discuss the significance of witnesses, both survivors and liberators, who documented the Holocaust through photographs, diaries, and testimonies. Emphasize the importance of preserving and sharing these historical records.

The Trial of Helena Grese

Night by elie wiesel: an analysis of surviving at all costs, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

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The Significance of Elie Wiesel's Night in Holocaust Literature

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Arek Hersh – a Story of a Holocaust Survivor

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Disastrous Event in Jewish History: The Holocaust

Holocaust denial: anti-semitic conspiracy theory, the reasons we should not forget the holocaust, irena sendler - a person who saved hundreds of lifes during holocaust, homosexuality and the holocaust, the physical and mental impact of holocaust on its victims, the influence of jewish music on the holocaust, the holocaust: historical anti-semitism, the possibility of the holocaust to have been avoided, "after i no longer speak"; a message on the impact of the holocaust in "shooting stars", the boy in the striped pajamas - the holocaust drama, understanding the holocaust through "schindler's list", a nazi’s metamorphosis in maxine kumin’s poem "woodchucks", experiences of the survivors in night by elie wiesel and maus by art spiegelman, the use of visual narrative and formal structure in maus: a survivors tale by art spiegelman, analysis of author’s struggles in night by elie wiesel, holocaust through the eyes of a child in the boy in the striped pajamas, the holocaust: chronicle of murders, analysis of artie's impressions of the holocaust in maus, time of savagery: churchill's speech, diary of anne frank and history of shmuel and bruno.

1933 - 1945

German Reich and German-occupied Europe

The Holocaust was a genocidal event that took place during World War II, orchestrated by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany. It was a systematic and state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of approximately six million Jews, along with millions of other victims, including Romani people, disabled individuals, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and others deemed "undesirable" by the Nazis. The Holocaust was marked by horrific atrocities, including the establishment of concentration camps, mass shootings, forced labor, and the implementation of gas chambers in extermination camps. It was an unparalleled act of inhumanity and racial hatred, driven by the Nazis' ideology of racial superiority and the desire to create a homogeneous "Aryan" society.

One such figure is Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl whose diary provided a poignant firsthand account of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. Her diary, discovered after her death in a concentration camp, has become an iconic symbol of hope and resilience. Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist, is another notable person associated with the Holocaust. Through his efforts, Schindler saved the lives of over 1,000 Jewish people by employing them in his factories and ensuring their protection. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, dedicated his life to bearing witness to the Holocaust and promoting Holocaust education and remembrance. His powerful memoir, "Night," chronicles his experiences in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, is remembered for his courageous actions in saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews by issuing protective passports and providing safe houses.

The historical context of the Holocaust can be traced back to the rise of Nazi ideology and its virulent antisemitism. Hitler's regime implemented a series of discriminatory laws known as the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their rights and subjected them to persecution. This was followed by the establishment of concentration camps and the implementation of the "Final Solution" – a plan to exterminate all Jews within Nazi-controlled territories. The Holocaust occurred within the broader context of World War II, as Nazi Germany sought to expand its territories and exert dominance over Europe. The war provided a cover for the implementation of mass murder and allowed the Nazis to carry out their genocidal agenda with relative impunity.

The Holocaust has had a profound impact on international law and the concept of human rights. The Nuremberg Trials, held after World War II, established the precedent for prosecuting individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, was a direct response to the atrocities of the Holocaust, emphasizing the inherent dignity and rights of all individuals. The Holocaust also serves as a reminder of the dangers of prejudice and discrimination. It has prompted ongoing efforts to combat antisemitism, racism, and bigotry in all forms. The Holocaust education and memorialization have become vital tools in raising awareness and fostering tolerance, ensuring that the lessons of the past are not forgotten. Furthermore, the Holocaust has inspired countless works of literature, art, and film, which bear witness to the horrors experienced by its victims. These creative expressions serve as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of remembering the past to prevent similar atrocities in the future.

Public opinion on the Holocaust varies, but it is generally characterized by shock, horror, and condemnation. The Holocaust is widely regarded as one of the most egregious crimes against humanity in history, and the vast majority of people view it with deep sorrow and sympathy for the victims. Public opinion acknowledges the gravity of the Holocaust and recognizes its impact on the world. The overwhelming sentiment is one of condemnation towards the Nazi regime and the individuals who perpetrated these heinous acts. People express profound empathy for the millions of innocent lives lost and the immense suffering endured by survivors. Moreover, public opinion acknowledges the importance of remembering the Holocaust as a means of honoring the victims and preventing future atrocities. Holocaust education and commemorative events have garnered significant support, with many recognizing the need to preserve the memory of the Holocaust as a stark reminder of the consequences of hatred and prejudice.

Film: Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" (1993) is a critically acclaimed movie based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of over a thousand Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. The film vividly portrays the atrocities and human suffering while highlighting acts of bravery and compassion. Literature: Elie Wiesel's memoir "Night" (1956) provides a firsthand account of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. It is a powerful and haunting narrative that has become a significant literary work, capturing the physical and emotional hardships endured by those subjected to Nazi persecution. Art: The artwork of Holocaust survivor and painter Samuel Bak often explores the themes of loss, resilience, and memory. His paintings depict scenes from his own experiences as a child during the Holocaust, offering a deeply personal and introspective perspective on the tragedy.

1. The Holocaust witnessed the systematic annihilation of six million Jewish individuals at the hands of the Nazis. This accounts for approximately two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe at that time. 2. The Holocaust took place between 1941 and 1945 during World War II, primarily in German-occupied territories. It involved the mass extermination of Jews, as well as other groups such as Romani people, Poles, disabled individuals, and political dissidents. 3. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration and extermination camp, was responsible for the deaths of over one million people. Other notorious camps include Treblinka, Sobibor, and Dachau. 4. The Nuremberg Laws, implemented in 1935, stripped Jews of their citizenship, rights, and protections. These laws laid the foundation for the persecution and eventual mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. 5. Rescuers, such as Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, risked their lives to save Jews from persecution. Their heroic actions demonstrated courage and compassion in the face of immense danger.

