LibGuides: Genocide: Armenian, Rwandan, Cambodian, and the Holocaust: Holocaust

In this video, Professor Paul Bookbinder of UMass Boston gives a short overview of the Holocaust.

Jews arriving on the platform at Auschwitz, May 1944
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-N0827-318 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

What was the Holocaust?

"The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews and others by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals."

-United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

History of the Holocaust Step by Step

Scholar Doris Bergen describes the phases of events that led to the Holocaust.

Primary Sources

Yale Fortunoff Library Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
Harvard Law School Library 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.
British Library: Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust, Sound Recordings
These recordings are powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain. This collection contains interviews from two oral history projects, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community (C410) and the Holocaust Survivors' Centre Interviews (C830).
Primo Levi: Auschwitz Report
While awaiting return home in a Russian-administered holding camp in Katowice, Poland, in 1945, Primo Levi, along with his friend, the doctor Leonardo De Benedetti, was asked to provide a report on living conditions in Auschwitz for the Russian authorities. Published the following year, it was then forgotten and has until now remained unknown to a wider public. Here, it is published for the first time in the English language. Dating from the weeks and months immediately after the war, Auschwitz Report represents a return to the very earliest phase of Holocaust testimony. It details the authors' deportation to Auschwitz, selection for work and extermination, everyday life in the camp, and the organization and working of the gas chambers. It constitutes Levi's first attempts to come to terms with events that would drive him to create some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature and testimony.
EuroDocs: Shoah
Public Understanding of the Holocaust, From WWII to Today
From the Roper Center for Public Opinion Archives at Cornell.
A look at what public opinion polling tells us about Americans and the Holocaust.
American Jewish Committee Archives
Filled with more than a million documents and hundreds of movies and radio shows, the New York-based American Jewish Committee Archives house an extraordinary range of resources on the past century of American Jewish history.
Yadvashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center Digital Collections
McMaster University Library Virtual Museum of the Holocaust and the Reistance
An émigré life oral history transcript : Munich, Berlin, Sanary, Pacific Palisades
by Marta Feuchtwanger, interviewee; Lawrence Weschler, interviewer;
University of California, Los Angeles. Oral History Program
Maps of the Warsaw Ghetto
Harrie Teunissen and his partner John Steegh are map-collectors from Leiden in Holland. Their jointly build up collection of some 8000 maps and 1200 atlases.
Photographs and Maps, Wikipedia/ Holocaust Media
Horrifying photos.
Weiner Holocaust Library Digital Resources
Library of Congress

Use Library of Congress subject heading to identify primary sources. From the "everything" dropdown select "Personal Narratives".

For search terms try:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) or
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Poland -- Warsaw
Holocaust Jewish (1939-1945) Polish
OR
Use advanced search: SUBJECT Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) and KEYWORD diaries
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Personal narratives -- History and criticism for books about diary writing during the Holocaust.

Genocide: Armenian, Rwandan, Cambodian, and the Holocaust

Websites

News Articles

Journal Articles

Films

What was the Holocaust?

History of the Holocaust Step by Step

Primary Sources

eBooks: Click to Read