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Ilse Koch On Trial
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Book Synopsis The Beasts of Buchenwald by : Flint Whitlock
Download or read book The Beasts of Buchenwald written by Flint Whitlock and published by Buchenwald Trilogy. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written about the Nazi concentration camps, but one camp--Buchenwald--stands out as the most horrific of them all. THE BEASTS OF BUCHENWALD is the story of Buchenwald's brutal first commandant, Karl Koch, and his equally brutal wife, Ilse. Their reign of terror, which included beatings, torture, and the killing of helpless inmates so their tattooed skin could adorn lampshades and other personal items, ended with Karl's execution for embezzlement and Ilse's war-crimes trial of the century.
Book Synopsis Ilse Koch on Trial by : Tomaz Jardim
Download or read book Ilse Koch on Trial written by Tomaz Jardim and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative reassessment of one of the Third Reich’s most notorious war criminals, whose alleged sexual barbarism made her a convenient scapegoat and obscured the true nature of Nazi terror. On September 1, 1967, one of the Third Reich’s most infamous figures hanged herself in her cell after nearly twenty-four years in prison. Known as the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” Ilse Koch was singularly notorious, having been accused of owning lampshades fabricated from skins of murdered camp inmates and engaging in “bestial” sexual behavior. These allegations fueled a public fascination that turned Koch into a household name and the foremost symbol of Nazi savagery. Her subsequent prosecution resulted in a scandal that prompted US Senate hearings and even the intervention of President Truman. Yet the most sensational atrocities attributed to Koch were apocryphal or unproven. In this authoritative reappraisal, Tomaz Jardim shows that, while Koch was guilty of heinous crimes, she also became a scapegoat for postwar Germans eager to distance themselves from the Nazi past. The popular condemnation of Koch—and the particularly perverse crimes attributed to her by prosecutors, the media, and the public at large—diverted attention from the far more consequential but less sensational complicity of millions of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich’s crimes. Ilse Koch on Trial reveals how gendered perceptions of violence and culpability drove Koch’s zealous prosecution at a time when male Nazi perpetrators responsible for greater crimes often escaped punishment or received lighter sentences. Both in the international press and during her three criminal trials, Koch was condemned for her violation of accepted gender norms and “good womanly behavior.” Koch’s “sexual barbarism,” though treated as an emblem of the Third Reich’s depravity, ultimately obscured the bureaucratized terror of the Nazi state and hampered understanding of the Holocaust.
Book Synopsis The August Trials by : Andrew Kornbluth
Download or read book The August Trials written by Andrew Kornbluth and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first account of the August Trials, in which postwar Poland confronted the betrayal of Jewish citizens under Nazi rule but ended up fashioning an alibi for the past. When six years of ferocious resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the “many Cains among us,” as a Poznań newspaper editorial put it, Poland’s judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being largely forgotten. Andrew Kornbluth reconstructs the story of the August Trials, long dismissed as a Stalinist travesty, and discovers that they were in fact a scrupulous search for the truth. But as the process of retribution began to unearth evidence of enthusiastic local participation in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely independent judiciary all struggled to salvage a purely heroic vision of the past that could unify a nation recovering from massive upheaval. The trials became the crucible in which the Communist state and an unyielding society forged a foundational myth of modern Poland but left a lasting open wound in Polish-Jewish relations. The August Trials draws striking parallels with incomplete postwar reckonings on both sides of the Iron Curtain, suggesting the extent to which ethnic cleansing and its abortive judicial accounting are part of a common European heritage. From Paris and The Hague to Warsaw and Kyiv, the law was made to serve many different purposes, even as it failed to secure the goal with which it is most closely associated: justice.
Book Synopsis Justice at Dachau by : Joshua Greene
Download or read book Justice at Dachau written by Joshua Greene and published by Broadway Books. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world remembers Nuremberg, where a handful of Nazi policymakers were brought to justice, but nearly forgotten are the proceedings at Dachau, where hundreds of Nazi guards, officers, and doctors stood trial for personally taking part in the torture and execution of prisoners inside the Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, and Buchenwald concentration camps. In Justice at Dachau, Joshua M. Greene, maker of the award winning documentary film Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, recreates the Dachau trials and reveals the dramatic story of William Denson, a soft-spoken young lawyer from Alabama whisked from teaching law at West Point to leading the prosecution in the largest series of Nazi trials in history. In a makeshift courtroom set up inside Hitler’s first concentration camp, Denson was charged with building a team from lawyers who had no background in war crimes and determining charges for crimes that courts had never before confronted. Among the accused were Dr. Klaus Schilling, responsible for hundreds of deaths in his “research” for a cure for malaria; Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, a Harvard psychologist turned Gestapo informant; and one of history’s most notorious female war criminals, Ilse Koch, “Bitch of Buchenwald,” whose penchant for tattooed skins and human bone lamps made headlines worldwide. Denson, just thirty-two years old, with one criminal trial to his name, led a brilliant and successful prosecution, but nearly two years of exposure to such horrors took its toll. His wife divorced him, his weight dropped to 116 pounds, and he collapsed from exhaustion. Worst of all was the pressure from his army superiors to bring the trials to a rapid end when their agenda shifted away from punishing Nazis to winning the Germans’ support in the emerging Cold War. Denson persevered, determined to create a careful record of responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust. When, in a final shocking twist, the United States used clandestine reversals and commutation of sentences to set free those found guilty at Dachau, Denson risked his army career to try to prevent justice from being undone. From the Hardcover edition.
