Bibliography of the Holocaust


This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust, including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation that helps to establish the event horizon of the Nazi genocide.
The Holocaust literature is extensive: The Bibliography on Holocaust Literature in its 1993 update listed around 20,000 items, including books, journal articles, pamphlets, newspaper stories and dissertations. Documentation by organizations such as Yad Vashem enters into the millions.
Conversely, in a 1989 publication, Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League from 1987 to 2015, estimated that there were 200 books denying the Holocaust. The number of works devoted to the history of the Holocaust, and to the literature of denialism has grown since that time.

Primary sources

Early Reports

Some of the information relayed in the Grojanowski Report, including an estimate of 700 thousand murdered Jews, was broadcast by the BBC on June 2, 1942. Mention of several details from this broadcast were recycled and reported on page 5 of the New York Times near the end of that month on June 27, 1942.
A New York Times article reports on the existence and use of the gas-chambers on November 24, 1942. It significantly understates the scale of the mass-killing ongoing in the camps, though it does quote the number killed that year at 250,000 and suggests by implication that operations were continuous or otherwise had not concluded. The article appears on page 10 of that day's edition of the New York Times next to an ad for Seagram's Gin much larger than the article itself. This brief mention broadcasts certain basic elements of the Racynski's note, which was not officially circulated as a brochure under the heading "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland" until several weeks later.
During the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath, many of the documents listed in the "Primary Documents" section above existed alongside a scattering of reports from individual camps such as Bettleheim's "" which appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Early book-length works from survivors of the camps that became widely available immediately after the war include Kogon's Theory and Practice of Hell, and Rousset's Other Kingdom. These come from Dachau. The Nuremberg Trials, with many and various testimonies, were ongoing as Rousset and Kogon were published. A second wave of early first person testimonies at book-length include those by Levi, Wiesel and Adler. These accounts speak of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Thereisenstadt.
The Bettleheim paper appearing in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology is a unique document, insofar as it was published while the concentration camps and extermination centers were still in operation and consisted of the testimony of a working psychiatric clinician in an attempt to report on the circumstances from the perspective of a survivor of the camps. However "Individual & Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations" also represents the limitations of the early reports: Dachau and Buchenwald were not, technically speaking, extermination centers and thus does not reflect the experience of prisoners in the death-camps in Eastern Europe but speaks to how the system operated within Germany.
Even reports that record massacres, camps and extermination centers in the East during the war such as Raczyński's Note; the Black Book of Polish Jewry ; the Black Book of Soviet Jewry ; and the Vrba–Wetzler report speak only to limited areas within the system of extermination, do not present a full picture of the killing, and were scarcely made available to the larger public due to an editorial policy that questioned the statistics at the time. The Black Book of Soviet Jewry did not circulate during the war, while the Vrba–Wetzler report saw a limited and circumscribed distribution. The Black Book of Polish Jewry and even earlier reports in the Allied press presented details, but these documents significantly understate the scale of the killings – due in part to limited information, and in part to a misplaced sense of discretion and sensitivity to the prevailing attitude of antisemitism amongst all Western powers, whether Allied or Axis: there was a desire to make the reports speak to an audience unconcerned about the fate of Jews.
The was first published in 1943, but remained primarily in Yiddish until a was published after the war. Many Yizkhor, or community chronicles by survivors, were to follow.
Articles such as the report on atrocities in the began the process of substantively documenting and revealing aspects of what had happened to the global public whereas before knowledge of the mass-killings and the gas-chambers – though alluded to, for example, in speeches by Churchill – and reported by rumor or anecdote, remained hazy and fragmentary in public consciousness. Many of the earliest accounts came from individual camps and the documents listed above – most substantially the Nuremberg Trial documents – but these remained obscure apart from high-level quotation in journalism.
After the Nuremberg Trials, the first attempt to comprehensively treat the full-sweep of the genocidal program is Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). This is followed by Reitlinger's Final Solution, and the work that was to become the first major historical standard, Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jewry.

First Histories: Early Attempts at a Comprehensive Presentation

Early major attempts at systematic scholarship or overviews of the whole system and process of Nazi genocide include:

Historical studies

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Selected accounts by survivors

  • Adler, H.G. Theresienstadt 1941–1945. Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft
  • Bettelheim, Bruno "", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38: 417–452
  • Gradowski, Zalman. From the Heart of Hell: A Diary of Auschwitz. Zalman was murdered in Auschwitz, but his diary survived buried next to a cresmstorium.
  • Also published as: Factory of Death; Escape from Auschwitz: I Cannot Forgive; 44070: The Conspiracy of the Twentieth Century; I Escaped from Auschwitz
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Selected semi-autobiographical accounts by survivors

  • Berger, Zdena. Tell Me Another Morning. Harper & Brothers.
  • Volume 1: My Father Bleeds History; Volume 2: Here My Troubles Began.
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Other documents

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Hypotheses and historiography

Holocaust Denialism & Refutation
In a 1989 publication, Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and various other pseudo-historians and pseudo-historical societies of a decidedly Neo-Nazi character. For a sketch of these activities and vandalisms of the historical record, see for example the case of David Irving v. Penguin Limited & Deborah Lipstadt.
A work by Jacques Derrida – The Differend (1983) – examines the structural and metaphysical fallacies and double-binds exploited by authors of Holocaust denialism in their negationist arguments.