The topic of the Holocaust is of utmost importance to write an essay about due to its profound historical significance and the lessons it teaches us about humanity. By exploring the Holocaust, we delve into one of the darkest periods in human history, where millions of innocent lives were brutally extinguished. Writing an essay about the Holocaust allows us to honor and remember the victims, ensuring that their stories are never forgotten. It serves as a powerful reminder of the consequences of unchecked hatred, discrimination, and prejudice. Through examining the causes, events, and aftermath of the Holocaust, we gain a deeper understanding of the depths of human cruelty and the dangers of ideological extremism. Moreover, studying the Holocaust prompts critical reflection on the importance of promoting tolerance, empathy, and respect for human rights. It compels us to confront the potential for evil within society and to actively work towards creating a world that rejects bigotry and embraces diversity. By writing an essay on the Holocaust, we contribute to the preservation of historical memory, promote empathy and understanding, and strive to ensure that such atrocities are never repeated. It is a testament to our commitment to learning from the past and building a more compassionate and just future.

1. Browning, C. R. (1992). Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. Harper Perennial. 2. Dawidowicz, L. S. (1981). The war against the Jews, 1933-1945. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 3. Evans, R. J. (2008). The Third Reich at war: How the Nazis led Germany from conquest to disaster. Penguin. 4. Gilbert, M. (1985). The Holocaust: A history of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. Henry Holt and Company. 5. Kershaw, I. (2000). Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis. W. W. Norton & Company. 6. LaCapra, D. (2004). History, memory, and representation: An essay in cognitive historiography. Cornell University Press. 7. Levi, P. (1986). Survival in Auschwitz. Touchstone. 8. Snyder, T. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books. 9. Wiesel, E. (2006). Night. Hill and Wang. 10. Yahil, L. (1991). The Holocaust: The fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945. Oxford University Press.

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80 Deep Holocaust Research Topics To Explore

Be it history or the sciences, the holocaust has played a key role in shaping theories and ideologies. How do you make your paper on the holocaust standout? What is it that you would be keen to know and research on? If you are finding it hard to put things in perspective, here is a list of topics on concentration camp research paper. It aims to help students and create a resource they can consult for writing research papers on the holocaust.

Table of Contents

Classic holocaust topics for research, holocaust argumentative essay topics, holocaust writing prompts for cause and effect, topics for comparison and contrast, art-based research papers on holocaust.

These holocaust research paper topics have inspired many students across the world. Go through these questions or topics to get inspired. They are sure to help you create interesting papers on the event.

To write a holocaust research paper use these topics as a foundation to start with and build upon.

• Ann Frank’s father — A Detailed character sketch
• Milestones in the life of Adolf Hitler
• Childhood events that shaped Adolf Hitler
• Prosecution of tribunes and war criminals during the Second World War
• The liberation of the concentration camps
• The heroic acts of Oskar Schindler
• Anti-Jew laws adopted in Nazi Germany
• The Schutzstaffel and their role during the holocaust
• The resistance of Denmark and the rescue of Jews of Danish origin
• Role of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust
• Countries that have adopted laws of Holocaust Denial and why
• The heroic acts of Irena Sendler during the holocaust
• Does the Holocaust question God’s existence?
• Why is it important for young people to visit Holocaust memorials?
• Christian and catholic community – their responses on the holocaust, then and now
• The persecution of homosexuals during the holocaust
• Twin experiments during the holocaust
• How and why did the Germans allow a phenomenon like a holocaust to occur?
• Holocaust – The various stages
• What initiated the Holocaust?
• Deprivation of basic human rights in concentration camps
• The personal history of Eva Braun
• Insights into the life of a Holocaust Survivor
• What do German schoolchildren learn about the Holocaust?

These holocaust research questions present two perspectives of a given topic. They focus on the concentration research camp paper, as well as, the papers on arts and science during the holocaust. The argumentative holocaust paper topics give you a lot of scope for research.

• Should holocaust be addressed in college and classrooms?
• Arguments that debunk the holocaust denial.
• Holocaust lessons for humanity
• Is one person responsible for the holocaust?
• Holocaust: Result of war or a systematically planned action?
• Would the international community intervene if a Holocaust was to repeat itself today?
• Were all Nazi soldiers, pro-genocide?
• Why must we remember the Holocaust?
• Could early destruction of concentration camps by allies have prevented the horrors of the Holocaust?
• The holocaust is the result of Hitler’s ideologies about race. Is this statement entirely true?
• What makes the Holocaust unique?
• Did stereotypes have any role to play in the Holocaust?
• Could more resistance from European citizens and Jewish people have stopped the Holocaust?
• Events contributing to the rise of Hitler
• Is it possible for the recurrence of the Holocaust in modern times?
• Was inaction the sole contributor for mass genocide during World War II?

These holocaust research topics look into the massive effects of the Holocaust. Some of these can be felt even today.

• What were the consequences of the Holocaust?
• Provide a holocaust thesis statement on the effects of the Holocaust on Modern Europe.
• The effect of the holocaust on Jewish people
• The effect of the holocaust on other minorities
• Did the Holocaust impact the formation of the EU?
• How did the Holocaust affect Israel?
• Origins and reasons for the Anti-Semitism ideology.
• The effect of the bystander effect on social attitudes towards WWII.
• The effect of the Holocaust on Western civilization.
• The role of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust.
• Increase in atheism after WWII
• Perception of Jewish people after WWII.
• Effects of the Holocaust on modern social ideologies.
• The role of the Holocaust in history
• The perception of Germany post Holocaust

These holocaust research topics compare similar events and ideologies that are connected to the holocaust.

• German Holocaust versus the American Indian Holocaust.
• Compare the lives of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel in concentration camps.
• Jewish and Black Holocausts
• Japanese Internment camps in the USA versus concentration camps in Germany
• Rwanda genocide versus Holocaust
• Dachau versus Auschwitz
• Similarities between the Holocaust and slavery
• Jewish refugees versus modern Syrian refugees.
• Cambodian genocide versus the Holocaust
• Jewish partisan and spiritual resistance.

These holocaust research questions delve into the artistic representation of the Holocaust.

• Schindler’s List: A representation of Holocaust
• Character sketch of Nechama Tec in the book “Dry Tears”
• Influence of concentration camps on characters in the book, “Night”
• Review of the Pianist
• Holocaust’s famous monuments
• Do movies trivialize the genocide?
• Do Holocaust movies reduce racial discrimination in modern society?
• How literature honours Holocaust victims.
• “March to Freedom” by Edith Singer and human resilience.
• Review of “Dry Tears” by Nechama Tec
• Guilt concept in the graphic novel “Maus” by Art Spiegelman
• Review of “The diary of Anne Frank”
• How personal diaries changed the perception of the Holocaust.
• Is it moral to create art about the Holocaust?
• Can holocaust movies prevent its recurrence?

For more prompts and writing help in various styles, get in touch with our skilled professionals today.