Download or read book Bitter Reckoning written by Dan Porat and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel prosecuted and jailed dozens of Holocaust survivors who had served as camp kapos or ghetto police under the Nazis. At last comes the first full account of the kapo trials, based on records newly declassified after forty years. In December 1945, a Polish-born commuter on a Tel Aviv bus recognized a fellow rider as the former head of a town council the Nazis had established to manage the Jews. When he denounced the man as a collaborator, the rider leapt off the bus, pursued by passengers intent on beating him to death. Five years later, to address ongoing tensions within Holocaust survivor communities, the State of Israel instituted the criminal prosecution of Jews who had served as ghetto administrators or kapos in concentration camps. Dan Porat brings to light more than three dozen little-known trials, held over the following two decades, of survivors charged with Nazi collaboration. Scouring police investigation files and trial records, he found accounts of Jewish policemen and camp functionaries who harassed, beat, robbed, and even murdered their brethren. But as the trials exposed the tragic experiences of the kapos, over time the courts and the public shifted from seeing them as evil collaborators to victims themselves, and the fervor to prosecute them abated. Porat shows how these trials changed Israel’s understanding of the Holocaust and explores how the suppression of the trial records—long classified by the state—affected history and memory. Sensitive to the devastating options confronting those who chose to collaborate, yet rigorous in its analysis, Bitter Reckoning invites us to rethink our ideas of complicity and justice and to consider what it means to be a victim in extraordinary circumstances.
Book Synopsis Before Auschwitz by : Kim Wünschmann
Download or read book Before Auschwitz written by Kim Wünschmann and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-16 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nazis began detaining Jews in camps as soon as they came to power in 1933. Kim Wünschmann reveals the origin of these extralegal detention sites, the harsh treatment Jews received there, and the message the camps sent to Germans: that Jews were enemies of the state, dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence.
Book Synopsis Marching into Darkness by : Waitman Wade Beorn
Download or read book Marching into Darkness written by Waitman Wade Beorn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On October 10, 1941, the Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. This atrocity was not the routine work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling exposé of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis. Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement has been lacking. Marching into Darkness reveals in detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Waitman Wade Beorn unearths forced labor, sexual violence, and grave robbing, though a few soldiers refused to participate and even helped Jews. Improvised extermination progressively became methodical, with some army units going so far as to organize "Jew hunts." The Wehrmacht also used the pretense of Jewish anti-partisan warfare as a subterfuge by reporting murdered Jews as partisans. Through military and legal records, survivor testimonies, and eyewitness interviews, Beorn paints a searing portrait of an army's descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.
Book Synopsis The Mauthausen Trial by : Tomaz Jardim
Download or read book The Mauthausen Trial written by Tomaz Jardim and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-02 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortly after 9:00 a.m. on May 27, 1947, the first of forty-nine men condemned to death for war crimes at Mauthausen concentration camp mounted the gallows at Landsberg prison near Munich. The mass execution that followed resulted from an American military trial conducted at Dachau in the spring of 1946—a trial that lasted only thirty-six days and yet produced more death sentences than any other in American history. The Mauthausen trial was part of a massive series of proceedings designed to judge and punish Nazi war criminals in the most expedient manner the law would allow. There was no doubt that the crimes had been monstrous. Yet despite meting out punishment to a group of incontestably guilty men, the Mauthausen trial reveals a troubling and seldom-recognized face of American postwar justice—one characterized by rapid proceedings, lax rules of evidence, and questionable interrogations. Although the better-known Nuremberg trials are often regarded as epitomizing American judicial ideals, these trials were in fact the exception to the rule. Instead, as Tomaz Jardim convincingly demonstrates, the rough justice of the Mauthausen trial remains indicative of the most common—and yet least understood—American approach to war crimes prosecution. The Mauthausen Trial forces reflection on the implications of compromising legal standards in order to guarantee that guilty people do not walk free.
