Books and Videos on the Holocaust at The Georgia Tech Library:
A Selected Bibliography

Printable Bibliography

Abzug, Robert H. Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985
D805.G3 A343 1985
Abzug draws extensively on the Fred Roberts Crawford Witness to the Holocaust Project Files to provide a very readable account of the liberation of the concentration camps from the perspective of the American soldier. Abzug's descriptions of the sights and smells of newly liberated camps, as provided by eyewitnesses, are unforgettable.

Aly, Götz, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross. Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Translated by Belinda Cooper. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
R853 .H8 A42 1994
Using primary sources, such as the letters of Hermann Voss, an anatomist and dean of the medical department at the Reich University of Posen in Poznán, Poland and Dr. Friedrich Mennecke, a Nazi extermination doctor, the authors examine the Nazi doctrine of "medicine against the useless"-handicapped children, Gypsies, the unemployed elderly, prostitutes, alcoholics, mentally ill, as well as Jews, in fact, anyone failing to meet a mythical ideal of "Aryan purity." The letters of Voss and Mennecke include visits to the grave of Voss's son, panegyrics to beautiful spring weather, political squabbles with colleagues, everyday doings of "normal" living interspersed with sterilizations, dissections and euthanasia. The letters and essays in this book raise more questions-deeply troubling questions about the human capacity for rationalization and denial-than they answer. This book, once read, is not easily forgotten.

Berenbaum, Michael. A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis. New York: New York University Press, 1990
D804 .G4 M63 1990
This important book examines the "other victims" the non-Jewish "useless mouths" and "enemies of the state," numbering in the millions, who were persecuted and exterminated to purify the German population and to create "Lebensraum" living space in Eastern Europe for the expansion of the "purified" Aryan German population. This book brings together presentations of the February, 1987 international conference entitled, "The Other Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis." Essays cover the perscution of Poles, Soviet P.O.W.s, German Catholics, Pacifists, Gays, and Gypsies, among others.

Browning, Christopher, R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 01 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
D804.3 .B77 1992
The Holocaust is filled with events of violence and depravity, from Kristallnacht in November, 1938 through the forced evacuations and hurried gassings of 1945. Nevertheless, events in Poland, when Jews were forced to dig mass graves and then shot and pitched forward into the graves-adults and children alike-are unbearably violent and depraved. Browning examines the record of Reserve Police Battalion 101, as based on the judicial interrogations of members of that unit, to ask how ordinary middle-aged men could engage in such a brutal activity. This book is an important contribution to the scholarship that asks the question that will perhaps never be satisfactorily answered: How could ordinary German citizens participate in the Holocaust?

Engelman, Bernt. In Hitler's Germany: Everyday Life in the Third Reich. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
DD256.5 .E5313 1986
This is a thoughtful narrative of ordinary Germans during the Third Reich the author, his friends and acquaintances--asking, from the German perspective: how could we let this happen? Engelman describes the difficulties facing dissenters, who were the first to be sent to concentration camps, as the Nazis ruthlessly consolidated power. However, he is unsparing of his friends and acquaintances who turned an indifferent or ignorant eye to the increased persecution and deportation of the Jews. He describes a woman of his acquaintance who got engaged on Kristallnacht and still remembers her fear that the broken glass littering the street would ruin her dress and shoes. That same woman had her first fight with her new husband when they moved into a "confiscated" house and she let a little girl from the evicted Jewish family retrieve her diary. When you learn that this same husband was later executed for participating in the attempt to assassinate Hitler, you realize that the question of the "ordinary German" during the Holocaust does not have a simple answer.

Feingold, Henry L. The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust: 1938-1945. New Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers University Press, 1970.
D810 .J4 F38
Feingold's book examines Roosevelt's inconsistent policies with regard to the Holocaust, the emigration to the U.S. of persecuted Jews and relief efforts for liberated victims and displaced persons in 1945.

Ferencz, Benjamin B. Less than Slaves: Jewish Labor and the Quest for Compensation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.
D810.J4 F42
Forced labor in the Holocaust was an alternative methodology for murder that carried the profitable byproduct of increased revenue for businesses and cheap production of weapons, much as death by gassing reaped profits from hair, gold teeth and clothing worn by the victims. Work conditions were uniformly inhuman, frequently hastening death for overworked, undernourished inmates. Yet compensation has been reluctant and has never equaled the value of the labor or adequately compensated for loss of life and health. Ferencz's book focuses on a critical yet somewhat neglected area of Holocaust scholarship.

Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
D810 .J4 F5413 1984
This intriguing book traces the mass murder of Jews from Hitler's first anti-Semitic leanings through his orders-direct and oblique--to his henchmen, resulting in the mass extermination of more than six million Jews. The attitudes and actions of Hitler and henchmen such as Himmler are revealed through letters, orders, interrogations and factual accounts of massacres.

Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank: the Critical Edition. Prepared by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. Edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
DS135 .N6 F73313 1989
Anne Frank's diary remains the best-known and best-loved chronicle of the Holocaust. Many people, of all ages, will learn all they know of the Holocaust from this book, the daily life and secret thoughts of a teenager in hiding, a girl who wanted to someday be a famous author and achieved her greatest wish at the expense of her own life.

Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning: an Introduction to Logotherapy. Translated by Ilse Lasch. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963
D805 .G3 F7233 1963
This slim, frequently quoted book begins with psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's own experiences in the concentration camps where he lost his father, mother, brother and wife. He describes the powerful psychological and moral lessons learned when one confronts the fact that he has "nothing to lose except his so ridiculously naked life." Frankl struggles first with the bitterness of why, then works through apathy to an understanding of the purpose of human suffering and dying, arriving finally at the transcendent acceptance of the last human freedom "to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances," from which his practice of Logotherapy derives.

Gill, Anton. The Journey Back from Hell, An Oral History: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors. New York: Morrow, 1988.
D805 .A2 G49 1988
This is a very readable and important look at the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust on its survivors. This book is notable not just for the moving reminiscences of Jewish survivors but for its even-handed focus on resistance workers and political prisoners, whose sufferings were also severe and whose ultimate recovery is also uncertain.

Gollwitzer, Helmut, Käthe Kuhn, and Reinhold Schneider, editors. Dying We Live: the Final Messages and Records of the Resistance. Translated by Reinhard C. Kuhn. New York: Pantheon, 1956.
DD256.3 .G613
This book collects and publishes letters and diary excerpts of men and women in the German resistance movement as they faced execution, including such famous resisters as the students of the White Rose at the University of Munich but also the final letter to his parents from an anonymous farm boy sentenced to death for refusing to join the SS.

Gordon, Peter A., producer and director. Children of the Holocaust. Narrated by Mark Halliley. A Yorkshire Television Production for ITV. Princeton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 1995. VHS video recording (51 minutes)
D804.3 .C54 1995
The most unforgettable victims of the Holocaust are the children, those who were too young for slave labor and therefore sent directly to the gas chambers as well as those who grew up in the camps, learning to hide rather than play. This documentary is a moving tribute to innocence lost.

Höss, Rudolph. Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz. Edited by Steven Paskuly. Translated by Andrew Pollinger. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996.
D805.P7 H6713 1996
Höss, the self-proclaimed "greatest mass murderer" of all time, wrote his memoir in 1946-47, while awaiting execution for his crimes. His writings reveal the self-serving memory of a bureaucrat-complaints about delays, insubordination by his staff, sardonic evaluations of his superiors. He might be talking about any factory, not a factory of death, until he discusses the victims themselves. His encounters with prisoners on their way to the gas chamber are incredibly harrowing. The book concludes with letters to his children, revealing a troubling "human" side to his character-troubling when contrasted with his attitude toward mothers begging for their children at the gas chamber doors. A chilling portrait of evil both banal and unfathomable.

Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
DS135 .G3315 K37 1998
This important book examines the daily life of German Jews, adults and children, during the growing anti-Semitism of the 1930s, culminating with Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass," November 9-10, 1938. The book continues through deportation, forced labor in the camps and a life of hiding among average German citizens. Kaplan's book helps to address some critical gaps in the history of German Jews during the Holocaust, particularly those who suffered through the war in hiding rather than incarcerated in the camps.

Keneally, Thomas. Schindler's List. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982
PZ4 .K336 SC 1982
A gripping fictionalized account of Nazi businessman and opportunist, Oskar Schindler, who paradoxically was one of the most successful individual rescuers of persecuted Jews in the Nazi regime, saving 1,300 Jews from extermination by employing them in his factory. This book was made into a movie in 1994 by Steven Spielberg.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
R853 .H8 L54 1986
This book provides a comprehensive examination of one of the most horrible facets of the Holocaust: medical experimentation and euthanasia of those not conforming to a mythical "Aryan ideal." Lifton examines the policy and practice of euthanasia for "life unworthy of life"-the mentally and physically disabled, many of them institutionalized children, as well as racial experimentation and euthanasia of Jews, gypsies and other "undesirable" ethnic groups. He looks at the psychological adjustments that healers must make to violate the basic Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. He looks at the psychological strategies not just of Nazi doctors, such as Mengele, who receives a whole chapter, but Jewish doctors in concentration camps forced to participate in experiments and gas chamber selections, as well as those willingly collaborating for their own benefit and survival. This is a difficult but important book.

Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: Plume, 1993.
D804.35 .L57 1993b
A very readable and frightening expose of the revisionists of Nazi history, including the Institute for Historical Review and others.

Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara. Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land. Edited by Eli Pfefferkorn and David H. Hirsch. Translated by Roslyn Hirsch. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
D805 .P7 N6 1985
The narrative and lyrical skill of the author, Sara Nomberg-Prytzyk, makes this autobiographical account of life at Auschwitz stand out among the many fine memoirs of camp life. The author skillfully presents a spellbinding account of camp life as well as a chilling protrait of Josef Mengele, the angel of death at Auschwitz camp.

Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. New York: Henry Holt, 1986
HQ76.2 .G4 P55 1986
Although all concentration camp inmates suffered, homosexuals, guilty of "crimes against nature" as well as crimes against the state, suffered some of the most vicious persecutions that Nazi paranoia could devise, including isolation, experimentation and enforced sex with prostitutes. Plank, a Jewish homosexual who narrowly escaped Nazi persecution, provides a painful account of the sufferings of the homosexual community, providing not just a critical chapter in concentration camp research but a cautionary study of the ultimate consequences of unchecked homophobia.

Spielberg, Steven, Director. Schindler's List [video recording]. Amblin Entertainment, 1994. VHS video recording. 197 minutes.
PN1997 .S355 1994
Perhaps the greatest fictionalized movie ever made about the Holocaust. By dramatizing the story of a Nazi opportunist who was also a rescuer of 1,300 Jews, Spielberg explores the ambiguities and complexities of the worst genocide in recorded history. Liam Neeson, as Oskar Schindler, and Ralph Fiennes, as SS Officer Amon Göth, are nuanced, complex and eminently believable in their roles.

Suhl, Yuri, Editor and Translator. They Fought Back: the Story of Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968.
D810 .J4 S85 1968
This book collects memoirs of Jewish resisters to the Holocaust, including the revolt at Sobibor Camp, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and escape attempts by individual prisoners in concentration camps.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Translated by Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.
D804.3 .T6313 1996
Todorov calls the Holocaust, "the war of all against all." In this powerful book, he examines the moral life of the camps, and of the Holocaust in general, looking at the virtues that extreme circumstances call into play: heroism, dignity, caring, the life of the mind and also the desire to be seen and treated as human beings, particularly after liberation, as inmates picked up the tattered threads of their former lives. In the next section, he examines evil, as practiced by the Nazi SS, and the adjustments the human mind makes to be able to perform evil, such as depersonalization of the victim and the enjoyment of power in its own right. In the last section, Todorov examines the human capacity to face evil, and the tools the human mind possesses: resignation, opposition, telling, judging and, finally, understanding, the ultimate moral tool of the human mind.

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
D804.3 .V5313 1992
Essays by a noted French intellectual on the revisionist effort to deny Nazi attrocities, particularly the extermination of Jews and other "undersirables."

Von Lang, Jochen, Editor, in collaboration with Claus Sibyll. Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983.
DD247 .E5 E48 1983
This is a chilling transcript of Eichmann's interrogation by Israeli police while in prison, awaiting trial for war crimes. Eichmann describes his childhood, his education, and his rise to power in the Nazi regime. He is defensive and wary in his interrogation, saying at one point, "Why is it always me?" When confronted with documentary proof he cannot evade, his defense is simple: "…if they had told me that my own father was a traitor and I had to kill him, I'd have done it. At that time, I obeyed orders without thinking. I just did as I was told."

Wiesel, Elie. Night/Dawn/Day. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1985.
PQ 2683.I32 A2 1985
Nobel Prize Winner Elie Wiesel's classic memoirs of the Holocaust and its aftermath were written between 1955 and 1960. Night, the most famous, recounts his experiences as a prisoner, along with his father, in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Dawn and Day, which explore the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust experience on a survivor, and explore the wider societal issues of violence, hatred and death, are equally worth reading. Wiesel says of the three works, "If I had to rewrite these three books today, I would not change a single word."

Wollenberg, Jörg, Editor. The German Public and the Persecution of the Jews: "No One Participated; No One Knew." English edition translated and edited by Rado Pribic. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996.
DS135 .G3315 N5313 1996
Through eyewitness reports and essays, Wollenberg examines the persecution of the Jews, as well as the general indifference of the German populace, from Kristallnacht through mass deportation and extermination. The roles of the church and the courts, among other institutions, are examined.