A photograph—a rare "action shot" documenting a family's murder during World War II—drives a riveting process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholar.In 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler's Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainia...

This "intriguing and chilling" WWII history follows thirteen ordinary German women who worked—and killed—on the Eastern Front ( Chicago Tribune).A National Book Award FinalistDrawing on twenty years of archival research and fieldwork, Wendy Lower introduces thirteen women who took jobs in Nazi-occupied Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. She presents startling evidence that these women were more than "desk murderers" or comforters of murde...

On 16 July 1941, Adolf Hitler convened top Nazi leaders at his headquarters in East Prussia to dictate how they would rule the newly occupied eastern territories. Ukraine, the "jewel" in the Nazi empire, would become a German colony administered by Heinrich Himmler's SS and police, Hermann Goring's economic plunderers, and a host of other satraps. Focusing on the Zhytomyr region and weaving together official German wartime records, diaries, memoirs, and personal interviews, Wendy Lower pro...

The gripping story of the fall of Heinrich Himmler--the man who sought to perfect genocide—as he becomes the most hunted war criminal in history during the convulsive final days of the Third ReichHeinrich Himmler, head of the SS, Gestapo, and Waffen-SS, rose to all but supreme power as architect of the concentration camps and commander of the murderous deportations, the mass sterilizations, and the gas chambers. In Himmler’s Last Days, acclaimed historians...

The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia examines the contents and context of a rare diary written by a Jewish man from Nazi-occupied Poland. Serving as both a record and an artifact of Samuel Golfard’s life, the diary details his attempt to make sense of and resist the event that ultimately destroyed him. Wendy Lower integrates photographs, newspaper articles, documents, and testimonies to create a more complete picture of Golfard’s experiences and writings. She also trace...

Volume III examines the most well-known century of genocide, the twentieth century. Opening with a discussion on the definitions of genocide and 'ethnic cleansing' and their relationships to modernity, it continues with a survey of the genocide studies field, racism and antisemitism. The four parts cover the impacts of Racism, Total War, Imperial Collapse, and Revolution; the crises of World War Two; the Cold War; and Globalization. Twenty-eight scholars with expertise in specific regions ...

A rare and poignant testimony of a survivor of the Armenian genocide.The twentieth century was an era of genocide, which started with the Turkish destruction of more than one million Armenian men, women, and children—a modern process of total, violent erasure that began in 1895 and exploded under the cover of the First World War. John Minassian lived through this as a young man, witnessing the murder of his kin, concealing his identity as an orphan and laborer in Syria, and eventua...

A single photograph—an exceptionally rare “action shot” documenting the horrific final moment of the murder of a family—drives a riveting process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholarIn 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler’s Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this c...

The gripping story of the fall of Heinrich Himmler--the man who sought to perfect genocide—as he becomes the most hunted war criminal in history during the convulsive final days of the Third ReichHeinrich Himmler, head of the SS, Gestapo, and Waffen-SS, rose to all but supreme power as architect of the concentration camps and commander of the murderous deportations, the mass sterilizations, and the gas chambers. In Himmler’s Last Days, acclaimed historians...

Wendy Lower’s stunning account of the role of German women on the World War II Nazi eastern front powerfully revises history, proving that we have ignored the reality of women’s participation in the Holocaust, including as brutal killers. The long-held picture of German women holding down the home front during the war, as loyal wives and cheerleaders for the Führer, pales in comparison to Lower’s incisive case for the massive complicity, and worse, of the 500,000 young German women she pla...

The disappearance of fabulously rich Chicago candy heiress Helen Brach and the suspicious deaths of a string of champion racehorses are linked in a celebrated scandal that has reverberated through every level of the glamorous enclaves of thoroughbred horse breeding.When widowed heiress Helen Brach suddenly disappeared on the morning of February 17, 1977, after a visit to the Mayo Clinic, she left behind a lavender Rolls-Royce, Cadillacs in red, pink, and coral, an eighteen-room man...

After learning about Nazi persecution of his family, Herschel Grynszpan (pronounced "Greenspan"), an impoverished seventeen-year-old Jew living in Paris, bought a small handgun and on November 7, 1938, went to the German embassy and shot the first German diplomat he saw. When the man died two days later, Hitler and Goebbels made the shooting their pretext for the great state-sponsored wave of anti-Semitic terror known as Kristallnacht, still seen by many as an initiating event of ...