Book Synopsis Probing the Limits of Representation by : Saul Friedländer
Download or read book Probing the Limits of Representation written by Saul Friedländer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: German memory, judicial interrogation, and historical reconstruction : writing perpetrator history from postwar testimony / Christopher R. Browning -- Historical emplotment and the problem of truth / Hayden White -- On emplotment : two kinds of ruin / Perry Anderson -- History, counterhistory, and narrative / Amos Funkenstein -- Just one witness / Carlo Ginzburg -- Of plots, witnesses, and judgments / Martin Jay -- Representing the Holocaust : reflections on the historians' debate / Dominick LaCapra -- Historical understanding and counterrationality : the Judenrat as epistemological vantage / Dan Diner -- History beyond the pleasure principle : some thoughts on the representation of trauma / Eric L. Santner -- Habermas, enlightenment, and antisemitism / Vincent P. Pecora -- Between image and phrase : progressive history and the "final solution" as dispossession / Sande Cohen.; Science, modernity, and the "final solution" / Mario Biagioli -- Holocaust and the end of history : postmodern historiography in cinema / Anton Kaes -- Whose story is it, anyway? : ideology and psychology in the representation of the Shoah in Israeli literature / Yael S. Feldman -- Translating Paul Celan's "Todesfuge" : rhythm and repetition as metaphor / John Felstiner -- "The grave in the air" : unbound metaphors in post-Holocaust poetry / Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi -- The dialectics of unspeakability : language, silence, and the narratives of desubjectification / Peter Haidu -- The representation of limits / Berel Lang -- The book of the destruction / Geoffrey H. Hartman.
Book Synopsis Women as Wartime Rapists by : Laura Sjoberg
Download or read book Women as Wartime Rapists written by Laura Sjoberg and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women as Wartime Rapists reveals the stories of female perpetrators of sexual violence and their place in wartime conflict, legal policy, and the punishment of sexual violence. Very few women are wartime rapists. Very few women issue commands to commit sexual violence. Very few women play a role in making war plans that feature the intentional sexual violation of other women. This book is about those very few women. More broadly, Laura Sjoberg asks, what do the actions and perceptions of female perpetrators of sexual violence reveal about our broader conceptions of war, violence, sexual assault, and gender? This book explores specific historical case studies, such as Nazi Germany, Serbia, the contemporary case of ISIS, and others, to understand how and why women participate in rape during war and conflict. Sjoberg examines the contrast between the visibility of female victims and the invisibility of female perpetrators, as well as the distinction between rape and genocidal rape, which is used as a weapon against a particular ethnic or national group. Further, she explores women’s engagement with genocidal rape and how some orchestrated the ethnic cleansing of entire regions. A provocative approach to a sensationalized topic, Women as Wartime Rapists offers important insights into not only the topic of female perpetrators of wartime sexual violence, but to larger notions of gender and violence with crucial cultural, legal, and political implications.
Book Synopsis Rumors of Injustice by : George R Mastroianni
Download or read book Rumors of Injustice written by George R Mastroianni and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ilse Koch and Rudolph Spanner were both accused of monstrous crimes during WWII. Ilse Koch was accused of having Buchenwald prisoners murdered so that she could have decorative and personal items, such as lampshades and purses, made from their tattooed skin. Rudolph Spanner was accused of using the bodies of Jewish prisoners of the Stutthof concentration camp to make soap. Both cases were introduced into evidence at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, though neither Koch nor Spanner were charged in that proceeding. Ilse Koch was eventually tried by both American and German authorities: she was sentenced to life imprisonment twice, though her initial life sentence from an American tribunal was reduced to four years. She eventually committed suicide in a German prison in 1967, one of the last German war criminals in custody. Rudolph Spanner, on the other hand, was never prosecuted, lived openly and freely in the Federal Republic of Germany, and died of natural causes. Why did these two cases follow such different trajectories? This book explores some of the reasons for these very different outcomes. It also clarifies what is known about the lampshades alleged to have been made from human skin, as the rumors of Ilse Koch's involvement with these objects contributed so much to her fate. Last seen in a basement in Indiana, it seems unlikely now that any of the pieces of the lampshade will ever resurface. We may thus never know of what the infamous lampshade was really constructed.
Download or read book Hitler's Furies written by Wendy Lower and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About the participation of German women in World War II and in the Holocaust.
Download or read book The Lampshade written by Mark Jacobson and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few growing up in the aftermath of World War II will ever forget the horrifying reports that Nazi concentration camp doctors had removed the skin of prison ers to make common, everyday lampshades. In The Lampshade, bestselling journalist Mark Jacobson tells the story of how he came into possession of one of these awful objects, and of his search to establish the origin, and larger meaning, of what can only be described as an icon of terror. From Hurricane Katrina–ravaged New Orleans to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to the Buchenwald concentration camp to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, almost everything Jacobson uncovers about the lampshade is contradictory, mysterious, shot through with legend and specious information. Through interviews with forensic experts, famous Holocaust scholars (and deniers), Buchenwald survivors and liberators, and New Orleans thieves and cops, Jacobson gradually comes to see the lampshade as a ghostly illuminator of his own existential status as a Jew, and to understand exactly what that means in the context of human responsibility. One question looms as his search progresses: what to do with the lampshade—this unsettling thing that used to be someone?