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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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Chronicles of Love & Resentment by Eric Gans

How to Write about the Holocaust

No. 410: Saturday, June 25th, 2011

As in many other things, not being an “authority” on the Holocaust makes it easier for me to formulate some basic ideas about it than for those whose lives and careers are directly dependent on it. I recently read Alvin Rosenfeld’s The End of the Holocaust (Indiana UP 2011), which is mostly devoted to noting the failures of Western culture’s memory of the Holocaust. While I sympathize with most of the views the author expresses, and certainly share his concluding apprehension concerning those in Iran and elsewhere who are happily dreaming of annihilating Israel in a “second Holocaust,” I would like to suggest a different, less polemical perspective on the subject.

The Holocaust provides an extreme version of the paradoxes that arise whenever we attempt to react as individuals to any real-world event. To simply take the event as a given is to abdicate our human responsibility to assign meaning, yet to insist on finding for it a “personal” meaning is to make our own judgment the measure of social value. The Holocaust poses this paradox in a maximally urgent manner because while it presents a spectacle so morally repugnant that we feel obliged to invent a personal way of “testifying” to it, it is a thing of the past that all our acts of repentance and charity cannot redeem. Hence it arouses reactions of denial, minimization, focusing on minor “positive” elements, de-Judaizing, attacks on the “Holocaust industry,” etc., as ways of reducing it to more tolerable dimensions; and at the other extreme, it inspires the suicide of survivors who cannot bear the guilt of having been “chosen” over so many others, coupled with the sense of irredeemable violation that suggests one no longer deserves to live.

But the intensity and frequent moral inadequacy of these responses testifies to the fact that the Holocaust’s historical impact goes well beyond the realm of direct reactions and their exploitation in rhetoric and imagery. To take a controversial example, when “happy” stories of the Holocaust such as Schindler’s List are accused of emphasizing cases that are in fact statistically trivial, I think a point missed is that the “happy ending” reflects not in fact the story of the Holocaust itself but of what is hoped to be its place in history—as the source of a new sensitivity to oppression, including but not limited to the Jewish resolve that has sustained Israel. For the justification for Schindler’s List as “the story of the Holocaust” includes as well the postwar liberation of the European colonies and the Blacks in the American South. Here and in general, I find it more useful to judge such works in their overall historical context rather than as attempted revisions, or re-visions, of the Holocaust. For the real story of the Holocaust cannot be made into a meaningful fiction, since the vast majority of its characters, those whom we desperately wish to memorialize, were not actors at all, only victims.

My thesis has long been that reaction to the Holocaust lies at the origin of the whole victimary trend of modern thought, in both what I consider its praiseworthy accomplishments and those I admire less—although like nearly all political actions ( except those that can be defined in terms of the Nazi-Jew paradigm of the Holocaust, which is why this very designation is, unsurprisingly, paradoxical) these are subject to the Hayekian principle that the “market” is smarter than its participants, so that a policy that may strike me as unjustified may in fact turn out to have a salutary effect on, say, the achievement of racial equality.

On the level at which this thesis is situated, specific reactions to the Holocaust as a historical event are no longer at issue; the question becomes how to understand the overall movement of thought that we claim this event brought about. To answer those who contest this claim, we must define victimary thinking and show how its categories can be conceived as reactions to the Holocaust. The point of such a discussion is not to prove that those who have made use of victimary categories in political and social thought “had the Holocaust in mind,” nor is it useful to argue with someone who denies either the Holocaust’s reality or its significance. The burden would rather be on such a person to provide an equally coherent alternative model, and only at this point would argument become productive.

But in fact the very notion of victimary thinking has no equivalent in everyday discourse, and not surprisingly there really are no other universal explanatory models. Most intellectuals reject the very idea of “victimary thought” and see themselves rather as defending the oppressed against their oppressors. In contrast, those who accept the idea of the victimary and who are generally critical of the phenomenon it designates are not wont to seek justifications for it in history.

Victimary thinking may be defined without circularly referring to the Holocaust. It is the way of thinking for which any difference between ascriptive or “objective” groups that can be understood as imputing values of superiority and inferiority is absolutely condemned as immoral and inhuman. In this context “ascriptive” may be taken broadly to include sexual orientation and religion as well as the usual categories of race, gender, nationality, social class, etc.

Let me now outline, as I have done in a number of Chronicles (e.g., 90 , 287 , 337 , 380 , 385 ,  392 , 399 …) a skeleton history of postwar victimary thinking. In the first phase, which in the United States was the era of “Civil Rights,” the form of victimization that was condemned was de jure inequality, whose obvious parallel with the Nazi-Jew relationship was rarely stated and, I imagine, seldom thought. The point is not that the living memory of the Holocaust was instrumental in creating a sense of repugnance, but that the Holocaust was experienced historically as a demonstration of the evil of differential relationships on racial lines. No doubt the Holocaust itself took place at a moment of history in which a certain (notably anti-colonial) struggle had already begun and must be understood in part as a reaction to it, as a strong assertion of the validity of “racial superiority” at a moment when this notion, so unproblematic in the previous century, had begun to come under fire. But in the next turn of the dialectic, the horror of Nazism itself, even independently of the still little-mentioned specifics of the Final Solution, was sufficient to fuel what turned out to be successful struggles for racial equality and colonial liberation. This phase of history, whose last triumph was the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1990-91, is to the extent that historical developments may be so considered, relatively unproblematic; today only a tiny fringe would find acceptable, let alone prefer, the racial/colonial hierarchies of an earlier era.

The “Jewish question” was relatively absent from the vision of Nazism that provided the impetus for these developments, which focused less on the six million than on the general horror of Nazi racism and tyranny. In this period the Jews, rather than insisting on their role as victims, tended rather to be ashamed of it; the question commonly asked of survivors was, “why didn’t you/they fight back?”

It was only in the second, mature phase of postmodernism that victimary thinking fully came into its own. At much the same time, the idea of “the Holocaust” acquired currency, along with the now-familiar images of piles of bodies and suitcases, emaciated prisoners, the Warsaw Ghetto in flames, “selection” on the Auschwitz ramp… as well as the iconic and much-abused figure of Anne Frank, to whom Rosenfeld devotes two full chapters of his book. In this second phase of victimary thinking, those who claimed to be or defend victims learned a new rhetoric of results . It was not enough to demand equal rights; to obtain full equality one had to be compensated for past ills, to be granted a “level playing field.” Victimary thinking has operated ever since with this expanded model, with which is associated a deconstructive theory of history. In this perspective, giving Blacks or women equal rights today cannot suffice to reverse not so much the direct results of past discrimination as the mind-set, indeed, the shared ontology of a world that affirms racial and gender superiority/inferiority. Although the domination of many areas of the university system, corporate hiring, etc., by such considerations has provided victimary groups with considerable financial and other advantages, victims are not expected to be satisfied simply to have acquired “rights” and advantages in the present. On the contrary, they are called as witnesses to the applicability of the Nazi-Jew model to human society in general. For from the beginning, the ethical and intellectual values of these societies have been complicit in the oppression of peripheral victims for the benefit of central authority.