Selected filmography

Documentaries
  • America and the Holocaust The American Experience. 1994, 2005 WGBH Educational Foundation,
  • Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution', BBC. 2005.Daring to Resist: Three Women Face the Holocaust is a 57-minute documentary from 1999 which tells the stories of three Jewish teenagers who resisted the Nazis: Faye Schulman, a photographer and partisan fighter in the forests of Poland ; Barbara Rodbell, a ballerina in Amsterdam who delivered underground newspapers and secured food and transportation for Jews in hiding; and Shulamit Lack, who acquired false papers and a safe house for Jews attempting to escape from Hungary. The movie was produced and directed by Barbara Attie and Martha Goell Lubell, and narrated by Janeane Garofalo.Genocide (1981 film) documents the history of the Holocaust and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the KindertransportLiebe Perla is a 53-minute documentary that documents Nazi Germany's brutality towards disabled people through the exploration of a friendship between two women with dwarfism: Hannelore Witkofski of Germany and Perla Ovitz, who at the time of filming was living in Israel. Perla Ovitz was experimented on by Joseph Mengele during the Nazi regime. The film was made by Shahar Rozen in Israel and Germany in 1999, and it is in German and Hebrew with English subtitles.
  • ', as shown by PBS FrontlineNight and Fog, 1955, directed by Alain Resnais, narrated by Michel Bouquet.One Survivor Remembers is a 1995 Oscar-winning documentary in which Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein describes her six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty.Paper clipsParagraph 175 is an 81-minute documentary directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman that discusses the plight of gays and lesbians during the Nazi regime using interviews with all of the known gay and lesbian survivors of this era, five gay men and one lesbian.Shoah is a nine-hour documentary completed by Claude Lanzmann in 1985. The film, unlike most historical documentaries, does not feature reenactments or historical photos; instead it consists of interviews with people who were involved in various ways in the Holocaust, and visits to different places they discuss.The Sorrow and the Pity, 1972, directed by Marcel Ophüls.Swimming in Auschwitz is a 2007 documentary which interweaves the stories of six Jewish women who were imprisoned inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. The women all survived and tell their stories in person in the documentary; at the time of its filming they were all living in Los Angeles.
Cinema'

General sites

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  • , H-Net discussion list for scholars and advanced students
  • a Holocaust primer.
  • Owned and run by the Aegis Trust, an independent international organisation dedicated to eliminating genocide
  • . The Jewish History Resource Center, Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • . Includes the extensive Holocaust Encyclopedia and large collections of maps and photos, one of the most comprehensive sites.
  • . Extensive archives with searchable databases of victims, photos, extremely comprehensive
  • Searchable online archives on the Holocaust and Jewish resistance
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  • an online memorial
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  • . The full 800 page book online, with photos and search features.
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  • , General site with large Q&A section, as well as works by Jean-Claude Pressac
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  • , first-hand account and photographs of the 51st Evacuation Hospital during World War II
  • "The Case of Archbishop Stepinac: How the Catholic Clergy Helped Run Ustashe Croatia"; Published by the Yugoslav Embassy, Washington, DC, 1947; reprinted at http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/stepinac1.htm
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  • A study of the kindertransport and testimonies from the children who took part in it.
  • An international Jewish human rights organization
  • at the
  • at the

Sites in languages other than English

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Memorials

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Particular groups which were involved in The Holocaust

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Holocaust education

  • The artwork, developed for Black is a Color, is meant to depict the heroic posture humanity has assumed in this post-Holocaust world, and present it to both humanity and God. For humanity it should serve as a reminder of the worth of their actions, and for God a testament to the worth of God's creations.
  • . The Holocaust Education Development Programme is run by the Institute of Education, University of London and jointly funded by the Pears Foundation and the Department for Children, Schools and Families with support from the Holocaust Educational Trust. Its overarching aim is to help teachers teach about the Holocaust in effective and thought-provoking ways.
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Victim information and databases

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Documentation and evidence

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  • photos of victims, camps, liberation

Other topics

  • – global human rights and development network looks at genocide from a variety of perspectives
  • the man in the center of Orthodoxy's rescue activities.

Other

  • , a documentary film and website.
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  • , describing Holocaust survivor Lola Mozes' experiences as a child in Nazi camps. By Chris Hedges in Truthdig., Hedges interviews Lola Mozes as she recounts her experience living in Nazi-occupied Poland, three-part video interview, The Real News
  • , describing the writings of inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto who buried their accounts of the ghetto as German forces were liquidating the Jewish population of the ghetto. By Chris Hedges in Truthdig
  • . "A US Army doctor helped free the Dachau concentration camp in 1945, meticulously documenting his experiences in letters home to his wife. Hidden for the remainder of his life, the letters have resurfaced, and with them, questions about the G.I.'s we know only as heroes." The New Republic
  • Máximo, João Carlos, "Não Há Aves em Sobibor", Chiado Editora..
  • , Jonathan Zatlin and Christoph Kreutzmüller, University of Michigan Press, ISBN 978-0472132034