Book Synopsis Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture by : Claudio Fogu
Download or read book Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture written by Claudio Fogu and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture is a reappraisal of the controversies that have shaped Holocaust studies since the 1980s. Historians, artists, and writers question if and why the Holocaust should remain the ultimate test case for ethics and a unique reference point for how we understand genocide and crimes against humanity.
Book Synopsis Surviving the Holocaust by : Avraham Tory
Download or read book Surviving the Holocaust written by Avraham Tory and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991-09-01 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable chronicle of life and death in the Jewish Ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, from June 1941 to January 1944, was written under conditions of extreme danger by a Ghetto inmate and secretary of the Jewish Council. After the war, in order to escape from Lithuania, the author was forced to entrust the diary to leaders of the Escape movement; eventually it made its way to his new home in Israel. The diary incorporates Avraham Tory’s collections of official documents, Jewish Council reports, and original photographs and drawings made in the Ghetto. It depicts in grim detail the struggle for survival under Nazi domination, when—if not simply carted off and murdered in a random “action”—Jews were exploited as slave labor while being systematically starved and denied adequate housing and medical care. Through it all, Tory’s overriding purpose was to record the unimaginable events of these years and to memorialize the determination of the Jews to sustain their community life in the midst of the Nazi terror. Of the surviving diaries originating in the principal European Ghettos of this period, Tory’s is the longest written by an adult, a dramatic and horrifying document that makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary history. Tory provides an insider’s view of the desperate efforts of Ghetto leaders to protect Jews. Martin Gilbert’s masterly introduction establishes the authenticity of the diary, presents its events against the backdrop of the war in Europe, and considers the crucial questions of collaboration and resistance.
Book Synopsis The Order of Terror by : Wolfgang Sofsky
Download or read book The Order of Terror written by Wolfgang Sofsky and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the twelve years from 1933 until 1945, the concentration camp operated as a terror society. In this pioneering book, the renowned German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky looks at the concentration camp from the inside as a laboratory of cruelty and a system of absolute power built on extreme violence, starvation, "terror labor," and the business-like extermination of human beings. Based on historical documents and the reports of survivors, the book details how the resistance of prisoners was broken down. Arbitrary terror and routine violence destroyed personal identity and social solidarity, disrupted the very ideas of time and space, perverted human work into torture, and unleashed innumerable atrocities. As a result, daily life was reduced to a permanent struggle for survival, even as the meaning of self-preservation was extinguished. Sofsky takes us from the searing, unforgettable image of the Muselmann--Auschwitz jargon for the "walking dead"--to chronicles of epidemics, terror punishments, selections, and torture. The society of the camp was dominated by the S.S. and a system of graduated and forced collaboration which turned selected victims into accomplices of terror. Sofsky shows that the S.S. was not a rigid bureaucracy, but a system with ample room for autonomy. The S.S. demanded individual initiative of its members. Consequently, although they were not required to torment or murder prisoners, officers and guards often exploited their freedom to do so--in passing or on a whim, with cause, or without. The order of terror described by Sofsky culminated in the organized murder of millions of European Jews and Gypsies in the death-factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka. By the end of this book, Sofsky shows that the German concentration camp system cannot be seen as a temporary lapse into barbarism. Instead, it must be conceived as a product of modern civilization, where institutionalized, state-run human cruelty became possible with or without the mobilizing feelings of hatred.
Download or read book KL written by Nikolaus Wachsmann and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “deeply researched, groundbreaking” first comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration camps (Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker). In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945. The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called “the gray zone.” In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system. Closely examining life and death inside the camps, and adopting a wider lens to show how the camp system was shaped by changing political, legal, social, economic, and military forces, Wachsmann produces a unified picture of the Nazi regime and its camps that we have never seen before. A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the history of the twentieth century. Praise for KL A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015 A Kirkus Reviews Best History Book of 2015 Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category “[A] monumental study . . . a work of prodigious scholarship . . . with agonizing human texture and extraordinary detail . . . Wachsmann makes the unimaginable palpable. That is his great achievement.” —Roger Cohen, The New York Times Book Review “Wachsmann’s meticulously detailed history is essential for many reasons, not the least of which is his careful documentation of Nazi Germany’s descent from greater to even greater madness. To the persistent question, “How did it happen?,” Wachsmann supplies voluminous answers.” —Earl Pike, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