The power of the Holocaust model is simple and absolute. If one wishes to claim, for example, that certain social roles are better fitted to men than women—or, say, that marriage should be restricted to that between a man and a woman—the implicit Nazi analogy renders these judgments as ugly as the caricatures in Der Stürmer . It is of great significance that anti-Jewish prejudice, unlike the standard racial variety, is based on the denial of what is generally an objective superiority— one that can be traced back to the Hebrews’ firstness as the inventors/discoverers of monotheism. The Nazi-Jew paradigm colors all other victimary oppositions with an undertone of envy. Whatever the value of the evidence that, say, Blacks are less intelligent on average than Whites, or women less gifted in the sciences than men, there is certainly no evidence that Jews are less intelligent or gifted than non-Jews— au contraire. If victimary groups are persecuted ultimately for their superiority, then no discrimination of any kind can be objectively justified. Hence the existence of statistical differences between groups with regard to success in any given endeavor (unless the victimary group actually does better, as with Blacks on basketball teams or women in college admissions) is considered prima facie evidence of discrimination.

At this point victimary thinking becomes problematic, for it incorporates two contradictory principles derived from the originary moral model. On the one hand, the firstness of the first user of the sign is not allowed to confer an advantage when it comes to distributing the products of the sparagmos; the exchange of signs, and of the things that are ritually distributed as a result of the exchange of signs, is in principle perfectly symmetrical. On the other hand, in more advanced societies the different roles are expected to be distributed according to the ability to perform them and not by victimary categories. The creation of such categories in the postwar era, however obviously necessary they may appear to us, is a radically new development that is best understood as the legacy of the Holocaust. It is in effect the extension of the Holocaust paradigm to the whole ensemble of social relations. Nothing like “affirmative action” had ever existed, even among persons with great sympathy for groups that are today considered victims and that in the past were simply thought of as deprived of equal rights, such as slaves in the South or women not given the vote. Needless to say, this new victimary consciousness has not done away with social hierarchy, but it has eliminated many selection criteria previously considered “objective,” such as aptitude examinations for civil service work, and spawned affirmative action programs of various kinds, not always in compensation for past prejudice.

Rosenfeld’s material offers confirmation of my assertion that results-oriented victimary thought is a product of the Holocaust, not merely in the broad sense that victimary thinkers make abundant and often reckless use of Holocaust analogies, but more specifically that the very outrageousness of the Holocaust metaphor is essential to creating and imposing the new victimary paradigm on human relations.

Let me take as an example a passage quoted by Rosenfeld from Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique , the key manifesto of American postwar feminism. This passage can serve us as a test case of “how to talk about the Holocaust,” since it lends itself admirably to Rosenfeld’s critique at the same time as its very enormity justifies my argument that the paradigm inaugurated by the Holocaust is at the heart of modern victimary thought.

[T]he women who “adjust” as housewives, who grow up wanting to be “just a housewife,” are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps—and the millions more who refused to believe that the concentration camps existed. In fact, there is an uncanny, uncomfortable insight into why a woman can so easily lose her sense of self as a housewife in certain psychological observations made of the behavior of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. In these settings, purposely contrived for the dehumanization of man [sic], the prisoners literally became “walking corpses.” Those who “adjusted” to the conditions of the camps surrendered their human identity and went almost indifferently to their deaths. Strangely enough, the conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and the brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife. . . .

It was said . . . that not the SS but the prisoners themselves became their own worst enemy. Because they could not bear to see their situation as it really was—because they denied the very reality of their problem, and finally “adjusted” to the camp itself as if it were the only reality—they were caught in the prison of their own minds. . . . All this seems terribly remote from the easy life of the American suburban housewife. But is [not] her house in reality a comfortable concentration camp? (48, quoting p. 305-07)

Here is Rosenfeld’s reaction to this passage:

“In reality,” her house is nothing of the sort, and a clear-thinking person knows that the comparison is a foolish one. . . . [W]hat we confront in Friedan’s book goes beyond merely hyperbolic thinking to something close to the shut-down of thought itself. For no one who thinks at all lucidly can possibly see a connection “in reality” between the situation of middle-class American housewives of the postwar period, no matter how bored they might be, and the wartime condition of inmates in the Nazi camps. (48)

In the paragraphs that follow, Rosenfeld attempts to explain Friedan’s use of this comparison, using ideas from Christopher Lasch and Tzvetan Todorov. But at bottom his “explanation” is simply a restatement of the facts. Rosenfeld alleges that “a politics of suffering and victimization has been developing within American society over the past several decades . . . whose proponents draw on the pervasive presence of Holocaust images in order to garner for themselves a certain moral superiority that victims have come to enjoy in our society.” Well, yes, but explaining the use of victimary imagery by “a certain moral superiority that victims have come to enjoy” is mere tautological wordplay.

But the basis for my remark that it is tautological is precisely my theoretical claim that it is truly the Holocaust that is the source of this rhetoric, which is not always as clearly derivative of its model as this particular example. And this means that calling it “rhetoric” and emphasizing as Rosenfeld does the “images” of the Holocaust in Friedan’s passage in fact obscures the real impact of the Holocaust on victimary thought. For these vocabulary elements need not be present in the text, and indeed, the course of victimary rhetoric has been to abandon the Nazi image, except to the extent it can be associated with the “West” and particularly with Israel. When Edward Said proposes “Orientalism” as the model for the West’s dismissive and ultimately oppressive attitude toward its “other,” the last thing he wants us to think of is the West’s oppression of its internal other, the Jews. In principle, at least, Rosenfeld should be happy with this development, as indeed he might be if it were not the flip side of Muslim-inspired neo-antisemitism that reviles Israel while reprinting Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . But precisely, the filiation of victimary thought with the Holocaust is not one of images but of paradigms, and the paradigm of oppressor vs. oppressed race/social group/gender/etc., is far more durable and significant than images of stacked bodies and false shower rooms.

What we observe in Friedan is an early, and for today’s reader strikingly naïve, use of this paradigm. But let us note how she uses it, before the Berkeley uprising of 1965, before the campus/French revolt of 1968, at a time when “affirmative action” (which dates—dixit Wikipedia—from a JFK Executive Order in 1961) was in its infancy and “diversity,” which college presidents today cannot form two consecutive sentences on any subject without mentioning, was as yet unknown. Friedan cannot claim that her housewives suffer physically, nor even that they are mentally tortured by… whom exactly? The SS is mentioned only to be dismissed, since not even the most uncompromising feminist could find an analogy between these women’s poor husbands and the SS. The real point is that the prisoners themselves became their own worst enemy , that the housewives/prisoners internalize their oppression and adjust to it. Today such language might be accused of “blaming the victim”; it is made palatable only by the extreme nature of the overall model, which allows the assimilation of the housewives’ oppression to Nazism on the condition that it be a Nazism without Nazis.

For the fact that the women’s material conditions are at the antipodes of those of Auschwitz inmates, far from leading us to dismiss Friedan’s comparison as “the shut-down of thought itself,” is precisely meant to caution us against rejecting it. Adjustment is the real problem, and although in the housewives’ world no oppressor is indicated, it is the system of oppression that is at fault. The point of this analogy is that any acquiescence in an oppressive system is the virtual equivalent of accepting the role of the oppressed in the Nazi-Jew model, something that no self-respecting human being should react to with anything but outrage, even unto death. But as Adam Katz would point out, and as the partisans of victimary thinking prefer to ignore, this analogy is only useful to the extent that it is being offered in a social context where it is not valid, where it can have an impact on us precisely because we are not Nazis and are shocked by the accusation that our notion of normality is “really the same as” Auschwitz.

Although Friedan isn’t proposing here anything like “affirmative action,” she clearly shows us where the Holocaust paradigm is going. This is no longer Civil Rights language; it is the language of absolute oppression, a pre-philosophical form of deconstruction, for which any acceptation of differential status—such as adjustment to a preestablished gender role—is equivalent to assuming the zombie-like status of prisoners who go unresistingly to their deaths. This is, to use a word that would have a considerable fortune a few decades later, the state of abjection.

However tasteless its rhetoric, Friedan’s book was instrumental in kicking off a neo-feminism that fifty years later has led American women to attend college in considerably higher proportion and with considerably greater success than men, to run for president, and to enter and in some cases dominate formerly male-dominated professions. Thus in condemning Friedan’s rhetoric for its wild reference to the Holocaust, we risk failing to notice what the outcome of reaction to the Holocaust through the mediation of such rhetoric has really been, leading both to the creation of a more gender-equal world and to the problematization of all remaining areas of non-reciprocity, justifiable or not. It is possible to feel disgust with the assimilation of suburban housewives to Nazi prisoners and yet to understand that Friedan’s overall (and generally valid) point in encouraging suburban housewives to look beyond their current roles is an example of the historical power of the Holocaust to generate victimary thought, independently of Friedan’s or anyone else’s specific use of Holocaust metaphors or images.

To conclude with an example of the persistence of this kind of rhetoric nearly fifty years later, here is an extract from the acknowledgement section of a 2008 UCLA doctoral dissertation.

I am . . . compelled to acknowledge the existence of demeaning plantation politics at UCLA, which also significantly and consistently contributed to my UCLA experience. While I carry a tremendous amount of resentment regarding experiences that can best be described as a new millennium form of Jim Crow, I have also gained a tremendous amount of strength from surviving, overcoming and conquering the demon of racism and the racist demons that exist and operate at the University of California Los Angeles.

The Nazis have been replaced by slave-drivers, but the rhetoric makes the same unbridled use of a stigmatized relationship of oppression to condemn phenomena that the author feels no need to describe in any detail. No doubt this example is more of an expression of personal hurt and resentment than an attempt to make other Black students conscious of their oppression. But this only makes it a more convincing illustration of the persistence of a model that, whatever the imagery used here, has its source not in American slavery but in the Holocaust, which brought forth a victimary paradigm that continues to dominate the postmodern era over 65 years after the end of WWII.

The Holocaust: Students reflect in award-winning essays, projects

In her award-winning high school essay, Emily Salko asks others to imagine the freedoms that Mira Kimmelman lost as Nazi Germany intensified its persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. 

“The freedom that we possess is something that we all take for granted each day,” she wrote. “Ask yourself, are you allowed to attend school? Walk the streets of your town? Ride a bus? Live in your own house? Answering ‘yes’ means that you already have 10 times the freedom that Mira Kimmelman had, and this little freedom is what sparked her appreciation of the things such as the clothes on her back, her shoes, and even her own roof.” 

Emily, a sophomore at Oak Ridge High School, is one of the 14 students who won awards in the first Mira Kimmelman “Learning from the Holocaust” Contest in 2021.  Kimmelman told her story of surviving the Holocaust to students, civic and religious groups in East Tennessee for more than 50 years before her death in 2019. 

Her sons, Benno and Gene Kimmelman, created the essay and project contest for Tennessee high school and middle school students, sponsored by the Tennessee Holocaust Commission, to carry on her legacy and ensure that her voice continues to be heard through her books and recorded talks. The contest offers prize money ranging from $150 to $750. 

Emily watched videos of Kimmelman's speeches and read articles about her and about anti-Semitism before writing her essay while she was in the ninth grade. She noticed that Kimmelman, as a teen, chose to take family photos, rather than other possessions, when her family was forced to leave home for a ghetto.

“She was so brave to continue moving forward and just fighting to stay alive for her family,” Emily said of Kimmelman after she received the first place high school essay award. She wrote the essay when the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining attention in the news, and she realized that people facing discrimination need to have strength and resilience.

“I think her biggest message I would continue to use is just kindness toward everyone. You shouldn’t judge people based on who they are as a group, based on race or religion. You should get to know someone,” Emily said. “You should not treat them differently because you might look different or believe in something different.” 

Along with the mantra of “never forget” often heard in relation to the Holocaust, Benno and Gene hope students entering the contest learn their mother’s lessons of tolerance and kindness. The essays reflect that, as the students wrote about being moved by her bravery and resilience and about how they are applying her lessons today. 

“Many of the essays touched on current injustices and suggested ways they could be addressed,” said contest judge Katie High, of Knoxville, a retired University of Tennessee vice president for academic affairs and a member of the Tennessee Holocaust Commission. “The writers were giving world-wide atrocities serious thought, which was impressive. I wanted to cheer the students, and their teachers, because it was obvious teaching and learning were going on.” 

High, who served as interim dean at the UT Martin College of Business after her retirement, said much of the Holocaust Commission’s work is focused on middle school students, and that work becomes more difficult as more Holocaust survivors die. 

“When they talk to a group of middle school students and show their tattoos and talk about what it’s like to be in the camps, kids are horrified, but in awe of these survivors, because of their resilience,” High said. “You have planted something in their hearts.”

Emmanuelle Wolf-Dubin, first-place winner in the middle school essay contest, wrote that hearing a rabbi challenge listeners to think not only of Israelis and their suffering but Palestinians, as well, reminded her of Kimmelman’s message of seeing the kindness in all people. Her story, she wrote, is a message of ideals that Emmanuelle can only hope to achieve.

“As a young adult, she would be imprisoned in the deadliest concentration camp called Auschwitz and was forced into the nearly unimaginable march to Bergen-Belsen,” wrote Emmanuelle, a student at Meigs Magnet Middle School in Nashville. “Yet, after all of these horrors at the hands of one of the most evil men in recorded history, she still preached lovingkindness in a world that seemed apathetic to her plight. Instead of focusing on that, she zeroed in on the people who helped, the people of all nationalities, races, and religions who saved her and her counterparts across Europe,” Emmanuelle wrote. 

Chloe Collins, a student at Oakdale Middle School in Morgan County, said she read Kimmelman’s first book, "Echoes from the Holocaust," before writing her essay, which was awarded second place in the middle school contest. 

“Mira Kimmelman … had to say good-bye to the family she loved, she had all of her dignity stripped away, she saw things that no one should ever have to see, she lived in a world of hate, and she felt unwanted in a country that was once her own,” wrote Chloe, an eighth grader this year. “I am thankful for Mira Kimmelman’s message of hope and tolerance that will live on forever.” 

Though not a Tennessee student, Soha Sherwani earned a “Notable Achievement” award from contest judges for her essay comparing the Holocaust with the current Chinese government repression of the Uigher people, a small and mostly Muslim minority. 

“The Uigher population is being forced into concentration camps, which are dubbed ‘re-education’ camps by the government, and are forced to partake in direct violations of their Islamic faith,” Soha wrote as a high school senior in Houston, Texas. “The Uighur Muslims are exploited for cheap labor and physically abused ... it is happening again.”

Now a college freshman, Soha said she read about the essay contest online as she was seeking scholarship opportunities and was moved by the emotion in Kimmelman’s words. She could teach and spread love through her pain, Soha said. 

“For Ms. Kimmelman, her perception was undoubtedly changed by the two integral lessons she learned surviving the Holocaust: that there are always beacons of light in the darkness and that humanity must uphold its responsibility to learn and act from instances of injustices,” Soha wrote. In her essay, Soha urges those concerned to join her with their voices in protesting, spreading awareness, and educating others on the injustice happening now. 

First- and second-place awards for middle school contest projects went to teams of students at Oak Ridge’s Robertsville Middle School.

“The Shoah Proliferates” won first place. The team used an online survey to ask students to allow their names to be used on a poster to help remember the 6 million who died in the Holocaust, saying that people remember what they can be part of. Nathanael Peters, Lennox Pack, Aiden Cantu and Kyleigh Langdale are the team members who created the project, using a QR code for business cards that students used to access the survey. All are ninth graders at Oak Ridge High School now. 

A poster with a poem and image of broken glass, symbolizing Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass when Nazis targeted synagogues, was included. Kyleigh created the poster, and Lennox wrote the poem:

Think of them not as 6 million lives lost,

But 6 million lives remembered.

Thousands more put through exhaust,

And families dismembered.

These depressing tales aren’t fiction,

Rather they are tales to stand the test of time.

It is our job to remember,

These lives left devoured. 

The second-place team, Julia Hussey, Alia Oakes, Teagan Tate and Audrey Thompson, proposed a mural for a hallway at their school. They created artwork with Holocaust symbols, including  barbed wire on a red background on one side, and symbols of peace and hope, including swallows and flowers on a blue background. A Star of David represents martyrdom and heroism. 

Haley Braden, second-place high school essay winner from Anderson County High School, wrote that she knew little about the Holocaust before entering the contest. Her essay urges her generation to follow in Kimmelman’s footsteps, to “keep a positive attitude and mindset through the darkest hours. Because with this hope comes peace and love.”

Haley wrote, “We can embody her message when looking at the face of injustice. When you see something that is wrong, be sure to right it. Stand up for people who are treated wrongly and cannot stand up for themselves.” 

Elizabeth Bernheisel, of Dyersburg Middle School, focused on Kimmelman’s second book, "Life Beyond the Holocaust: Memories and Realities," in her third-place middle school essay. The book, she wrote, offers insights on how Holocaust survivors recover, rebuild and live normal lives after experiencing unimaginable trauma. 

“Through letters, reunions, and travels back to Europe, Mira Kimmelman tells her story, as well as the stories of those no longer able to speak for themselves,” Elizabeth wrote. “She also highlights the importance of remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust, as well as the restoration that must follow.” 

HIST B323 History of the Holocaust

• Finding Books
• Sources for Researching the Holocaust
• Develop a Research Question
• Primary Sources
• Cite Sources
• Scholarly vs Popular
• Thesis Statements

Guide created by Scott Libson. Updated in January 2024 by Catherine J. Minter. Feel free to contact Catherine if you need help.

The Holocaust

• Search Terms/Subjects
• Bibliographies
• Encyclopedias
• Scholarly Journals & Articles

Library of Congress Subject Headings:

• Anti-Nazi Movement
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Fiction
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Germany
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Historiography
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Influence
• Holocaust Denial
• Holocaust Memorials
• Holocaust Survivors
• Germany--Politics and government--1933-1945.
• Germany--History--1933-1945.
• Jews--Germany--History--1933-1945.
• Jews--Persecutions--Germany.
• National Socialism
• World War, 1939-1945
• World War, 1939-1945--Concentration Camps
• Basic Bibliography of the Holocaust (Yad Vashem) Comprehensive and current, this bibliography is subdivided into various Holocaust-related topics and includes about four to twenty-five books on each topic.
• Bibliography of Holocaust Literature by Abraham J. Edelheit; Hershel Edelheit Call Number: Wells Library - Stacks -- Z6374.H6 E33 1986 (a second copy with the same call number is in the Wells Library Reference Reading Room) ISBN: 081337233X Publication Date: 1986-11-09 This is a massive, if dated, bibliography of English-language materials on the Holocaust. It includes an author index, introductory essays, and some annotations. See also the Edelheits' supplement , with 6,500 additional entries, published in 1990.
• The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust by Donald L. Niewyk; Francis R. Nicosia Call Number: E-book, also available in print: Wells Library - Stacks -- D804.3 .N54 2000 ISBN: 9780231505901 Publication Date: 2000 This invaluable resource provides a multidimensional survey of the Holocaust, essentially integrating five separate books into one comprehensive reference tool: a historical overview; a guide to Holocaust controversies; an A-to-Z encyclopedia of people, places, and terms; a chronology; and a comprehensive resource guide. Whether used separately for their individual merits or approached as an integrated whole, the five sections of this informative volume constitute an indispensable contribution to the study of the Holocaust.
• European Jewish Research Archive A free-to-use and comprehensive repository of social research on European Jews since 1990.
• The Oryx Holocaust Sourcebook by William R. Fernekes Call Number: Wells Library - Reference Reading Room -- Z6374.H6 F47 2002 ISBN: 1573562955 Publication Date: 2002-05-30 The Oryx Holocaust Sourcebook provides a comprehensive selection of high quality resources in the field of Holocaust studies. The Sourcebook's 17 chapters cover general reference works; narrative histories; monographs in the social sciences; fiction, drama, and poetry; books for children and young adults; periodicals; primary sources; electronic resources in various formats; audiovisual materials; photographs; music; film and video; educational and teaching materials; and information on organizations, museums, and memorials. In addition, each chapter begins with a concise overview essay.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Bibliographies The bibliographies "list only materials that are in the Museum Library’s collection or available online. They are not meant to be exhaustive. In most cases, annotations are provided to help the user determine each item’s focus, and call numbers for the Museum’s Library are given in parentheses following each citation."
• Children of the Holocaust by Paul R. Bartrop; Eve E. Grimm Call Number: E-book ISBN: 9781440868535 Publication Date: 2020 This important reference work highlights a number of disparate themes relating to the experience of children during the Holocaust, showing their vulnerability and how some heroic people sought to save their lives amid the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime. In addition to more than 125 entries, this book features 10 illuminating primary source documents, ranging from personal accounts to Nazi statements regarding what the fate of Jewish children should be to statements from refugee leaders considering how to help Jewish children after World War II ended.
• The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust by Shmuel Spector (Editor); Geoffrey Wigoder (Editor); Elie Wiesel (Introduction by) Call Number: Wells Library - Reference Reading Room -- DS135.E8 E45 2001 ISBN: 0814793568 Publication Date: 2001-07-01 "Today throughout much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, only fragmentary remnants of once thriving Jewish communities can be found as evidence of more than two thousand years of vibrant Jewish presence among the nations of the world. These communities, many of them ancient, were systematically destroyed by Hitler's forces during the Holocaust. Yet each of their stories-from small village enclaves to large urban centers-is unique in its details and represents one of the countless intertwined threads that comprise the rich tapestry of Jewish history. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust captures these lost images. In three volumes, it chronicles the people, habits and customs of more than 6,500 Jewish communities that thrived during the early part of the twentieth century only to be changed irrevocably by the war."
• Encyclopedia of the Holocaust by Schmuel Spector (Editor); Robert Rozett (Editor) Call Number: Wells Library - Reference Reading Room -- D804.25 .E53 2000 ISBN: 0816043337 Publication Date: 2000 Written in association with Yad Vashem, this encyclopedia features eight essays on the Holocaust on such topics as the history of European Jewry, Jewish achievements and contributions to European culture, and the rise of antisemitism.
• The Holocaust: an Encyclopedia and Document Collection [4 Volumes] by Paul R. Bartrop (Editor); Michael Dickerman (Editor) Call Number: E-book, also available in print: Wells Library - Undergraduate Services - Core Collection -- D804.25 .H655 2017 ISBN: 9781440840845 Publication Date: 2017 This four-volume set provides reference entries, primary documents, and personal accounts from individuals who lived through the Holocaust that allow readers to better understand the cultural, political, and economic motivations that spurred the Final Solution.
• The Holocaust Encyclopedia by Walter Laqueur (Editor); Judith Tydor Baumel Call Number: E-book, also available in print: Wells Library - Reference Reading Room -- D804.25 .H66 2001 ISBN: 0300084323 Publication Date: 2001 The Holocaust has been the subject of countless books, works of art, and memorials. Fifty-five years after the fact the world still ponders the enormity of this disaster. The Holocaust Encyclopedia is the only comprehensive single-volume work of reference providing both a reflective overview of the subject and abundant detail concerning major events, policy decisions, cities, and individuals.
• Holocaust Survivors by Emily Taitz (Editor) Call Number: Wells Library - Undergraduate Services - Core Collection -- D804.3 .T34 2007 ISBN: 9780313336768 Publication Date: 2007 Although there are more and more Holocaust memoirs on the market, this essential collection is the first to present such a large number of biographical profiles of survivors for a broad readership. Holocaust Survivors: A Biographical Dictionary comprises 278 entries on more than 500 survivors of the World War II genocide. The profiles, averaging 500 words, are mostly of Jews, both individuals and family members, from throughout Europe. Organized alphabetically, the essays cover their background, circumstances and ordeals during the war, aftermath, and life achievements, including family and career. Most are on ordinary people who have extraordinary life stories.
• Perpetrating the Holocaust: Leaders, Enablers, and Collaborators by Paul R. Bartrop; Eve E. Grimm Call Number: E-book, also available in print: ISBN: 9781440858970 Publication Date: 2019 Weaving together a number of disparate themes relating to Holocaust perpetrators, this book shows how Nazi Germany propelled a vast number of Europeans to try to re-engineer the population base of the continent through mass murder.
• The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume I by Geoffrey P. Megargee (Editor) Call Number: E-book, also available in print: Wells Library - Stacks -- D805.A2 U55 2009 ISBN: 9780253353283 Publication Date: 2009 The Nazis and their allies ran more than 44,000 camps, ghettos, and other sites of detention, persecution, forced labor, and murder during the Holocaust. Few people know about the breadth of the Nazi camp system and the conditions in those places—including the broad range of prisoner experiences. The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 , aims to answer basic questions about as many of those sites as possible. As of July 2020, three of the expected seven volumes have been published. Volumes I and II are available for free from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum . The link above goes to the IUCAT record for volume I. Here are the links for volume II and volume III .

Freely Available Websites:

• Guide to Holocaust Websites List created by Professor Mark Roseman. Largely primary sources, but also many secondary sources.
• AHEYM: The Archive of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories The Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM—the acronym means "homeward" in Yiddish) includes approximately 800 hours of Yiddish-language interviews with 350 individuals, most of whom were born between 1900 and 1930. The interviews were conducted in Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, and Slovakia. The interviews include: linguistic and dialectological data; oral histories of Jewish life in Eastern Europe; Holocaust testimonials; musical performances (including Yiddish folk songs, liturgical and Hasidic melodies, and macaronic songs); folklore, including anecdotes, jokes, stories, children's ditties, folk remedies, and Purim plays; reflections on contemporary Jewish life in the region, and; guided tours by local residents of sites of Jewish memory in the region.
• Arolsen Archives The Arolsen Archives are an international center on Nazi persecution with the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of National Socialism. The collection has information on about 17.5 million people and belongs to UNESCO’s Memory of the World. It contains documents on the various victim groups targeted by the Nazi regime and is an important source of knowledge for society today.
• Duane Mezga Holocaust Sites Photograph Collection The Duane Mezga Holocaust Sites photograph collection consists of 682 digitized Kodachrome 64 color slides. Almost all of the photographs were taken in 1992, of concentration camps and other historically significant sites related to the Holocaust. Twenty-one sites in Austria, then-Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland are included. The photographs were taken using the progressive-realization technique, which captures the experience of walking through a site. Memorials present at these sites were a focus of the documentation.
• Holocaust Denial on Trial Documents the trial of David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt.
• Nuremberg Trials Project The Harvard Law School Library's Nuremberg Trials Project is an open-access initiative to create and present digitized images or full-text versions of the Library's Nuremberg documents, descriptions of each document, and general information about the trials.
• Pogrom: November 1938--Testimonies from Kristallnacht (Wiener Library) In the months following November 1938, Alfred Wiener and his colleagues at the Central Jewish Information Office in Amsterdam collected over 350 contemporary testimonies and reports of the November Pogrom in Germany and Austria. These documents are now available here, for the first time in English.
• Simon Wiesenthal Center Digital Archives The Digital Archives images are owned by the Simon Wiesenthal Center Library and Archives. The Archives database and low-resolution images are available here.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Digitized Collections Includes interviews, objects, newspapers, books, and many other types of material. You can also limit results based on events, cities, camps, and ghettos.
• Yad Vashem Documents Archive Includes posters, personal documentation, official documentation, lists, letters, memoirs, testimonies, diaries, and legal documentation. Advanced search allows you to limit results to English-language documents.
• Yizkor Books at the New York Public Library Yizkor (memorial) books document Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Most yizkor books are in Hebrew and/or Yiddish. Most are available for download.
• Conditions & Politics in Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1945 Features full-text documents received in the British Foreign Office from all European states under Nazi occupation during World War II.
• Archives of the Holocaust : an international collection of selected documents by Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (general editors) Call Number: Wells Library - Research Coll. - D810.J4 A73 Publication Date: 1989- Contains reproductions of files and documents from a number of relief and charitable organizations dealing with the plight of the Jews during the 1930s and 1940s.

• The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 Call Number: e-books ISBN: 9783110435191 Publication Date: 2019- This landmark collection of primary sources provides unique first-hand insights into the persecution and murder of the Jews of Europe under Nazi rule. The documents, all translated from the language of the original source, range from the police orders and administrative decrees issued by the Nazi apparatus across Germany and occupied Europe to the diaries and letters of Jewish men, women, and children facing discrimination, impoverishment, violent assaults, incarceration, deportation, and death.
• The trial of German major war criminals by the International Military Tribunal sitting at Nuremberg, Germany [e-book] by H.M. Attorney-general by H.M. Stationery Off Call Number: E-book Publication Date: 1946-1951

Scholarly Journals Related to the Holocaust

• Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal Call Number: Electronic resource

Databases Containing Scholarly Articles

Provides full-text coverage of magazine, newspaper, and scholarly journal articles for most academic disciplines.

This multi-disciplinary database provides full-text for more than 4,500 journals, including full text for more than 3,700 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.

PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) indexes articles, books, studies, selected official documents and other resources on public policy issues, public administration, law, politics and government.

Includes journal articles, books, government documents, pamphlets and the reports of public and private bodies.  Also indexes publications in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Print source: PAIS bulletin (1915-1990), PAIS Foreign Language Index (1968-1990), PAIS International in Print (1991-)

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Introduction to the Holocaust: Photographs

This content is available in the following languages.

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators.

Two German Jewish families at a gathering

Two German Jewish families at a gathering before the Nazi rise to power . Only two people in this group survived the Holocaust . Germany, 1928.

Group portrait of six young Jewish men and women in the Piotrkow Trybunalski ghetto

Young Jewish men and women pose for a photograph in the Piotrkow Trybunalski ghetto. Poland, 1940.

Pictured from left to right are: Abram Zarnowiecki, Rozia Zarnowiecki, Mania Freiberger, Moniek, Rachel Zarnowiecki, and Chaim Zarnowiecki.

All those pictured died in the Holocaust . 

Two cousins shortly before they were smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto

Two young cousins shortly before they were smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto. A Lithuanian family hid the children and both girls survived the war. Kovno, Lithuania, August 1943.

Two young brothers in the Kovno ghetto

Two young brothers, seated for a family photograph in the Kovno ghetto. One month later, they were deported to the Majdanek camp. Kovno, Lithuania, February 1944.

Pictured are Avram (5 years) and Emanuel Rosenthal (2 years). Emanuel was born in the Kovno ghetto. The children, who were deported in the March 1944 "Children's Action," did not survive. Their uncle, Shraga Wainer, who had asked George Kadish to take this photograph, received a copy of it from the photographer after the war in the Landsberg displaced persons camp.

Young members of a Jewish family

A brother and sisters, members of a Jewish family. One of the sisters pictured here, along with other family members, did not survive the Holocaust . Nove Zamky, Czechoslovakia , May 1944.

Portrait of members of a Hungarian Jewish family

Portrait of members of a Hungarian Jewish family. They were deported to and killed in Auschwitz soon after this photo was taken. Kapuvar, Hungary , June 8, 1944.

Articles that Reference This Item

Article Introduction to the Holocaust

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